Wilderness / Motors Issue
The National Park Service is now in the process of revising the Colorado River Management Plan for Grand Canyon National Park. Wilderness advocates are attempting to use this process to ban the low-powered outboard motors that have been used in the Grand Canyon for over five decades.

Motorized trips are essential, however, for a reasonable level of public access to Grand Canyon river trips. Today, they are the principal reason why the Grand Canyon river experience is available to such a very broad range of the general public, including people of all ages, abilities and time schedules.
NO NEGATIVE ECOLOGICAL IMPACT
It is important to understand that the Grand Canyon wilderness/motor issue is not about protecting the Colorado River from harm. There is no evidence that the current type and level of motorized use negatively impacts the Grand Canyon in any way. The NPS makes clear that this debate involves visitor experience matters, aesthetics and wilderness ideology, not resource protection imperatives.

The wilderness/motors issue is also a debate about who gets to go on Grand Canyon river trips. Today, three out of four who take professionally-outfitted trips depend on motorized watercraft. With motors, full canyon river trips take about a week. Without motors, these trips take two weeks or more.

Because recreational use of the Colorado River is capped by NPS regulation, if motors are eliminated, the number of professionally-outfitted river trip participants could be reduced by fifty to sixty percent or more. This is because the majority of persons doing full canyon river trips would stay on the river for approximately twice as long. Additionally, the overall population now able to do these trips would be sharply narrowed, because many working Americans simply cannot get away for two weeks or more.
IMPACT OF GLEN CANYON DAM
Because Glen Canyon Dam sits just upstream from the park, the Grand Canyon’s river corridor may no longer meet the statutory definition of lands eligible for wilderness status. Revealingly, leading conservation groups are now advocating a series of intensive restorative activities, such as altering the river’s temperature and augmenting its sediment load, designed to return the Colorado River to its pre-dam natural condition.

These activities, which involve changing fundamental aspects of the river’s ecology, conflict with the Wilderness Act’s notion of preserving untouched areas as wilderness. The river corridor either qualifies for wilderness designation, or is in need of massive human manipulation designed to undo earlier massive human manipulation. It cannot be both.
WILDERNESS AS THEOLOGY
Proponents of designation by Congress of the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River corridor as wilderness, and/or the administrative elimination of low-powered outboard motors historically used in this area, are motivated by profound philosophical belief.

The argument/belief is that wilderness designation is simply a greater good that trumps any and all of the demonstrably negative impacts such a policy decision would impose on the public interest. Chief among these is sharply reduced public access to the area. The GCRRA has great respect for this belief, but we do respectfully disagree with it.

We think that at the heart of this debate lies the question, what impact would wilderness designation and/or the removal of motors have on the general public’s access to the Grand Canyon river experience? Wilderness advocates will tell you that it would have none. We believe, however, that the reduction in public access would be substantial.
WILDERNESS AS PUBLIC POLICY
The GCRRA suggests that the proper context in which to view, analyze, and ultimately decide the Grand Canyon wilderness/motors issue is that of a open, rational, objective, and spirited public policy debate. Such a discussion should be centered on and driven by the careful weighing of public interest pros and cons, positive and negative impacts, and the balancing of equally yet competing desirable outcomes as established and constrained in this case by the NPS mission and the purposes for which Grand Canyon National Park was created on the people’s behalf.

The goal should be to strike a reasonable balance between competing public benefits and values while minimizing negative outcomes to the extent possible. It is the duty and responsibility of the NPS to make the motor use decision driven by a careful deliberation of what is in the public’s best interests both now and for future generations.

When the Grand Canyon wilderness/motors question is approached in this way, we believe that the policy conclusions are that a) Grand Canyon National Park should remain a National Park and not be turned into a wilderness, b) that a type and level of motorized use similar to the current pattern is fully consistent with the proper protection and care of this irreplaceable natural wonder, and c) that such motorized use is instrumental in maintaining a reasonable level of public access to the Grand Canyon river experience, of a type and form readily accessible to and enjoyable by most visitors.
A REASONABLE SOLUTION with AMPLE PRECEDENT
Designating the vast majority of the Grand Canyon as wilderness is essentially non-controversial. It is the controversy about motors on the river that has for three and a half decades prevented resolution of this issue. Yet there is ample precedent for the approach of excluding the Colorado River corridor from such a wilderness designation, in light of the river’s function as a main access route into and through the canyon’s greater backcountry.

As a means of public access to large blocks of backcountry area, the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River functions in a way similar to such famous parkways as Shenandoah National Park’s Skyline Drive, the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park and the Tioga Road across the high Sierra in Yosemite National Park. These popular corridors are bordered by yet excluded from statutory wilderness designation.

Congress chose this approach because these routes function as primary access arteries in a manner similar to how the Colorado River works in the Grand Canyon. The GCRRA believes that these other areas provide the appropriate and successful model for how Congress can ensure both reasonable public access to Grand Canyon river trips while also designating over one million acres of the Grand Canyon as wilderness.

To view a timeline of key wilderness issue events, go here.

For an in-depth, historical look at the wilderness/motors issue, go here.