DRAFT Statement on Actions to be taken on Kaibab Plateau DRAFT

FACTORS TO CONSIDER IN PLANNING THE FUTURE OF THE KAIBAB PLATEAU

Alternative 4 Rebuilding a Better Landscape

The three alternatives offer a band aid dressing change on a large festering wound. We propose a broader revisioning of the North Rim.

This alternative includes:

- The entire landscape from the Marble Canyon escarpment to Kanab Creek, the North Rim escarpment to Highway 89A

- The affiliated Tribes that are included in the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument are included as planning stakeholders.

- The Kaibab National Forest is included as a planning stakeholder.

- The Bureau of Land Management is included as a planning stakeholder.

- The Arizona Game and Fish is included as a planning stakeholder.

We recognize the historical actions of the past that are disconnected from the realities of the present including:

On November 28, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Game Preserve to safeguard native animals and natural resources on the Kaibab Plateau.

The North Rim Lodge was dedicated in 1928 at a time when the NPS was promoting tourism to the region.

11,030 people visited the North Rim during the 1925–1926 season, while roughly 40 times that amount visited in 2024.

The concept of  a place to safeguard native animals and natural resources was replaced with a tourist hotel, cattle grazing, logging, and a failed attempt at Bison management.  

The National Park Service lacks the funding to maintain a hotel, restaurant, visitor center, cabin lodging, employee housing, fire, backcountry, maintenance and law enforcement facilities. 

Post Dragon Bravo fire, the Roaring Springs water supply may not be available over the long term. 

We recognize the present, including climate change impacts on a mismanaged forest with the potential for catastrophic wildland fire and winter blizzards will increase in intensity in the near future. 

The hotels in Page, Marble Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs, Cliffdwellers, Jacob Lake, Kaibab Lodge, Fredonia and Kanab have more than enough lodging to accommodate the 2024 North Rim visiting public.

Some facilities survived the DB fire. These facilities can be retained as the North Rim developed area is downsized to support existing overnight camping. 

Bison management must recognize the benefits of Bison on the entire North Rim by expanding the existing herd’s range and no longer treats the herd as corralled beasts for shooting. 

Overnight visitors will need to be totally self sufficient with regards to food and water. 

Fire management must include controlled burns with the assumption that uncontrolled burns as the Dragon Bravo may transition into grassland.

The Kaibab Plateau, named after one of the Grand Canyon's Associated Tribes, has had a rugged 100 years. Just consider recent fires:

 

A century ago, shortly after the creation of Grand Canyon National Park and the nearby Kaibab Indian Reservation(for that band of the Southern Paiute), National Park Service Director Steven Mather, impressed by the magnificence of the forest that covered the Plateau, proposed that it be designated The President's Forest. 

6500 cattle 5000 sheep 1-1/2 billion bd.ft.

Stepping to the side, in order to get moving out front:

Baaj and NKRD need to be involved, their land and purposes.

The Associated Tribes need to be involved (north side, yes, but also as an entity)

The cattle need to be factored in, and the Trust has to figure out what sort of environmental org it is going to be on this incredible landscape (the Kaibab +). Cattle? Or how to phase them out?

The bison are an incredible resource, apparently. Where is G&F? 

So NPS/GC needs to focus on what is usable and to use that to maintain a minimal support focus and presence for visitors. The question of mass tourism and big new building should be off table until main questions are dealt with:

They are: integrating the Plateau: FS,NPS,Blm, G&F , and most important, include and integrate the Assoc Tribes, both immediate (Paiute, Navajo) and as advisory influence , decision making force.

Who are the others to be involved?

What is intellectual-environmental framework? Kaibab as an integrated entity. Kaibab as a damaged forest, and evolving landscape, one subject to big fires (they bad or good?) A landscape to be rejuvenated, recovered, restored, renewed/ in fact new decisions made for a changed place. So: What is vision of Kaibab Plateau 2150/2200/2300 ...?

Need integration of agencies, assoc tribes, interested non-govtal parties.

How about appeal to groups? To Assoc Tribes?

 THESE ARE SERIOUS MATTERS*

(*this is a first, very first, rough draft, to get ideas down)

Two Surprise (Near Simultaneous) Destructive Floods

Balancing Living As We Do and Human Impacts

Consider: The Grand Canyon is revered (protected?) and enjoyed as a world-spanning environmental icon -- a place that reminds us of how gorgeous this world we evolved in is, and therefore a place "saying" to us: You MUST do differently how you live in the world, or we will all hang separately.

Celebrating Raul Grijalva, A Grand Grand Canyon Advocate

As we friends of the Grand Canyon urge the matter of access to South Bass Trailhead, here is some more advocacy for this historic area of Canyon topography.

 

Raul Grijalva, in his time as a U.S. Representative, used his public status most prominently in this century to protect and enhance the status of the Grand Canyon. Through his efforts to curb mining activities, and in his successful advocacy for additional designation of relevant lands, working with the Associated Tribes, he brought about an expanded concept of Grand Canyon, so that we can now, referring to the ensemble of proclaimed and legislated lands, speak of the Greater Grand Canyon. His decade+ of work (as always in cooperation with many others) deserves to be recognized and celebrated. I suggest that it would be appropriate to have a prominent landmark feature his name. 

What do you think of a designation in the area in which the South Bass Trailhead is located? There are already points of relevance there: Chemehuevi, Havasupai, and Walapai Points. What if the above-rim sub-plateau drained by Pasture Wash, and leading to the Trailhead, were designated Grijalva Plateau as a landform similar to Powell Plateau and Walhalla Plateau on the North Rim.

 

This post is written with gratitude to Tom Martin for his work on the South Bass Trail access as well as to Raul Grijalva for his expansion of Grand Canyon’s recognition.

AGENDA, A GUIDE FOR GREATER GRAND CANYON’S

APPRECIATION AND PRESENTATION, PROTECTION

(necessarily, a work-in-progress, maps to follow)

Using the institutions and procedures of the present, and those offered in Baaj Nwaajo NM, these comments are aimed at strengthening  the presence and understanding of the Greater Grand Canyon. Integrating the GC National Park and North Kaibab is essential in this effort.

Activation of section 5 of P.L. 93-620 could provide one aspect animating procedures of Baaj Nwaavjo, strengthening understanding of the Greater Grand Canyon and its peoples as an entity. Overall, this understanding could mark the beginning of an over-arching cooperative mode within the GGC, putting into the past the many efforts, large and small, to use our national governmental structure as the mode of decision-making.

Looking outward, there could be integrative maps and tours, introductions to the GGC, its country and its peoples.

A rectification of the GC-Parashant NM would see its northwest half as part of a north-running Grand Wash Cliffs/Colorado Plateau’s west rim and wildlife orientation, while the southeastern half would be oriented, together with the drainages (Kanab, Tuckup, Whitmore) and plateaus (Kanab, Uinkarets, Shivwits). into a conceptual presentation unit of the western Grand Canyon.

Continuing recognition and appreciation of the Canyon’s western ending and the Colorado’s exit into the Basin & Range would involve an integrated understanding, running from the Westernmost High Point, (south of Pearce drainage—a B&R feature), across the Sanup /Esplanade platform, down the Sanup escarpment to the Colorado at the exit butte Waving Farewell, then climbing south on the crest of the GW Cliffs, and re-introducing the Hualapai lands and developments into this west end within the Greater Grand Canyon.

Among the many opportunities for naming recognition in the west would be the appreciation of the late Congressman Raul Grijalva’s multi-year contribution to the GGC’s protection and the emergence of the Greater Grand Canyon as a result of the proclamation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni NM. 

The effort to find the fittest feature and names for other locations can mark an appropriate statement of recognition for the GGC and its constituent peoples.

Should this appropriate time ever come, discussion of the management and designation of the Grand Canyon’s wild land could be included.

A special deliberative effort would be well made for the Kaibab Plateau. Following the several fires on the forest, there could be discussion of appropriate visions for the plateau’s great forest. The place of the bison, of the wildlife overall, the future of cattle in a restorative effort, could be integrated into such visions of the GGC and the southwestern landscape.

The huge, sprawling, and not completely comprehensive research activities oriented in and about the GGC could be conceptualized and publicized in a cooperative mode strengthening it as an enhancement of public appreciation.

GRAND CANYON END DROWNED!! And Other Grand Matters (updated 12/30/25)

 

Where did the Canyon's Lower Granite Gorge go?

Here is a photo of the west end of the Grand Canyon from the time in the 1940's when the snow fell and the water flowed freely and the Bureau of Reclamation filled Lake Mead, Hoover Dam's reservoir. Courtesy of Mrill Ingram and John Weisheit, who collected this gem of a report.

Note the lighter turbid river water reaching right close to river mile 277.

The photo appears in a report printed 1960:

That is the reservoir, and deep beneath its surface water, out in the middle, is river mile 277, a human-determined place used to define the Grand Canyon's exit. The Grand Wash Cliffs are well-defined on the right as they lower down into the water.

Now here is a photo from our October 2025 visit. The foreground flats and white hill would have been underwater. She Who Waves Farewell is just off photo left. Because the 1940s photo is taken above and from over toward the left, changing the angle, I think that the pinkish small cliff with vertical marks here, lower down in center left, is the one up in the upper left of the older photo. 

Across the river, the Sanup Escarpment shows up well here, rising above the foreground slopes on this side that climb to the right to continue the Grand Wash Cliffs southward.

The Grand Wash, the Grand Gulch, draining the Cliffs from the north. Perched up top on the Sanup is the Grand Pipe. Creating this major change in geological province from Colorado Plateau to the Basin and Range: the Grand Wash Fault, known but hidden.

And the province's climax, through the Cliffs after this final 277-mile leg of its Colorado River journey: the Grand Canyon.

This is the topo-map view of the Canyon ending, climbing up between the Hualapai Plateau on the south, and the northside platforms of the Shivwits and, at the mid-level, the Sanup Plateau bounded on the east by Chuarumpeak Point (the blue line starting down it in the upper left) then spread out west until squeezed over the rim where it drops 3000' down the escarpment to river level, once, pre-dam, even deeper as part of the Lower Granite Gorge, now in the silt. And above, the Canyon end-marking butte rising up to Wave Farewell:

Not Until My 90's -- A Long-Delayed Walk On The West Side

  Our Hike To The Grand Canyon's West Exit

A splendid, sunny Saturday, October 18, 2025, a few days after I entered my nineties.

Hiking with me: fellow lovers of the Grand Canyon and my essential support, Mrill Ingram (relation) and Missy Rigg (both hiking companions over decades). 

Our goal: the spot on the south (left) bank of the Colorado River where 1) the topographic western ending of the Grand Canyon is defined by the Board on Geographic Names; 2) River Mile 277 (+or-) is now located; 3) the Grand Canyon National Park boundary crosses the River; 4) there is a handsome landmark butte composed of the last outcrops of Canyon rocks: A pyramid of Muav limestone on top of a base of Bright Angel layers.

Lets Bring It All Together: THE GREATER GRAND CANYON

A LONG MATURING: THE GREATER GRAND CANYON 

Addendum: The key role of Grand Canyon champion

U. S. Representative Raul Grijalva

Over almost two centuries, spasmodic and often unconnected actions and designations have pieced together the patchwork of recognition and designations and ownerships and protections that today cover THE GREATER GRAND CANYON.