Motor Rafts Create a Great Divide in Grand Canyon

They climbed down from the Las Vegas charter bus, a group of mostly middle-aged, none-too-fit vacationers, glancing eagerly at the river on which they would spend the next eight days.

The Colorado glistened in the hot morning sun, ready to carry them more than 200 miles through the Grand Canyon, a trip that once was an exotic adventure for the hardy but now requires little more than money and plenty of suntan lotion.

Of the 22,000 people who boat through the Grand Canyon every year, more than 80% do it with commercial companies, the majority on big motorized rafts like the ones this group clambered on.

Piled high with provisions and even portable toilets, their passengers squeezed around the baggage, the engine-powered rafts are at the center of a controversy that is boiling up like a troublesome rapid.

Whether motors should be allowed in the ancient, mile-deep recesses of the river gorge--where quiet creates its own magic--is under passionate debate.

It is not just a matter of decibel levels, but of commercial profits, public access and ultimately, the kind of experience visitors should have in what explorer John W. Powell described a century ago as a land of gigantic scenery, mad waters, soaring rock walls and grand, gloomy depths.

The dispute is but one of many besetting Grand Canyon National Park, which is struggling with more contentious issues over use than probably any other national park in the country.

Environmentalists fret that between the hum of raft engines, the drone of sightseeing planes, plans for commercial development outside the park and the roar of tourist buses ferrying in some of the canyon’s 5 million annual visitors, one of the nation’s natural treasures is turning into a veritable amusement park.

“It’s a real comprehensive assault on the wilderness, by air and on the river,” said local Sierra Club activist Sharon Galbreath.

Just about any topic of substance in this carved and sculpted landscape can become a point of conflict.

“I have not yet encountered an issue in my five years here that isn’t hot,” said park Supt. Rob Arnberger. “They’re all controversial and all involve constituencies that are highly polarized.”

The raft fight first erupted nearly 20 years ago when the park service proposed phasing out motors on the Colorado. The ensuing uproar and congressional action squelched the effort.

The park administration is once again working on a management plan that could lead to a ban on motors or a reduction in their use.

The prospect that motors could be barred from the Colorado has the canyon’s $25-million-a-year commercial rafting industry frothing.

Most people prefer to go on motor trips, said Mark Grisham, executive director of the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Assn., which represents the 16 companies that hold rafting concessions in the park.

Grisham contends that at an average of $215 per day per person, far fewer visitors would be willing to raft the canyon by oar because of the extra expense and time required--typically 14 days for a full trip rather than seven.

“It’s not about the motors,” he said. “It’s first about the time, and second, the cost.”

Moreover, commercial outfitters say the trips on large motorized rafts appeal to a broader cross section of the public--the older and less adventuresome for instance--than the ones on smaller oar rafts.

“It’s about who the canyon is for,” said outfitter Gaylord Staveley, who started running river trips in 1957 and owns Canyoneers with his wife, Joy. “Whether it’s for the young and strong or for everyone.”

When Staveley first worked the Colorado, the river was for the few.

Boaters showed up in pith helmets, prepared for an expedition. In 1956, Staveley recalled, 53 people ran the river.

For the majority of the more than 20,000 who now raft it, the voyage into what Powell called “the Great Unknown” has become routine, a family vacation, guided, catered and planned down to minute detail by commercial companies ferrying them by outboard motor.

Rather than going through the entire canyon, roughly half the people now helicopter in or out of a tribally owned spot called Whitmore about two-thirds of the way down.

At some of the more popular daytime stopover points, so many boating parties can pull up at the same time that a couple hundred people will be milling about. One location, Havasu Creek, has earned the nickname Hava-zoo.

“You can just be bombarded,” said Liz Boussard, a field specialist for the Wilderness Society. “It’s more like a Disneyland experience.”

Environmental groups including Boussard’s are pressuring the park service to get motors off the Colorado.

They say the rafting customers may change somewhat but there will still be plenty of them. They also note that it is possible to take shorter oar trips by hiking out of the canyon at a couple of points and that more people could be accommodated by stretching out the rafting season beyond its traditional summer peak.

“The bottom line is you could sell anything you wanted to at the Grand Canyon,” Galbreath said.

Certainly there is no shortage of demand for oar trips. Arizona Raft Adventures, one of the bigger companies on the river, specializes in oar excursions and sells out its annual bookings in 10 days.

Company President Robert Elliott stands with the rest of the industry in opposing a motor ban, but he concedes that the canyon’s natural quiet is one of its most singular qualities.

The industry has tried to address the noise issue, Grisham said, by voluntarily switching to quieter engines and is experimenting with an electric raft motor.

But they are still motors, say the anti-engine forces, and hardly make for the primitive wilderness experience they believe appropriate for the canyon.

Furthermore, environmentalists say the park service has been duty bound for years to get rid of motors because most of the park’s 1.2 million acres, including the river, were recommended for wilderness designation more than two decades ago. Federal law, they say, requires that areas deemed suitable for wilderness be managed as such, including a prohibition on mechanized equipment.

Arnberger counters that the motors are perfectly legal because the recommendation was never forwarded to Congress and there is nothing irreversibly damaging about motorized trips on the Colorado.

Regardless, the issue is again on the table in the form of a park management plan that will be devised over the next several years and could change river rules in various ways, including those involving motor use.

Among those who hope that engines will putt-putt out of the Grand Canyon forever is Kim Crumbo, the park’s wilderness coordinator. He spent 18 years on the river as a guide and ranger and likens taking a motorized raft trip to being “on this bus with 14 other people. It’s a rush trip through the Grand Canyon.”

Crumbo predicts that the engine issue will ripple far beyond the Colorado. “The push to get rid of motors is gaining momentum now and will be considered a national issue with very important consequences for the National Park Service and the wilderness system.”

Yet the water fight is about more than engines. The ratio of commercial to private boaters on the river is also contentious.

Rafting through the canyon is highly regulated by the park service--from requirements that crumbs be swept from campsites to discourage ants to a cap on the number of user days, defined as one person on the river for one day.

The user days are heavily tilted toward commercial companies, a leftover, the park service says, from a time when there were relatively few private rafters.

Despite the fact that private demand has jumped dramatically, fewer than 20% of the people running the river are in private parties, almost all in smaller oar boats.

The waiting list for a private permit now has 6,000 names on it, according to Linda Jalbert, the park’s outdoor recreation planner. In theory, it could be nearly 20 years before the people at the bottom of the list get their rafts into the canyon.

“The concessions have a lock on access,” said Tom Martin of the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Assn., a 500-member group formed three years ago out of what Martin calls “frustration with the degradation of the river experience and inaccessibility.”

The same morning the Vegas bus pulled up at the Lees Ferry boat launching area north of the park, a private party of 16 was lashing gear to their two-person rafts across the river from a line of red cliffs.

As he pumped up his raft, Eugene, Ore. City Councilman Gary Pape grumbled about the allocation of private versus commercial trips. It should be half and half, he said. “We’re all taxpayers last time I checked.

“I’ve had my name on the private list for four years and they said it will take another eight years [to reach the top],” he added. “You gotta have friends.”

That is how Pape got on this trip and how many private rafters get on the river long before their names come up. They know somebody who obtains a permit or have enough expertise on the Colorado to be repeatedly invited along.

A few yards up the beach from Pape, Dottie Noyes and her husband were preparing to climb onto a 38-foot-long, motorized raft riding 3 feet high in the water.

They had flown in from Sudbury, Mass., part of a group of 28 who bused from Las Vegas. A commercial trip on a big raft appealed to them, Noyes said, because it was adventuresome without being too adventuresome.

“My husband is a little more leery of a small raft,” she said.

Motors, noise from sightseeing flights, how to handle the crush of park visitors and the private boater demand for more river access--all these are part of Supt. Arnberger’s daily fare.

“While I’m fatigued and often attacked from all sides . . . this is the most exciting time and most important time to be at Grand Canyon,” said Arnberger, a second-generation national park ranger who was actually born in the park. “The issues we face are going to lay the road course for many decades to come.”