PHYLLIS CHRISTY CAME ALL THE way from Ipswich, South Dakota, to experience the Grand Canyon firsthand. She couldn’t wait to peer into its dizzying, mile-deep abyss to take in the multihued walls and, far below, the roaring waters of the Colorado River. Aware of the jostling horde of tourists on the overcrowded South Rim of the canyon, she traveled to the less popular main overlook at the North Rim. But while she stood there, her ears were assaulted by the drone of two sightseeing Cessnas and a Twin Otter, plus the clatter of four helicopters–all of which flew by within a few minutes. “With such an incredible view,” she complained, “you’d expect some solitude.”
Grand Canyon National Park, the crown jewel of America’s park system, is being overrun. And like many other underfunded and deteriorating national parks, it is ill prepared for the invasion. Summer has barely begun, and cars and campers are already queuing up in lines nearly a mile long at the entrance gates. The wait for dinner tables at park restaurants is two hours, and families without advance reservations are being turned away from campgrounds that have been booked for weeks.
Yet the 16,000 visitors who descend on the park each day are a mere trickle compared with the daily flood tide of 27,000 that park officials expect in July and August. By midsummer, they predict, hour-long waits for shuttle buses to the overlooks will be common. Fistfights will break out in parking lots as thousands of motorists compete for 2,000 slots. So many hikers will suffer from exhaustion and other heat-related problems that park rangers will be forced to practice triage, leaving the least seriously affected vacationers at the bottom of the canyon to fend for themselves. Says a harassed park official: “We are being loved nearly to death.”
The statistics are as awesome as the canyon: the number of park visitors has more than doubled in a decade, from some 2 million in 1984 to 4.7 million last year. If the tide is not checked, the National Park Service estimates, there will be 7 million visitors by 2010. “We are under siege,” says park superintendent Robert Arnberger.
At first glance the park seems spacious enough to accommodate all comers. It covers more than 1.2 million acres and the most dramatic 56-mile stretch of the 277-mile-long Grand Canyon. But the broad vistas are deceptive. The rugged terrain funnels visitors along narrow strips of trails and roads alongside both rims and into facilities that have been overcrowded for years.
Working with a $12 million annual budget, officials are hard pressed to maintain essential park services, let alone improve and expand them. Primitive water and sewer lines regularly rupture. Twisted, aging roads are dangerous and confusing. The visitors’ center is cramped, overrun and hard to find. Its exhibits are outdated and the roof leaks. Employee housing is so critically short that some government workers are living in the medical clinic and an old laundry. Others are billeted in rickety trailers that were hauled to the site from nearby Glen Canyon Dam, where they housed the dam’s construction crew 33 years ago.
Overcrowding is affecting even the air above Grand Canyon. All told, 43 different services provide as many as 10,000 plane and helicopter flights over the canyon during peak summer months. The noisy aerial onslaught dismays Robert Smith, Southwest representative of the Sierra Club. “If visitors can’t experience the silence,” he says, “they’re missing a lot of what makes the Grand Canyon special.”
The view from below, from the swiftly running waters of the Colorado, is also much in demand. Average waiting time for a private rafting permit is an incredible nine years, and pressure on the Park Service to allow more private rafts and kayaks is intense. “We’re on a collision course,” says Mark Law, the river district ranger. “You could walk the river on boats if we ever opened it up.”
In creating the Park Service in 1916, Congress decreed that it should “promote and regulate” and “conserve the scenery,” yet “provide for the enjoyment of the same.” Park officials have tried to take that mandate literally, protecting the canyon without limiting the number of visitors. With the help of the Arizona congressional delegation, officials are pushing for more stringent noise regulation of flights over the canyon. They also joined with environmentalists in lobbying for the emissions-cleansing scrubbers now being installed in the nearby Navajo power plant, which, officials contend, was contributing to haze that has drastically cut visibility at some canyon vantage points.
In what may be his boldest initiative, Arnberger has devised a plan to keep the park’s entrance gates open to tourists but not their vehicles. He wants to close several major roads on the South Rim, requiring most visitors to park their cars in remote lots just outside the park. From there tourists would be transported in a fleet of shuttle buses to overlooks, trails and Grand Canyon Village, where hotels and restaurants are located.
To accommodate the crowds better, Arnberger wants to build new visitors’ centers, renovate lodging facilities and erect employee housing outside park boundaries. His wish list includes the restoration of historic structures that date back nearly to Teddy Roosevelt. Total cost of his suggested improvements: $300 million.
“The request couldn’t have come at a worse time,” concedes Brad Traver, the park’s planning chief. Even now a so-called reform bill aimed at “pork parks” is moving through the House Resources Committee. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt warns that the impact of proposed budget cuts would be severe: some 200 parks and monuments could be shuttered, and even Yellowstone might have to be placed off limits during the winter.
Grand Canyon is not likely to be closed, but it is hardly in line for a windfall from this Congress. Instead the Park Service is about to begin renegotiating the park’s deal with its chief concessionaire, is seeking a $2 hike in the current $10 vehicle-entry fee and is pushing for legislation that would send that money directly to the parks rather than to the general Treasury.
Critics of the superintendent’s master plan feel that it is at best a holding action that avoids a politically unpopular solution. “Pouring concrete and buying shuttle buses just dodges the issue,” says the Sierra Club’s Smith. “It’s time to talk people limits.” Easy to say, but who wants to man the barricades come July?
–Reported by Richard Woodbury/Grand Canyon
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