Shh! Are Scenic Flights Too Noisy?

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am 20 miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation

--Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire

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If he were still alive, desert anarchist Edward Abbey could whisper in wonder about the Hale-Bopp comet, but many campers would be within hearing distance.

In the late 1950s, a few thousand visitors passed his National Park Service trailer. This year more than 900,000 will visit Arches National Park, and the number of visitors to neighboring Canyonlands will top 450,000.

Still, both are considered the creme de la creme for those who seek silence. In the meantime, the debate is still coalescing in urban areas over what noise does to the quality of life. It is slowly becoming an issue in natural environments as well.

“What I hope the American people will recognize before it’s too late is that there are a few of these places where we want to recognize natural sound as a national resource,” said Walt Dabney, superintendent of Arches, Canyonlands and Natural Bridges National Monument.

Abbey, in his “Desert Solitaire,” preferred to talk about “a great stillness” rather than silence. “. . . [F]or there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist--slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace.”

Dabney says: “Sometimes you can sit out there and your ears will ring because it is so quiet. It’s as quiet as a professional recording studio. You can absolutely hear rocks fall without the sound of some airplane circling overhead.” In Cataract Canyon, on the mighty Colorado River, “the rapids can be deafening. But it’s natural.”

Dabney and others in the Park Service also fear the curse some believe Abbey put on the Moab parks. By writing of their beauty, he enticed millions to visit them. Talking about the quiet that remains could do the very same, they contend.

Parks already have the power to turn down the volume on boomboxes and RV stereos. The National Parks and Conservation Assn. is pushing the Clinton administration to restrict flights. Nearly a third of the nation’s parks are plagued by aircraft noise, the Park Service has reported to Congress.

Dabney said park officials would have no way to stop flights over Old Faithful at Yellowstone, ruining the experience of 2,500 people on the boardwalk for the pleasure of a handful above.

Most attention has focused on the Grand Canyon, where more than 800,000 people take fixed-wing or helicopter sightseeing trips yearly. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced last year plans to radically limit Grand Canyon flights but backed off when air operators filed a lawsuit.

Bonnie Lindgren, operator-manager of Redtail Aviation Inc. in Moab and treasurer of the U.S. Air Tours Operators Assn., said, “If the approach will be reasonable and balanced, we will accept restrictions.”

She said the Park Service until recent years had wanted to wrest control of flights from the Federal Aviation Administration so it could ban them completely.

“I don’t fault the Park Service for wanting to have some control over flights over the parks,” she added, agreeing with Dabney that it “would be a terrible scenario” for helicopters to be buzzing Old Faithful.

She said her company, which operates 93% of the park flights in the Moab area, has offered to coordinate with the Park Service by avoiding areas where hikers have registered to travel.

The air tour executive also disputes Dabney’s assertion that quiet should be preserved for its own sake, saying the Park Service has sought to adopt ideology over science. She faxed a reporter a U.S. National Forest Service study that found “few adverse impacts to wilderness users . . . resulting from overflights of FS-managed wildernesses.”

Dabney readily conceded there have been very few complaints by park users in his region. He also said the existing Moab operations could probably continue without compromising the natural quiet. Fewer than 6,000 people take the tours over Arches and Canyonlands now, and most of them only on return flights from trips down river.

Redtail pilot Willy Fulton says it would take a week or more, “depending on how many breakdowns you had,” to see by four-wheel drive what can be observed in a one-hour flight.

The Maze in Canyonlands lives up to its name. The Chocolate Drops could have melted from a candy bar.

“These rivers [the Colorado, or red in Spanish, and Green] change color almost daily. Sometimes the Colorado is green and the Green is red,” Fulton said from the cockpit of an aging Cessna 207 above Canyonlands.

This day he noted “the first two boaters I’ve seen all season.” By midseason there would be 20 to 30 on the 60-mile stretch of rivers covered in the flight.

Dabney, for his part, said, “Canyonlands is completely accessible. There are 300 miles of designated back-country roads.” He also is concerned that “there is nothing to stop a big operator [such as in Grand Canyon] from coming to town.”

It’s a familiar conflict in the West, where the federal government often owns 50% or more of the land, and where good-paying jobs left when the mines shut down.

“I think we are failing. The parks are going to be islands in the future,” Dabney said.

Fulton wonders where he will be able to find work if tighter flight restrictions are imposed. Though the Moab flights are like a needle in a haystack in this national park--compared with Grand Canyon--18 full-time jobs are at stake during the season.

Perhaps the only incontestable thing in the debate is that those who want their silence pure best get it now.