The Denver Service Center, along with the staff of Grand Canyon National Park, not only met the congressional deadline for reporting on whether the Kanab and Uinkaret plateau lands were suitable for retention in the Park, but used the period of 1975 to become acquainted with the larger reaches of the Canyon's North Side in the Arizona Strip. The immediate job would be to update and expand the recommendation for Wilderness, due on the President's desk in January 1977. However, the even larger task would be to come to know the lands from Kanab Canyon west to the Shivwits, in order to evaluate them as possible candidates for adding to the Park. Since these, called the Adjacent Lands, were under the administration of the Forest Service (most of Kanab Canyon) and the Bureau of Land Management (west side of Kanab, the upper ends of Whitmore and Parashant Canyons, and the grand back-country viewing platforms of the multi-fingered Shivwits). Sharing the BLM features (except for Kanab) is the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (part of NPS, of course, but for all that, a turf that would be defended by the NRA staff).
The matter of the Grand Canyon Wilderness was inextricably wound up in the question of removing motorized craft from the river, and that history has been told, all the way up to its sad denouement as the commercial river operators (whether motorized or rowers) banded together to protect their oligopoly and conservative river operations by pressing well-placed bureaucrats in the President's Office of Management and Budget to keep the excellent NPS Wilderness proposal away from Congress. (See my Hijacking A River: A Political History of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, 2003. It is available -- along with many other invaluable books on the Canyon, river running, and the Park -- from Vishnu Temple Press in Flagstaff, http://www.vishnutemplepress.com/.)
