A CLASS ON THE RIVER

A while ago, I wrote a book tracing the great effort the Park Service made in the 1970’s to sculpt a Grand Canyon National Park river traffic management plan that would solve the various crises besetting the Colorado and its riverine environment.* 

As the sixties ended, river traffic was out of control, numbers  increasing hugely; the river with its beaches and shores, being soiled, trashed and re-trashed;  the experience of a wild river trip, a wilderness river trip, battered and shattered by more and more motorized push-em-thru shortie thrill rides; the Park Service bewildered by this ravenous new profit-making invasion. 

The result, as the seventies ended, was full of promise: a thorough-going research effort both detailed the problems and pointed toward  resolution; with innovation in policy and technology the river corridor was on its way toward a cleaner, healthier future; an excellent proposal including a motor-free Wilderness was approved by the NPS Director; a detailed and thorough-going Colorado River Management Plan was formulated based on the research and public input, and ready for an implementation that would move toward ending motor use while providing a true Wilderness Park experience for the river traveller. Not all difficulties were resolved, but the near-future looked bright for a Park-worthy, visitor-oriented, and Wilderness-friendly pro-environment river experience for the public.

Then came the 1980 election of an anti-environmental President, who immediately put the attorney for the motor-using river-trip concessionaires in charge of the Interior Department, and thus the Park Service, and buried under it all, the Grand Canyon National Park and its new river plan. The CRMP was scrapped, motors’ future was made secure, the concessionaires were put in actual charge of how the river traffic was to be run, as well as what the passengers’ experience would be (well — of course it was still the Grand Canyon). The one plus was that NPS was able to keep its pro-environmental reforms of human activity on river tripping in place, resulting over the years in a healthier riverine system. 

As befit a river regime imposed by a hostile national political regime, the motorboaters were protected first by friendly management of an anti-wilderness plan, and secondly over the coming decades by three Republican Senators, a phalanx that would have intimidated even the most principled Park Service personnel. So in succeeding decades, NPS became ever less interested in its environmental credentials and more embedded in the politically imposed concessionaire-friendly river management. 

What at first seemed like a sidelined matter — providing trip opportunities for river runners who do their own trip planning and running — has now decayed into the most glaring sores and even cancers on today’s NPS river policies. The history of NPS treatment of, let me call them “citizen boaters” in honor of their American spirit of innovation and wilderness appreciation**, is a string of ignorance, mis-steps, and outright prejudice. 

The history, both sparkling and dark, of citizen boating in Grand Canyon National Park —revealed in research done independently by Tom Martin as well as partly in my 2003 book—, needs to be written in detail. Here I want to bring out an aspect of the behavior of GCNP staff over the past near-century: the prejudice shown and the disadvantages perpetrated by administrators, top on down. It is an attitude also held and fostered, of course, by those who own and operate the trips-for-money. And given the closeness of concessionaires and Park regulators, the attitude has festered, hardened, and become an article of faith in deciding matters of river policy and operations. 

The tools to implement this prejudice are many. For instance, NPS has stubbornly refused to track and chart demand for river trips; sequestering what minimal research has been done. A rough idea of demand for citizen trips might be gained (if NPS were open about their data) from the numbers who apply to the official NPS lottery to launch such trips, and from the length of time applicants wait for a lottery slot. However, there is no, absolutely no, way for NPS to gauge demand for trips-for-money. NPS does not publish data that might suggest their size and overlap, nor how visitors chose a trip, nor evaluate trips for user satisfaction. You may be sure that the trip owners hide their methods and success in drumming up passengers. For them, potential-customer lists are a precious, protected resource.

And here is a telling point: NPS rules limit every person to one trip a year. However, NPS does not vet the paying passengers, while it does collect information on and regulate citizen boaters, each and every one. And on top of that, all a would-be paying passenger need do is book a trip through a concessionaire, and possibly another through a different company. Meanwhile, the thousands of would-be citizen travelers are caught up in the infamous official Park lottery system with its boatloads of arcane procedures.

In economic, as well as social and political, terms, the trips-for-money operation creates a privileged class. NPS, by contrast, in its attitude and rules and regulations for citizen boaters, creates a segregated and disadvantaged class, corralled into a kind of regulatory ghetto, successful exit from which comes only for that small percentage who win the lottery. 

Mark well that this is not a matter of how much income or wealth people have to throw around, although river-running is not a particularly integrated activity in standard American terms. These are, however, two very different trip experiences, physically, socially, culturally, psychologically. Opinions across the class divide of citizens and concessionaires about each other can get pretty hard-edged.

That could be all well and good, were it not for the addition of NPS prejudice. That has resulted in a monied class being privileged in its chance to take these trips, as against the corralled citizen class that is deliberately disadvantaged by NPS rules, often giving the appearance of being formulated to intensify that disadvantage, and often accompanied through river tripping history by sneers that citizen boaters are, of course, out to cheat the system. 

Since NPS and the trips-for-money owners hide or do not collect and make public their data, the magnitude of this class discrimination is not, as I said, fully quantifiable. However, what is worse is the quality of the discrimination: Trips-for-money passengers can be almost anonymous in their efforts to obtain seats on a trip. Exactly opposite from this comfortable situation, citizen boaters must, in essence, become creatures of the “NPS state” subject to the full glare of information collection and categorization by the Park’s River Office managers. 

I offer a prejudice litmus test for NPS river policy: Lets proclaim that everyone is to have the same chance to go on a river trip. Lets institute a system where all applicants for a “seat” on a trip, each and every one, have to get a ticket and each has an equal percentage chance of obtaining one. That is, each would-be boater/passenger is equal in trip opportunity to each and every other would-be boater/passenger, no matter what kind of trip they wish to take. Fair? Non-discriminatory? Equal protection under NPS rules? Yes. So is that how NPS runs their Grand Canyon system? Hardly.

And here’s the kicker: That IS the basis for how citizen boaters now get to go (subject to the impediments imposed by all the other NPS red tape). Contrarily, the pay-to-go passenger can mostly ignore NPS and all its rules, throw money at the commercial trip owner, and waltz on board. Bon voyage, and a fig to the thousands waiting stuck in NPS-lottery-land. 

The sad conclusion is a discriminatory political regime for Park river use arising out of the 1980 political victory that put the trip-for-hire operators in political charge of river management; one that NPS attitudes and policies have hardened into a sad demonstration of class division.

*Hijacking A River; A Political History of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Vishnu Temple Press, 2003.

**Other terms of use are do-it-yourself, private, non-commercial, boaters, emphasizing different aspects of the activity. A major characteristic is sharing costs and trip work rather than just buying a ticket to be taken through on a trip run for profit.