Each year, nearly 5 million
people visit the Grand Canyon, most traveling to the South Rim
where they spend as much time looking for a parking place as they
do looking at the canyon. Only a few venture below the rim on a
trail.
Another 22,000 people a year see the canyon from
the bottom up, enjoying a week or more of spectacular scenery while
running rapids, hiking to waterfalls hidden in side canyons and
sleeping on sand next to the river under a sky studded with stars.
For most, life on the river is an earthly paradise.
Surrounded by “the best wallpaper in the world,” as my fellow guide
Kevin Johnson describes it, your body is assaulted by sensations
— the warmth of a breeze, splash of cool water, roar of a
rapid, song of a canyon wren, smell of coffee at sunrise, the
yipping of a pack of coyotes
Absent are clocks,
television, newspapers and phones that ring. A hundred miles down
the river you don’t know, or care, what day it is.
It’s not for everyone. But for some, the experience beats
most pleasures known to man. And there’s the rub: Interest in
whitewater boating has grown steadily over the years, and
there’s not enough room in the canyon for everybody to be
there at once.
In the century before the completion of
Glen Canyon Dam, 1,100 people floated through the Grand Canyon.
Five years later, it was a thousand a year; in five more years, it
was 10,000. Recognizing that people have impacts on the canyon, and
on each other’s experience, the National Park Service
“stabilized” use in 1973, by saying, in effect, “No more people.”
A decade later, a new plan called for the elimination of
motorized boating but more than doubled use levels, in an effort to
appease both commercial and noncommercial users. A rider attached
to the Park Service appropriations bill axed the controversial
elimination of motorboats, but left the increased use levels.
Complaints about crowding and competition for campsites soon
followed. As interest in do-it-yourself trips grew, the Park
Service established a waiting list for future trips, a list that
grew ever longer.
Today, canyon resources are in a
tailspin. Downstream impacts of Glen Canyon Dam, which began
operations in 1963, have increased. Camping beaches, deprived of
new sediment, grow smaller and disappear, some native fish species
exist on the brink of extinction, while others are gone for good.
Footprints evolve into trails, then metamorphose into backcountry
highways. Non-native plants and animals proliferate while ancient
artifacts disappear into the pockets of tourists.
Nobody
is trying to wreck anything, but the changes accumulate over the
years, many in direct proportion to the number of visitors. Almost
everybody has a great time in the canyon, they tell their friends
about it, and even more want to go the next year, with no end in
sight. Professionally outfitted trips book far in advance, and when
the waiting list for a private trip got to be 20 years long, the
agency stopped taking names.
A planning process intended
to straighten all this out got so bogged down in controversy it was
terminated by the agency in 2000. After a lawsuit got the process
started again, the controversy over who gets to go on the river, on
their own or with an outfitter, resumed. Outfitters just want to do
what they’ve done for years — make a living showing
folks a good time in the canyon. Private boaters just want to get
on the river soon, not in 20 years. The Park Service wants the
controversy to go away, so it can get on to another issue: managing
the backcountry for hikers, or dealing with aircraft noise. The
agency’s last plan, aimed at getting cars away from the rim,
lacks funding and appears stalled.
Now, there’s a
new plan, but sad to say, it increases river use by 23 percent,
reaching a level two and a half times what was “enough” 30 years
ago. The plan is up for public comment until Feb. 1 at
nps.gov/grca/crmp.
The Park Service assures the public
that if more use creates more problems, it will cut back.
Experience says that will never happen. Simply monitoring of
impacts of this proposed plan, for example, will have to depend on
“additional funding” from unspecified sources.
For three
decades, I’ve watched the Park Service struggle to please
everyone, while crowds and congestion increased and the river
experience diminished. That is why most river guides oppose further
use increases, even if it means less work and smaller incomes for
us. We believe that the canyon, and the experience, are too
precious to destroy.
Drifter Smith is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona,
where he is president of Grand Canyon River Guides, a nonprofit
group with 1, 800 members in 48 states and 10 foreign
countries.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
