hat does wilderness look like?” “What does wilderness sound like?” “What does wilderness feel like?”, a refrain circling round and round my head, while I separate charcoal debris from sand through a sieve, rocking, back and forth – shshshshshshshsh.
Soot coats my damp hot arms. I’ve been sifting three hours and i will never be done! On this exquisite beach we’ve identified four fire sites, one with evidence of multiple fires. Think of that, four fire sites leave such severe impact that I will never be done!
I wonder, “Do 20% of the folks who’ll visit this beach notice charcoal, or not notice charcoal? Do 5% notice charcoal, or not notice charcoal? Or do .5%? Or do 80%? Or, or, or.
No one knows.
What do I know? I’m just a guy rafting the Colorado for eighteen days with five other volunteers, supervised by nps folks, helping to move forward the Grand Canyon gcra Revegetation Plan: removing and/or documenting exotics, obliterating social trails, recording visitor impact, tallying animal sightings, relentlessly pick up micro and macro trash.
And because I am sifting it happens that I’m thinking about stewardship. I set down the sieve, puzzling, “How can visitors, commercials and privates, manage even more successful river stewardship?” The response seems to always be inextricably linked to usage impact issues, predicated on whose resources are affected.
Mesmerized by the heat and the repetitive rhythm I fall into a trance, and wonder, “What about other tasks I am here to accomplish?”
Picking up trash, that makes undisputed sense. Yanking invasive Ravenna grass, that makes sense. If left unchecked it will choke beaches, slash at and welt visitors’ legs. Rerouting walkers’ feet away from endangered areas by building stage-set like deterrents of brush, rocks and branches, that makes sense. Unless footsteps are deterred, the fragile cryptogamic soil will be forever lost.

Loudly intruding on my reveries, irritatingly, challengingly, a gcra employee leans over my pile of charcoal asking, “So now that you’ve been working on river stewardship, what useful insights might you share with other river stewards?”
A response forms over the next few days. As I observe happenings along the river, I notice a pattern of missed opportunities to display stewardship—opportunities to teach others about stewardship. I call the pattern “People Learn by Watching.”
Here are two examples:

one
I overhear, spoken by a commercial trip leader to tired-at-end-of-day passengers, “Just take your gear and walk up river about 100 yards and find a site. This is a great camping area.”
So I watch passengers cart 20 dry bags along, and alongside, the clearly outlined path, plopping them down in obvious site areas, and also plopping them down in areas that obviously are not intended for camping. In fact, we volunteers had just spent 3 hours making the obvious sites even more obvious. And the less obvious sites even less obvious. grrrr.
I wondered, “Why didn’t the leader have someone accompany the passengers to show them what paths and campsites look like...and don’t look like?”

two
A trudging caravan of visitors edge along paths that ultimately lead to an arch site. Social trails are everywhere and the guide allows his herd to wander as they will. “All roads lead to Rome.” must be his thinking. So I watch the wandering. In fact, I’m sweating in the sun, obliterating trails as the leader walks by, and waves. grrr.
Again, I wonder, “Why didn’t the leader point out the impact of social trailing? Why didn’t he scout out the designated paths for his group and show the way?
I detail these stories because they are stories of folks asleep at the stewardship wheel. None are badly intended. None are uneducated. And these stewards hold the interests of the river’s ecology close to their hearts. Undeniably.
I guess that the day-to-day caring for passengers’ safety and the quality of their trip comes first, and sometimes it’s tough to elevate stewardship to the same priority.
At the same time I noticed how short stewardshipless naps cause the river banks to become, at a glacial but steady pace, less than what they are.
I don’t mean to criticize, only to offer a gentle reminder—stay awake—don’t nap.

Bruce Kanarek