Slice the Pie Even Thinner?

In 1857, Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives led one hell of a journey from the mouth of the Colorado upriver to the Rio Virgin west of Western Grand Canyon. He then plodded overland with his mule train onto the South Rim and the Coconino Plateau, dropping partway into Havasu. Next he traversed all the way east and north to Fort Defiance. This foray into the relatively unknown Southwest was high adventure of the first caliber. His quote about the sheer desolation of the Coconino Plateau—“Ours has been the first, and doubtless will be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality”—rings down to us today, however, with a singular lack of foresight that makes us shake our heads despite ourselves.
A dozen years later, a Major John Wesley Powell carved out a name for himself by hiring a crew of Civil War veterans living as mountain men in the Rockies to row four Whitehalls down a thousand miles of relatively unknown river canyons along the Green and Colorado rivers. Grand Canyon was the grand—and ultimately fatal—finale to Powell’s 1869 Expedition of Exploration. (An aside here, a new book just published this year by Puma Press presents the journals and letters of these first Grand Canyon River Guides and engagingly explores this expedition with the eyes of a professional…) Not only did none of Powell’s surviving crew ever want to run that river again, Powell himself made only one more partial trip. It is clear from Powell’s ensuing career that he, like Ives, believed that no one else would be tough enough or foolish enough to attempt boating the Colorado River in Grand Canyon ever again. Not even Powell’s second, 1871–1872, crew wanted to row past Kanab Creek to face Lava Falls, Separation Rapid, and Lava Cliff Falls. They abandoned their Whitehalls near Mile 144 with a profound sense of relief. The whole enterprise of continuing downriver was far too taxing of both strength and courage.
If we don’t watch ourselves, we can tend to be smug today over these dramatic, perhaps even overdramatic, early accounts of the terrors of Grand Canyon and that wild beast of a river coursing through it. And we can grin and roll our eyes at those explorers’ wrong predictions that no one new would ever be dimwitted enough to venture into the region again. Not only do we have the whole thing figured out—the cut at Bedrock, the V-wave in Lava, the whale’s tail in Horn Creek, the left and right runs in Hance (and the center one at flows of 70,000–95,000 cfs)—we babysit dimwitted newcomers in the depths of that canyon quite often. Collectively, it seems, a legion of them. Hey, not only do we know the Canyon and the River, we also know that both together act as one of the most powerful catalysts of renewal of the human spirit. We, it turns out, are guides not only into an immensely impressive terrain on Planet Earth, we are equally guides into the lost canyons of joy within the human spirit.
Have we—and the Canyon—done this job too well?
None of the outfitters running the Grand Canyon Colorado have to advertise their services much any more. Sure, the current economic recession and war have nicked business a bit. But, really, the sixteen commercial nps concession contracts are relative gold mines when compared to other “real-world” business out there in that cutthroat national economy of layoffs and bankruptcies. After all, no new companies can enter the scene in Grand Canyon to present competition. The Chinese cannot manufacture new, cheap but serviceable Grand Canyon trips or user-days or launches by using sweat shop/slave labor. “Our” established and sanctioned and contracted trips are the number one-rated adventure travel experience in North America. Powell never would have dreamed this, but now half a million people do dream of their experiences here and they tell others how wonderful and even life-changing they were. So, yes, in a business sense, outfitters seem to have their cake and eat it too. And we are the agents of their success.
We are also guardians of the quality of this experience. Sure the nps continues to try to build fences around what we can do, but the majority of those fences are ones with which we Grand Canyon River Guides already agree. Some are even ones that we have recommended. Most of us take our guardianship and stewardship of the Canyon deeply to heart. This deep love for the Canyon combined with our far superior knowledge of it places us in a weird psychological position.
Who else, we may ask ourselves, is better suited to take people into this Canyon with the greatest positive effects on our fellow explorers but with the fewest negative impacts on the Canyon beside us?
The answer is nobody. Really nobody.
For those of us who dwell on this revelation, our superiority with regard to Grand Canyon issues compared to the entire remainder of intelligent life in the universe, lies a deep trap of conceit and hubris. Sure, we’re smart and we run good clean trips. But so too do other boaters out there, boaters for whom a private Grand Canyon trip is a float to boating Mecca.
Yes, we’ve all seen private trips rigging in a hurricane-scattered mess of gear at the launch ramp with a proud heap of 80+ case of beer stacked up to supply fifteen people with a constant mental anesthesia for two-plus weeks. And we know that these private boaters’ attempts to consume that beer—to bring no can home alive—will guarantee that the experiences of those private boaters in Grand Canyon will be at best mediocre and more likely a pathetic beer bash that mocks the majesty of the Canyon. Why not, we ask ourselves, find some pond somewhere, launch their boats on it, and stay drunk there under their umbrellas and in their folding chairs, out of our sight and that of the Canyon itself?
Lest we judge too harshly, however, or condemn these “trailer-trash” private trips as being the typical private trips, let me point out that most private trips are populated with private boaters who respect the Canyon and value extremely highly their boating/hiking experiences in it during their trips. For many of them it is truly the trip of their lifetimes. So much so that, as with the commercial passengers that we service, the word spreads.
And the demand grows.
And grows.
Lieutenant Ives and Major Powell would be blown away with the current state of affairs at the Canyon.
And with shrinking beaches due to the environmentally deleterious operations of Glen Canyon Dam, the pie fails to expand to accommodate this growing demand.
The National Park Service in the 1970s made an attempt to determine the carrying capacity of the river corridor within the Canyon. This carrying capacity pivoted around camp site numbers, size, and dispersion, and upon other more social factors such as crowding at attraction sites, rapids, etc. This attempt at identifying carrying capacity or defining the size of the “pie” to be sliced up between users became the backbone of the entire system by which the nps allocates and limits usage of the river to commercial outfitters and also to the private sector made up of those who want to row or paddle or motor their own boats themselves. In short, to be their own pilots. Yes, I know this is common knowledge but please bear with me for a moment.
The early allocation was roughly 93 percent commercial and seven percent private. This was shifted several years back to roughly 75 percent commercial and 25 percent commercial. Commercial outfitters, it might be pointed out, require both a critical mass of user-days and a very high predictability of having them to remain in business. An allocation system allowing this, whatever their slice of the pie might be, is vital. Meanwhile, access as a private trip permit holder to this 25 percent shifted away from a lottery system, complained about by many as being one so extremely unreliable that a private boater might never gain access to the river, and has moved to the now infamous and hated “Waiting List.”
No matter what your opinion might be of the Waiting List or of private boating in general, demand by private boaters to be a trip permit holder now apparently exceeds demand by commercial passengers for access to the river in Grand Canyon.

The current Colorado River Management Plan (crmp) process to somehow revise or “improve” on this apparent inequity of access is occurring due to nps law and also in response to a lawsuit by private boaters. This process has become a very hot one, with scoping sessions scattered across the usa and with more recent “Stakeholder meetings” and then yet more Stakeholder meetings on the issues of carrying capacity (what is it, anyway, and how does one determine it?), motor usage, and allocation of user days between the two major user groups of private versus commercial. Conspicuously, there exists no nps allocation for an “educational” sector, again, just commercial and private plus the large “shadow” allocation for “science/resource monitoring.”
The scoping sessions, as you might know, were tightly controlled. They limited most comments to a written format. Even so, this yielded more than 50,000 comments from 13,000 public commentors. The Stakeholder meetings (occurring as late as June 2003) were also tightly controlled, and, in my personal opinion at least, restricted to such arbitrary dimensions of input and also without allowing true discussion groups that might lead to consensus compromises, that their value will, I fear, prove to be limited at best, and detrimentally distortable at worst.
Even so, a pattern emerged with singular clarity: Neither the commercial outfitters nor those representing the private boating community are eager to make concessions within their own camps.

This may sound obvious or even facile, but unless such discussion between the user groups can lead to remedying at least some of what are identified as inequities enjoyed by both sides, then the entity who will saw the baby in half will be the National Park Service. And if the latter entity does a glaringly poor job of it, their completed crmp will result not in a workable plan but instead in litigation.
For example, commercial outfitters point out that half of the scheduled private launch dates are canceled or deferred by the permittees, and thus imply that the private permit holders are not acting in a responsible manner. They also point out that a minority of private boaters have become so adept at playing the nps system to get themselves onto private trips that they do three, or four, or even five private trips in a year, thus taking private user-day slots away from more deserving private boaters. The outfitters point out that if the private boating leadership were really interested in “equity,” as claimed, then they would agree to new regulations to limit a private boater to one trip per year and thus “clean their house” of “system-abusers” who worsen the overall situation for private boaters in general. But, some outfitters point out, the private boating leadership is not willing to do this.
A further criticism by outfitters is that, while, yes, it may take twelve years for a private boater to get his or her own permit to run a private trip, any private boater is free right now to explore the possibility of joining a partially filled private trip with a launch date scheduled for the next 12–24 months; this is exactly, outfitters point out, the same option that a commercial passenger now faces in trying to get onto a commercial river trip.
On the other side of the coin, private boaters point out that a twelve year wait (or even twenty years as some extrapolate) to get a private launch permit is ridiculously unequal to the one or two year wait that a person who wants to buy a commercial charter trip faces. Private boaters say this is socioeconomic discrimination, or even segregation, and unfair.
With such arguments, often degrading into apples-versus-oranges comparisons, all progress is derailed, which seems to be, for a few, a goal in itself.
In the last “Stakeholder Session” I pointed out to the group in general—and to several members’ dismay—that all discussion of allocation scenarios are completely arbitrary and are an exercise in futility without a very specific and critical body of data. It is absolutely necessary to the nps, I said, in their deciding an equitable allocation system, to know what the true demand of the American public in general is for specific sorts of trips: commercial, private, and educational.
Thus the nps must devise instruments to assess what every member of the public interested in a river trip through the Canyon actually wants as their preferred trip. When such data are tallied, they yield a guide for allocation. This may sound obvious and simple and true, but the knowledge that such data may yield (assuming that the data are accurate and representative) is potentially dangerous to every user group and threatening to the status quo in general, including the status quo of private users, who may discover that private boaters are an even smaller minority than currently claimed, while the currently unallocated “educational” user group is vastly underestimated.
Apropos of this need, the nps is already exploring a “gateway” concept. This computer gateway would assess every person who wants to participate in a Canyon river trip—private or commercial—with a series of questions designed to categorize their specific interests and preferences. This system does not yet exist but resides in the stage of conceptualization.
Critics of gateway concept—and of all other social survey instruments aimed at determining public preference—point out that some people within any and all user groups will be tempted to stack the deck somehow by creating a flood of their own user-members to distort the pool of data. Their ability to do this depends of course on nps safeguards within their survey system but also pivots on a user group’s combined financial resources to pay for flooding the system with “extra” or “spurious” would-be users.
No system is perfect. And all systems are suspect when the status quo is threatened with change that will hurt a user group.
Unfortunately this problem is ours. Not with some other group of “experts.” And it devolves upon us to open-mindedly consider and offer positive inputs in creating a better system.
The pie is shrinking and the demand is growing—and all of this in an adversarial and litigious arena. Our contributions are critical.
We may never “all get along.” Very likely we will not. Animosities between some elements of all user groups over allocation may fester forever due to “equity” being perceived differently by different individuals. But if we are to behave as rational individuals in a civilized society, we need to engage in honest dialog with the full foreknowledge that everyone at the table may have to give up some small part of their slice of the pie to forge a better allocation system.
Do we have it in us to help shape a fairer system that preserves a viable commercial outfitter system while allowing the average private boater out there to gain a workable anticipation that he or she will be able to hop onto a private trip with three or four years?
I think it is possible, especially if we are willing to re-explore the idea of “private permit-holder” versus “private boater” and devise a system that favors the latter and de-emphasizes the exclusivity of the former.
To pull this off we need to sit at that table and hammer it out. As we all know, democracy is a messy process. But it is infinitely better than “Big Brother.”
Hence, when the next crmp review session begins, please be there. Your positive participation is needed.
This is my last President’s Column in the bqr. I will soon step down to leave the gcrg presidency in the very capable and sometimes wry hands of John O’Brien. It has been my pleasure to try to serve you, my fellow guides, in positive ways. After all, we are a limited breed and we pay a big price to practice our profession. I’ve tried to reduce that price. I also, as most of you do, possess a deep respect and, yes, a somewhat possessive one, for the Canyon itself; I would like to pay “it” back by attempting to protect it from the seemingly endless follies and ecological insults perpetrated upon it by our fellow men (not women, it may be pointed out, just men). In these two dual attempts, I must admit, I have had what I consider to have been very limited success. For my parting shot—my Parthian arrow—please let me simply say: Thanks for trusting me (if you did), and my plea to you is, when faced with any issues on Grand Canyon, follow your heart and act upon its dictates.

Michael Ghiglieri