What if ....

 

the politics of the future allowed the west boundary of Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to be adjusted to match the topographic ideal of including only land that drains into the Canyon? (See comment on previous post.) What would happen to the excluded pieces?

On the south side of the river, the western slope of the ridge that marks the divide between Basin and Range, and on the east the Colorado Plateau, Grand Canyon, most specifically Cave Canyon, -- that slope would fit easily into Lake Mead National Recreation Area (LMNRA). On the other hand, lets first look at the north side. 

Wait -- first, I need to add a comment about that odd turkey wattle hanging down the west side of the Hualapai Reservation. It is an artifact of Park Service (NPS) thinking (compare with the Navajo Reservation boundary) that it would have been good to gather into LMNRA all the surroundings of their "lake" (now once again a river!). So the 1964 law that established LMNRA drew a line of which the southern curve of the wattle is the start that, get this, would have put the northern third of the Hualapai Reservation in the LMNRA, no doubt under NPS' benevolent administration. 

Two notes: I recall the 1930's recreation plan for the Hualapai area adjacent to Lake Mead by the activist Hualapai Fred Mahone (would Mahone Ridge be a sound name for the Park  divide we are discussing? He deserves it--see C. W. McMillen, Making Indian Law). For some reason, the tribal government did not follow his 1934 ideas up. Otherwise the story of the lower river / upper reservoir might have had a different outcome.

Anyway and more important, the 1964 LMNRA Act said that this huge swath of the Reservation could come under NPS only if the Hualapai approved it. They did not, of course, and that was  the end of that scheme (though it has an echo in the current duel over the Park Service claiming Hualapai land on the south bank of the river up to the historic high water line, which is never what the sponsors of the 1975 GCNP enlargement intended). 

Anyway... When NPS drew up a map in 1968 at the request of a Senator who wanted to show his support for an undammed Grand Canyon, it included that bit of the fantasy swath aimed at the Hualapai that was in LMNRA up to the Hualapai boundary. Hence the hanging wattle. Then in 1973, when providing Senator Goldwater a draft bill for his proposed GCNP enlargement, the wattle was included in the Park, up to the south side of the reservoir and along it to the point where the physical, topographic Canyon crosses the river.

So, if excluded from the Park, that western slice of the wattle  could go back to LMNRA (on the river/reservoir, it includes the Pearce Ferry take-out).

However, and now we jump the river to the north side (a more complicated situation), there are the Grand Wash Cliffs (GWC), a monumental feature all their own, marking the end of the Colorado Plateau and opening to the Basin and Range geological province. A Grand Wash Cliffs Monument, running north for many miles, could have been justified at almost any time, and indeed some 15 miles further north, there is a Grand Wash Cliffs Wilderness.  

However, in 1964 when the LMNRA act was passed, it was assumed by almost everybody that Bridge Canyon dam (later called, now disavowed, Hualapai dam) would be built just upstream from the end of Lake Mead. And NPS had a pile of plans for how it would administer this north side of the Grand Canyon with roads and all, connecting up to the Parks in Utah and beyond. So all this north side of the Canyon was included in the LMNRA, since soon, everyone assumed, it would be a GCNRA with a flashy, up-and-down, bathtub lake where then a river was flowing.

Oops.

And after 1968 passage of the Colorado River Basin Act, that included a ban on dams in the Grand Canyon (unless Congress approved), there was a rush to extend GCNP downstream to get it in a Park, where it would be safe. (Unless Congress changed (lost) its collective mind.) We advocates for an undammed Canyon and its further glorification were not as educated about "on the ground" as we should have been, and therefore just accepted the NPS lines that included the wattle and, crossing the river, took more of the GWC, including some of Pearce Canyon and up to the overlook of Snap Point. 

(A digression: The Sanup Plateau, a mid-level platform above the mainstem gorge and below the westernmost highest Canyon rim, comes from the Southern Paiute: Here's a quote from "Arizona Highways" article "Coming to an End"  by Tyler Williams (2024?): 

The Sanup of the Grand Canyon, however, is named after the sap of the piñon pine, many of which grow in the plateau’s nooks. Daniel Bulletts, cultural resource director of the Southern Paiute Tribe, explains: “We pronounce it ‘SUE-nupp,’ our word for pine pitch. You can use it as a glue or a skin salve.”

 What I wonder is whether Snap, as in the point and canyon, is a mispronunciation of SUE-nupp.)

Anyway, though NPS used it to mark the northwestern high point of the Park, Snap Point is not in the Canyon's drainage; it is part of the Grand Wash Cliffs, as is Snap Canyon; and also Pearce Canyon, pieces of which were included in the Park.

They are all also in that huge, odd, misnamed creation called the Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument (GCPNM), courtesy of then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, a knowledgeable friend of the Canyon. He had in the late 1990's decided to get President Clinton to use the Antiquities Act to extend protection for that part of the Grand Canyon that Congress had refused to include within the Park in 1974. He started out with a nice, well-drawn proposal, but then pressure from friends led to a doubling and the inclusion of 500,000 acres that should have been instead the basis of a Grand Wash Cliffs National Monument.

So now the boundary of the Park crosses the river at the butte She Waves Goodbye, and then is ambushed by the boundaries of LMNRA and GCPNM and they all wander along, sometimes along the Canyon's rim, sometimes on township lines. A silly mess. Rectification would start with the elimination of LMNRA east of the Grand Wash Cliffs, the laying down of a topographically true GCNP boundary like the one shown in the previous post, a new inclusive GWC National Monument north of the Park boundary, and either a shrinkage of GCPNM to its appropriate boundary or an expansion of the Park (not in this lifetime, buster!) as envisioned in the 1974 House-approved enlargement legislation. 

Such ideas mash the tender toes of enough stake-holders for them to take their stakes and beat the ideas to death.

So instead: we do have the West End of the Canyon inside the Park boundaries. We have what Im sure is some sort of cooperation among NPS (LMNRA and GCNP both) and the Arizona Strip office of the Bureau of Land Management, though the latter has had a tough time this century. 

And we do have the 2023 birthing of a Greater Grand Canyon that might bring more cooperation. It is most sad that the moving force in Congress behind that expansion, Raul Grijalva, died this year. Is there another Grand Canyon champion moving toward the high levels of national decision-making? A Grijalva, a Babbitt, a Goldwater, a Udall...?