Sad News from the Grand Canyon

[deluxestogie]

In the summer of 1984, I drove with my son, then 6 years old, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. As I was checking-in at the desk inside the multi-story Grand Canyon Lodge, built nearly 100 years ago from native stone and truly massive logs, my son wandered down the interior steps, into an enclosed room that offered him the first view of the Canyon itself. The Lodge perches at the verge. When he returned, his mouth spontaneously gaped, eyebrows raised.

In 1991, I hiked across the Canyon from the South Rim to the North Rim, and visited the Grand Canyon Lodge. And in the summer of 2019, I drove with my brother and my grandson (then 12 years old) to the North Rim, and he innocently repeated the facial expression of his father, from 35 years earlier.

Today, the Lodge and all the surrounding buildings are no more.

Grand Canyon lodge has been destroyed by wildfire

Bob

EDIT:

[The Hotshot Wake Up]

 

[deluxestogie]

In an additional blow to Canyon wildlife, the water treatment facility below the North Rim was destroyed, and is pouring chlorine gas (heavier than air) down Bright Angel Canyon. That treatment plant also supplies water to the South Rim.

Bob

 

[HillDweller]

In the summer of 1984, I drove with my son, then 6 years old, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. As I was checking-in at the desk inside the multi-story Grand Canyon Lodge, built nearly 100 years ago from native stone and truly massive logs, my son wandered down the interior steps, into an enclosed room that offered him the first view of the Canyon itself. The Lodge perches at the verge. When he returned, his mouth spontaneously gaped, eyebrows raised.

In 1991, I hiked across the Canyon from the South Rim to the North Rim, and visited the Grand Canyon Lodge. And in the summer of 2019, I drove with my brother and my grandson (then 12 years old) to the North Rim, and he innocently repeated the facial expression of his father, from 35 years earlier.

Today, the Lodge and all the surrounding buildings are no more.

Grand Canyon lodge has been destroyed by wildfire

Bob

EDIT:

[The Hotshot Wake Up]

What a loss.

 

[deluxestogie]

Buildings can be re-built. Memories will last. No human lives were lost, so far as I can determine.

But thousands of livelihoods have just vanished from a region with few alternatives—all of the park's North Rim employees; the mule-riding businesses; the souvenir manufacturers, distributors and vendors; the folks who run Phantom Ranch. The mule skinners who lead mule trains down from the South Rim. Every business and campground north of the Canyon, depends on summer visitors passing through to make ends meet. The adjacent Navajo reservation depends on passing traffic going to the North Rim, for their various businesses. The town of Page, at Lake Powell, and all its boating and lake services, as well as the tourism aspect of Glen Canyon Dam, depend on North Rim visitors who take advantage of a side trip there while traveling to or from the Canyon.

And I think of the ringtails that I watched dance in circles one night—just outside my tent—at Bright Angel Camp Ground, at the bottom of the Canyon. And the wild turkeys that clustered near Phantom Ranch. Have they all just been gassed?

The Grand Canyon is a uniquely harsh environment, where the animal and plant species that are present survive day by day on a knife's edge.

Bob