A Look Back

Colorado Plateau Advocate magazine, Spring 2015

From one-man show to pioneering conservation organization, we’ve come a long way, packrats and all.

Thirty-four years ago on a beach in the Grand Canyon, a group of river-runners sitting in the sand around a crackling fire discussed the need for an organization devoted to protecting the canyon. Long-time conservationist Huey Johnson proposed a name: the Grand Canyon Trust. Four years later, the first public event to launch the Trust was held in a remarkably different locale: the Museum of Natural History in New York City. NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw served as master of ceremonies, with Governor Bruce Babbitt as the keynote speaker. The event was a success; all that remained to be done was secure funding, hire a staff, and define the scope of the Trust’s work.

Enter the indefatigable and assiduous Ed Norton, who became the Trust’s CEO and president. The first order of business: rein in the fleet of noisy planes buzzing over the Grand Canyon. Within a year, the National Parks Overflights Act was passed and the Trust was established as an organization that could get things done.

Jim Ruch—and his dog Rowdy—opened the Flagstaff office in 1989.

Location? A quirky two-story homestead built in 1886 by Thomas McMillan, a prominent local doctor. Jim loaned the Trust some furniture, hired Fran Joseph to handle administrative needs, and got to work. By 1992, there were ten staff members, two computers, a fax machine, and a phone line, but no internet or cell phones. To see what Congress was up to meant a trek to the library at Northern Arizona University to pore over onion-skin paper booklets of the Congressional Record or scan earlier records on a microfiche machine.

When Ed Norton visited from Washington, he tooled around Flagstaff in a beat-up Squareback VW with a bent coat hanger for a radio antennae.

During the winter months he drove with the window open (the defroster was broken). But things like that didn’t faze Ed. He was too busy negotiating an agreement to cut sulfur dioxide pollution from the Navajo Generating Station by 90 percent, getting the Grand Canyon Protection Act passed, and successfully suing the Western Area Power Administration to require an assessment of the environmental impacts on the Colorado River of selling power from Glen Canyon Dam.

The McMillan Homestead served the Trust well, despite its quirks. The floors in a few of the upstairs rooms had settled over the years and sloped enough that a rolling chair would slide away from the desk unless it was either tethered or on a thick rug.

One day we came to work to find that a packrat had grabbed one end of a roll of toilet paper, dragged it out of the bathroom, down the hall, into an office, and behind a desk, where it disappeared into a hole in the wall.

Geoff Barnard became president of the Trust in 1995 near the end of the McMillan Homestead era. The last office to be jammed into the building was a tiny unfinished room with exposed rough-sawn lumber tucked under the eaves. In 1997, the Trust moved to another pioneer family home a half-mile down the road: the Lockett Homestead. Lockett Meadow, a popular picnic, hiking, and camping spot high on the east side of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, is named for the family patriarch, sheepman Henry Lockett.

Trust work continued unabated. President Bill Clinton announced the designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument at an event the Trust helped host on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. A bill the Trust had been pushing to expand Arches National Park was signed. The Grand Canyon Forests Partnership was created.

And the Trust sued the owners of the coal-fired Mohave Generating Station, alleging tens of thousands of Clean Air Act violations.

After retiring livestock grazing on 449,000 acres in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and getting a bill passed to move the radioactive Atlas Mill tailings pile, Bill Hedden became Executive Director in 2003. The two-computers-and-a-fax-machine days were over; the digital age allowed easy instantaneous communication and Bill decided to operate from his hand-built home shaded by cottonwoods in Castle Valley, near Moab, Utah.

Traversing the spectacular country between Moab and Flagstaff more than 600 times and counting, Bill’s treks to ensure critical face-time embody one of the basic tenants of the Trust’s work: the pace may be grueling, but the landscape makes it worth it.

The Trust continued to grow and succeed over the next eleven years: we purchased Kane and Two Mile Ranches (now known collectively as North Rim Ranches), which hold grazing permits on 850,000 acres of public lands, and established the most effective Native America program in the country. We led the effort to launch the Four Forests Restoration Initiative, the largest restoration project ever undertaken in the United States; created a stellar volunteer program to engage people in hands-on conservation, and tackled intransigent issues in southern Utah, focusing on livestock grazing and protecting wildlands.

It’s hard to imagine what the Trust will achieve over the next thirty years—from helping to preserve traditional ecological knowledge as a hedge against climate change to protecting Greater Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon from destructive energy development and other threats, but I hope that toilet paper strung down the office hallway in the McMillan Homestead, like the Lockett Homestead’s ghosts and resident skunk, remain a part of our story.

Read more Advocate stories ›