More Is More

 How a journalist’s love affair with red rock put her on a mission to protect it.

First, you should know I have legs that can hold up a baby grand piano. This fact became relevant after my husband and I moved to Arizona more than forty years ago and I discovered the extraordinary landscape of the Colorado Plateau, a place that begs to be hiked, a land where long legs are a definite advantage.

While I loved Arizona, I knew little about the Colorado Plateau and less about conservation. My first encounter with the Grand Canyon struck terror in my heart. My husband and I were strolling along the South Rim one dark September evening when a gust of wind lifted the baby carrier holding our infant daughter, shaking it violently.

In the instant when we lunged to steady the basket, I understood the savagery of the natural world and the feral power of that awesome chasm.

I learned to love the plateau by traveling on magazine assignments to the Hopi and Navajo reservations, and vacationing with our family at national parks and monuments. Seeing made me a passionate believer. Experiencing the red buttes and flowering meadows, soaring sandstone cliffs and plunging canyons, Technicolor sunsets and starstrewn skies, made me want to help save it all.

I began writing about environmental issues and signed up to be a foot soldier for conservation. Soon, I was making calls and sending thank you notes to elected officials who made good environmental decisions, and protesting their bad choices. I signed petitions to support environmental causes and encouraged friends to sign too. As a journalist, I knew that elected officials always tally votes, so calls and letters count. Going unabashedly public with my passion for protecting the environment—and especially the Colorado Plateau—made me a likely suspect for the board of trustees of the Grand Canyon Trust.

I joined the board in 1998, filled with awe and apprehension. Historically, this organization has a genius for attracting giants. Two of the founders of the Grand Canyon Trust—Stewart Udall and Bruce Babbitt—served as U.S. secretary of the interior. At my first meeting, I found myself face-to-face with David Getches, our chairman. The next week, he was quoted at length in The Wall Street Journal, identified as the foremost expert on water law in the West.

I sat next to Charles Wilkinson, a renowned law professor, to discover that he wrote Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest, one of my favorite books. In time, Charles would succeed David as chairman. I remember looking around the table in panic that day: what could I bring to this conversation?

In time, I figured out I’m not a former solicitor general, like one of our trustees. I couldn’t write a hugely generous check to launch the Native America program, like another. I’m not a successful Washington, D.C. litigator with a famous name, like our former chairman, Ty Cobb. Nor am I a prominent Salt Lake City lawyer and environmental advocate like Lou Callister, who also led our organization. But I could—and did—get smart about issues that threaten the air, water and land of the Colorado Plateau. I could and do write checks to support our mission and I can help spread the word about our work.

We don’t win every fight we wage, but when we do, it’s miraculous.

On my last Colorado River trip, we made camp in the late afternoon and heard only the sound of laughter and water lapping against the rocks. The Trust pushed hard for sane policies to prohibit canyon overflights and preserve that quiet. Quiet pervades the plateau. I felt the hush when I dropped into a slot canyon on the Escalante and squeezed myself small to inch past narrow walls. And again, when I returned to the golden muted land of Capitol Reef to scramble over the giant sandstone domes and trek miles through sandy washes. Parks are the heart of our work.

The Grand Canyon Trust was born in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and, in a cosmic coincidence, 30 years later, Steve Martin, a former superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, is our chair. He brings a 35-year career with the National Park Service. Yes, we still attract giants.

Our newest board members are Terry Goddard, a former mayor of Phoenix and former Arizona attorney general, and Mark Udall, a former U.S. senator from Colorado who previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives. I love that Terry, whose father Sam was governor of Arizona, is a historian, and Mark, the son of Morris “Mo” Udall and the nephew of Stewart Udall, is an experienced mountaineer who has climbed Colorado’s 100 tallest peaks. It’s good to have a mountaineer on board because steep challenges lie ahead. Our beloved landscape is in danger of being loved to death.

In 1985, the year the Trust was established, 2.7 million people visited Grand Canyon National Park. In 2014, the park recorded almost 4.8 million visitors. According to a 2015 report by the American Hiking Society, 273 million people visited America’s national parks in 2013. Hiking is exploding as a national recreational pastime, and national parks and monuments remain the big attraction. The Colorado Plateau is home to more than 55 national parks, monuments and wilderness areas and 15 Native American tribes. It’s at the epicenter of all the action. Yet, it is also under siege.

Invasive users, including mining, fracking and purveyors of inappropriate development, are pushing for activities that will destroy the singular beauty of this place and wipe out its ecosystems forever. These forces have faces and voices—individuals and corporations who lobby our elected leaders and contribute to re-election campaigns.

In contrast, the natural constituency of the Colorado Plateau is pretty quiet: the whoosh of the hawk diving for a rodent, the hoot of an owl, the slithering of a snake, the scratching of a ringtail, the rumble of a thunder cloud, the beat of Native drums.

That’s why your support is vital. Together we put a face and a voice to the “wild heart of the American West.” Your letters and calls, signed petitions and emails, matter because elected officials respond to critical mass. More is more in politics. You can help us by telling and retelling our story to your family, friends and colleagues: how extraordinary geological events pulled at this landscape, raising it more than a vertical mile and leaving us a fragile, arid otherworld scoured with canyons and adorned with arches and bridges, pillars and spires. You can stand with our Native American neighbors who know, through their stories, that this land is sacred. You can volunteer your time on the plateau, and you can open your checkbook so we can cajole and lobby, and, when necessary, sue to defend the dazzling diversity of life that depends on this rare habitat. If you’re already doing this, thank you. If not, now is a great time to start.

The red rocks of the Colorado Plateau fired my imagination, but the Grand Canyon Trust inspired my dedication. It transformed a girl whose first experience in the “wild” took place at the grassy Fabyan Park in Batavia, Illinois, where her father would hop into the empty bear cage, shake the bars and roar, into a confirmed conservationist who has hiked rim-to-rim in the Grand Canyon (OK, with an overnight at Phantom Ranch) several times and explored many trails on the plateau.

I’ve learned that hiking is an apt metaphor for the work the Trust does.

We keep putting one foot in front of the other and we never give up. Best of all, long legs are not required.