ou think GCES had their hands full? Well, this one is way beyond everyone. NPS is helpless! BOR is helpless! Fish and Wildlife is helpless! Game and Fish is helpless! USGS is helpless! Even if we got all the rangers together, and all the other people with badges and arm patches, and all the Native Americans in America, everyone would be helpless against it!
It’s the Canyon. It’s disappearing before our very eyes. Not just the beaches (which aren’t disappearing, actually, they’re just going to Lake Mead), but the whole dammed Grand Canyon!
Sure it’s “grand” (we all knew that), but it’s “grand” because of erosion. Every year, thousands of tons of the Canyon wind up in the Colorado River, dumped there by pretty little waterfalls we see during storms, by all the sweet-tasting side streams, by the tremendous and, thankfully, infrequent debris flows that downright clog up the river with gunk. And the rangers, the tourists, the boatmen, everyone, stand by and watch helplessly.
This is a fine how-do-you-do for Teddy Roosevelt’s admonishment to us to “keep it as it is.” Since 1903, when T.R. stood on the South Rim and gave that blissfully short speech (just about two minutes, unheard of by modern presidential standards), there is less of the Canyon to see than there was in his day. We should be ashamed.
Well, okay, talk is cheap. So what to do about the problem?
In 1991 I published a short paper1 in an international journal, titled, “Saving the Grand Canyon: Final Report.” It even caught the eye of columnist James Cook in the Arizona Republic (October 24th), where in an interview I mentioned that I had spent nearly a whole Saturday afternoon tackling this problem. For some reason, though, that research paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results (yes, a real title) failed to gain the necessary attention to bring my plan into effect. So now I turn to the only real group of people who give a damn about the Canyon—the people who work there.
Simply put, we can’t save the Canyon. The technology doesn’t exist right now to stave off the monumental forces of erosion that have excavated the Canyon. Ivo Lucchitta (USGS, Flagstaff) has estimated that 1,000 cubic miles of rock have been eroded away from the main gorge and myriad side-canyons-of-side-canyons. But if we are to preserve the Canyon for “our children and our children’s children,” as T.R. had hoped, we have to place the Canyon in stasis until the technology exists to stop the erosion.
The only way to do this is to fill in the Canyon. My earlier plan had shown that dirt was, frankly, too heavy for the job—and it can’t be kept very clean. But the ideal long-term packing material is piffles; you know, the styrofoam peanuts (or whatever they’re called) that fly all over the place when you open a box. Fill ‘er up with piffles!

I calculated the number of piffles of different kinds that would be necessary to fill up Grand Canyon. It turned out that nearly the lightest kind of piffle was the one that would do the job best, and it would take—well, I still don’t know the name for this number, but it would take 291 (followed by 13 zeros) of these things to fill up the Canyon. The whole mess would weigh 13,600,000,000 tons—half a billion truckloads. That’s nothing like the 40 dumptrucks-per-second that used to go past Phantom Ranch, carrying all that sediment that gets hung up now behind the dam. Or so say the old-timers.

But there’s a hitch, and that is the subject of my revitalized research plan. Where do you buy piffles? Have you seen them in a store? Or in a catalog? It seems that the whole world’s supply of piffles was manufactured during the ‘60s, and since then they have just been in a complex cycle of recycling and storage. We save a few boxes of them until we need them, and out they go. We hardly ever run out because someone winds up sending a box or two of them to us.
So we need piffles. Lots of them! Please do your part. On your next trip, take a box of piffles down the river with you. Dump them on top of the loose sand, squeeze them in between those rock cracks. Help save the Canyon! If we do this now, our children’s children will have us to thank. T.R. will smile.
If you’re worried about the animals and the trees, don’t. My previous research showed that air circulation is pretty good between all those piffles. And they’re so light that nothing will get crushed by them. They’re inert. They last forever. Piffles are nature’s perfect packing material. They also have the uncanny characteristic of protecting boats from the damaging effects of rocks. True, you may not be able to see very far downstream—well, actually you wouldn’t be able to see at all—but you would never have to scout again.
Now, what to do when the means become available to stave off severe erosion in the Canyon? The Canyon is open to the west at Grand Wash, and the whole load can be blown out of the Canyon into Nevada with leaf blowers. (Hey, if they’re willing to take nuclear waste, what’s a few piffles?)
So if this summer you see a guy in Tevas and a white lab coat on the river, it’ll probably be me. I will be working on a update to my research program, to be published in the Annals of Improbable Research (yes, another real title). Please do your part and shower me with piffles. Remember, if the Canyon gets too grand, it won’t be there at all!

Earle Spamer