Developments Doom Grand Canyon?

Update: CBS News also covered this story on July 14, 2014. Watch the video. 

 by Roger Clark, Grand Canyon Director

This week’s story in the Los Angeles Times spotlights ever-present threats to Grand Canyon National Park. “The Grand Canyon is Doomed” chimed in Outside online in response to developers’ plans to build a gondola ride to the canyon’s bottom and a mega-resort at the canyon’s most popular entrance.

According to the Times article, the National Park Service “worries those new developments will jeopardize some of the park’s most iconic vistas and push already-strained resources to the brink” and adds that this is the “most serious threat the park has faced in its 95-year history.”

Grand Canyon Trust was challenging these threats long before they reached national media.

In 2012, we accepted an invitation from Save the Confluence, an organized group of local families from the Bodaway/Gap Chapter of the Navajo Nation, to join their campaign to oppose the proposed Escalade development at the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado rivers.

While working in support of the Confluence families to stop the project, our team is also collaborating with community groups to help craft alternative economic development strategies that would bring much-needed jobs to this area of the Navajo Nation without threatening national park resources, sacred sites, or traditional culture.

Two years ago, Grand Canyon Trust intervened in water and sewer applications before the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) in a massive development proposed in Tusayan, at the southern entrance to Grand Canyon National Park.

Developers hope to build “3 million square feet of commercial space—with high-end stores, fancy hotels, condos, a concert pavilion, spa, dude ranch and Native American cultural fair—along with hundreds of homes, at a range of price-points, and some of it meant for local workers.” (Indian Country Today Media Network)

Under pressure from the Trust, developers withdrew their ACC permit application. The Trust, Havasupai Tribe, and other allies are continuing to fight to prevent the developer from sinking new wells that threaten Grand Canyon springs and to force compliance with all state and federal regulations.

The Grand Canyon is not doomed. The Trust remains vigilant in opposing these developments, as well as uranium mining in Grand Canyon watersheds. But we need your help.

You can help by becoming a member of the Grand Canyon Trust; you can also stay up to date on this and other issues by signing up for our e-news and action alerts. You can also follow and support Save the Confluence families.