Grand Canyon Looks East

Faced with overcrowding, Grand Canyon looks east.

BY ETHAN AUMACK AND STEVE MARTIN

When James and Abigail Johnson set out with their children, Sophia and Elijah, to visit Grand Canyon National Park for the first time in December 2016, they had no idea of the welcome that awaited them. 

As they passed the park gates, the Johnson kids were crowned. The family met the park’s superintendent, Chris Lehnertz, and posed for photos, told they’d nudged the number of annual visitors to the Grand Canyon up over the 6 million mark, a far cry from the 37,745 the park welcomed in 1919, the year it opened.

But with millions of visitors arriving each year and aging infrastructure groaning in protest, some are asking: How many more can the Grand Canyon take?

Simply counting them is a challenge. When the final numbers were tallied, it turned out 2016 visitation to the Grand Canyon was actually just shy of 6 million — still a park record — enough people to join hands and form a human chain between Los Angeles and New York City and back. The Johnsons, one link in that chain, were also part of a huge uptick in visits to national parks.

Millions answered the call to “find your park” in 2016, the National Park Service’s centennial year. This type of marketing push dates back to the 1950s, when the park service rode the post-World War II outdoor recreation wave. And it works. Over 88 million people visited national parks and preserves in 2016, almost 10 percent more than the year before. Some of this can be attributed to centennial marketing, but there has also been a dramatic increase in international visitation; over one-third of visitors are estimated to come from abroad. At Grand Canyon National Park, the spike was even bigger. Grand Canyon visits have jumped more than 25 percent over the last two years alone.

View a larger version or download the print copy ›

But while the marketing message is tried and true — call Americans to their national parks and they will come — at least one thing has changed. In the 1950s, the federal government invested billions in today’s dollars to support increased visitation. Unfortunately, the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary saw no comparable budget increase. This leaves the park service in the difficult position of having to do more with less.

The centennial brought a flood of new visitors to parks already struggling to juggle too many visitors on too little funding, while slapping Band-Aids on crumbling infrastructure. Across the Colorado Plateau, parks, including Arches, Zion, Bryce, and Grand Canyon, are facing record numbers of visitors. On Memorial Day 2015, the Utah Highway Patrol closed the entrance to Arches National Park. The line of cars waiting to get in was over a mile long, creating a traffic hazard as it backed out onto U.S. Highway 191. At the Devils Garden Trailhead, 300 cars were wedged into 190 spaces, and on the road to Delicate Arch, the state of Utah’s unofficial symbol, parked cars lined both sides of the road for half a mile leading up to the parking area. Zion National Park is considering a year-round online reservation system for its popular trails and attractions in response to a massive surge in visitation.

The same overcrowding exists at the Grand Canyon, where the current transportation plan was designed to accommodate 5.48 million people by 2020. Visitation blew past that number in 2015, a full five years early. No plan exists to handle the current crush. If nothing is done, massive resort developments, like the proposed Grand Canyon Escalade gondola and the 3 million square feet of commercial space Italian developer Stilo proposes for the park gateway community of Tusayan, may rush in to fill the void.

In 2019, Grand Canyon National Park will turn 100. Let’s put that in context.

Humans have called the Grand Canyon home, and a sacred place, for thousands of years. For most of that time, human impacts on the canyon were minimal. Over the course of the last 100 years, however, we have changed the canyon at an astounding rate. Visitation has skyrocketed. Uranium mining has contaminated land and water. Glen Canyon Dam has degraded the Colorado River corridor. Helicopters throng to noisy flight corridors over the park, like Quartermaster Canyon in western Grand Canyon. Climate change creeps into even the wildest, most remote reaches of the park. And to top it all off, developers cook up massive tourism ventures, threatening the sacred confluence with a gondola tramway resort and angling to drill more wells in the already crowded Tusayan area, where they could suck Grand Canyon springs dry.

The park is hard-pressed to respond to these threats when it’s already facing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure backlog, including everything from the failing transcanyon water pipeline to trails and visitor facilities badly in need of maintenance and repair. There is no indication that the Trump administration will ride to the rescue. The president’s 2018 budget request would likely cut over 1,000 park service jobs. Remaining employees — already overloaded — would face heavier workloads. Park lands would suffer.

As we look to the second century of Grand Canyon National Park’s life, the list of threats is long, but the challenge of ever-increasing visitation is near the top.

There’s no cap on the number of people who can visit the Grand Canyon in a year. Should there be?

Should we be thinking about a Grand Canyon lottery? A waiting list or an online reservation system? It’s hard to think of an idea less popular than closing the gates at the Grand Canyon. Just ask business owners. Though estimates vary, studies suggest the Grand Canyon drives almost a billion dollars in revenue for the region each year. Local, state, tribal, and national leaders should push President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to celebrate the park’s centennial by making sure it has the funding it needs to continue as an economic engine.

Support from Washington, D.C. isn’t the only answer. Most visitors to the canyon cluster around the South Rim, but the Grand Canyon snakes along 277 sinuous miles. Dispersing increasing numbers of visitors, especially to the east, could alleviate stress on overburdened infrastructure and create more opportunity for Grand Canyon tribes. While visitation numbers cannot be managed sustainably if they grow endlessly, environmentally and culturally sensitive ecotourism dispersed to the east could be profitable for tribes, better for the long-term health of the canyon, and enriching for visitors.

The Navajo community of Cameron, with support from the Dinéhózhó L3C and the Grand Canyon Trust's Native America Program, is working on a tourism plan for the western Navajo region, along the border with the national park. This includes Marble Canyon and the corridor that runs from the Grand Canyon to Cameron along the Little Colorado River, a breathtaking landscape with sweeping views.

The National Park Service plan for Desert View envisions ways to manage growing tourism, including a Desert View orientation and transit center that could serve as the transportation hub for the East Rim. There, visitors could park and board buses to all South Rim destinations, rent bicycles, or meander along pedestrian rim trails. The Desert View area has been a gathering place for native people for thousands of years and today serves as a cultural heritage site inside the park; it’s a natural and cultural gateway to the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The park service should work with the tribes on other ways to ease the overcrowding. The law already provides a pathway for this kind of partnership.

The Grand Canyon Enlargement Act of 1975 encourages the secretary of the interior to enter into cooperative agreements with interested Indian tribes to provide for “the protection and interpretation of the Grand Canyon in its entirety.”

Conservation Director Ethan Aumack is a repeat offender when it comes to visiting the Grand Canyon. He grew up hiking and boating in and around Grand Canyon National Park.

Grand Canyon Trust Board Chair Steve Martin served as superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park from 2007 to 2011 and has been a loyal park visitor, spending more than two years of his life below the rim.

Read more Advocate stories ›