Welcome to the Grand Canyon Trust website. I hope you find these pages helpful and informative.

The Trust is a highly respected regional conservation group working to protect and restore the Colorado Plateau—its spectacular landscapes, flowing rivers, clean air, diversity of plants and animals, and areas of beauty and solitude. Our vision of the region a hundred years from now is of a landscape still characterized by vast open spaces and dominated by wildness; of healthy natural systems with habitat for all native plants and animals; and of thriving human communities whose inhabitants are stewards of the region’s natural resources and beauty.

This is a big job. The dramatic landscapes of the Colorado Plateau cover northern Arizona, including the Grand Canyon, and the redrock wildlands of southern Utah, as well as portions of western Colorado and New Mexico (see map). The region has the world’s highest density of national parks and monuments, the most significant unprotected wilderness in the Lower 48 states, and a rich diversity of Native American tribes. We approach our work with humility, seeking collaborative, balanced and common sense solutions to the Plateau’s major conservation problems.

For the last twenty years, the Trust and its 5,000 members have been fighting for clean air and water, and for the protection of our remaining open spaces and wild areas. We have a distinguished history of protecting the canyon country’s remarkable diversity of native plants and animals and its irreplaceable legacy of archaeological sites. We want our children to have the same opportunities for fulfilling lives in this place as we had gifted to us. In fact, we want them to have better lives. That is why we are working very actively to assist the Hopi and Navajo tribes with sustainable economic development.

Our passion for the mission and our long-term vision have shaped our distinctive way of working. The Trust takes on big issues and sticks with them. We work collaboratively with the other players and look for solutions, but that does not mean that we are meek. We use every available activist tool to assure that natural resources remain intact for the future, and are not shy about resorting to litigation when it is necessary to ensure that existing laws are followed.

The Trust has accomplished much in our first two decades and I hope you will read about our successes in detail in our various program areas. Here, I would just like to give you a feeling for our work by mentioning some of the highlights:

Since the late 1980s we have been negotiating and litigating to clean up the dirtiest coal fired power plants in the southwest. This ongoing work has already removed tens of thousands of tons of toxic haze from the air. Today, we are helping the Hopi tribe with plans to bring the largest wind energy project on any Native American reservation to a location near Winslow, Arizona.

On the Colorado River, we helped pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act in 1992, mandating that Glen Canyon dam be operated to restore the resources of the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Today, through our continued involvement in that program, we are using science and litigation to force the government to adopt realistic strategies to restore the river’s native fish in the Grand Canyon. Upstream, we were the leading advocates in a successful effort to remove 12 million tons of radioactive uranium mill wastes from the floodplain, and we recently helped with completion of a withdrawal that closes 200 miles of the canyons of the Colorado, Green and Dolores rivers to all hardrock mineral development.

The Trust was among the first to recognize the impending disaster in our forests as a result of 100 years of fire suppression, clear-cutting and overgrazing. We founded the Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership to design and implement forest restoration projects around the community. This work has given us national standing on forest issues as we fight for saner forest policy in the ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona and write citizen’s sustainable multiple use management plans for southern Utah’s three national forests.

To protect open space and intact wild areas, the Trust has purchased especially critical parcels, including ten zoned for commercial development in the heart of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and negotiated land exchanges such as one now pending in Congress that will remove 50,000 acres of developable land from proposed wilderness along the Colorado River. In the deep backcountry, the Trust retired oil and gas leases from 50,000 acres of the Kaiparowits Plateau and helped pass legislation to expand Arches National Park. Today, we are working in varied ways to reform management of state lands across the region, including helping to develop and support an Arizona ballot initiative that will protect 694,000 acres of state trust land.

We also provide mapping and spatial analysis support to conservation colleagues from many other groups.

Finally, on the Plateau’s grasslands, the Trust has used market-based transactions to retire livestock grazing from hundreds of thousands of acres of key wildlife habitat. This program has now evolved into an even larger scale: We and colleagues at the Conservation Fund purchased the Kane and Two Mile ranches that hold grazing permits for 860,000 acres on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The opportunities to create a showplace of healthy habitat and wildlife across such a large, diverse area are extraordinarily compelling.

I hope you will find something to get excited about in these pages. Our members are our most important supporters, both financially and when they decide to take action and get involved in the issues themselves. We need your help. Please consider joining us, writing a letter to your elected representatives, or making a donation today. If you share our vision of the region’s future, remember the Trust in your estate planning. All of us pitching in together will make a real difference in the quality of life our children and grandchildren will enjoy here on the Colorado Plateau.

Best regards,
Bill Hedden