Who Can Save the Grand Canyon?

A gondola ride to the bottom of the Grand Canyon would be like a gondola ride to the top of Everest.<p>These projects are deeply frustrating because all the developers have to do is get them built once - they can essentially fail as many times as they need to in order to get their project built. If you oppose this kind of project, you have to succeed in your efforts over and over again. If you fail once, the wild nature of the place is lost.<p>We need to preserve wild places, and this is one of them.

The price of solitude is effort. Don&#x27;t want to share nature with others? Walk a mile and you will filter 99% of humanity. Three miles uphill will filter 99.9%.<p>My trip to the Grand Canyon was tailored for solitude. We drove hours to get to a trailhead on the North Rim, hiked a a steep trail down, camped (by a hard-to-believe falls&#x2F;spring), and hiked up and out by moonlight to avoid the heat. I don&#x27;t mean to sound hardcore - I&#x27;m really not - I just like solitude and that&#x27;s how you get it.<p>I&#x27;m ambivalent about this particular proposal. Exposure to nature creates naturalists. At the same time people ruin nature - the experience of it and it&#x27;s physical environment. It&#x27;s a balancing act and I have no idea if this is too much or too little.

&quot;...who like the idea of enabling a large number of people to enjoy the great canyon’s very heart, a stunningly beautiful and remote site long inaccessible to the masses.&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t they realize that being remote and inaccessible is a big part of what makes it stunningly beautiful? The moment you arrive there with 10,000 other people, the place will no longer have what you came there to see.

For a good perspective on this see Ken Burns&#x27; documentary series about the creation of the national parks. It will open your eyes to the constant battle the parks face from commercial enterprises, and explains why the parks are such a unique system that should be protected at all costs.

I couldn&#x27;t get a real sense of just where this development wanted to be, what it looked like: <a href="http://grandcanyonescalade.com/comparison-chart-grand-canyon-national-park-grand-canyon-escalade-land-use-plans/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;grandcanyonescalade.com&#x2F;comparison-chart-grand-canyon...</a><p>That monstrosity should absolutely not be built.

As a regular visitor to the Grand Canyon, this saddens me, but fortunately the Grand Canyon is big, and even if this gets built, there are still plenty of places where you can visit the canyon and see next to no development, such as Toroweap:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroweap_Overlook" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Toroweap_Overlook</a><p>My hope is that enough of the canyon access remains dirt roads and trails, with nothing but a few camp sites at the end.

Irrigating the southwest in the first place was a Big Government mistake. That&#x27;s the real disaster here. The Grand Canyon is pretty, but it&#x27;s just a big ravine. Damming up the Colorado so people in Tuscon can have grass lawns is the real crime.

I&#x27;m currently reading The Wilderness Warrior, the biography of Theodore Roosevelt who was instrumental not only in setting aside the Grand Canyon as a national park but also in saving millions of acres of forest through the West from wanton development. In that time, it was possible for a politician to have that kind of far reaching impact. Leaving aside whether it was the right or wrong thing to do, it&#x27;s interesting that now we&#x27;re likely subject to financial interests in whether this gets done and possibly a court decision. I doubt that any of our elected leaders could have much effect over what will eventually happen here. I think that&#x27;s probably a failing of our political system.

I typically refrain from commenting on how heavy a page is because we&#x27;re here for the content, not web design critiques. That said, page load for the &quot;As a single page&quot; version of the article generates 349 requests (prior to the ad beacon&#x2F;analytics calls that are made periodically after loading the page). Those 349 requests pull down &gt;11,000KB in &gt;52 seconds. That&#x27;s excessive to the tune of an order of magnitude (and really for the page load time, probably 2 orders of magnitude).

If you&#x27;ve not been to the Grand Canyon, you should go before we humans ruin it. It truly is one of the most beautiful places you&#x27;ll ever see.

They should all be sent a copy of &quot;A Pattern Language&quot;. In one of the most memorable patterns, Christopher Alexander writes (paraphrased), &quot;Find the most lovely location on your plot of land. Then make sure you don&#x27;t build on it! Instead build elsewhere so you can continue to enjoy that lovely location.&quot;

If Escalade has to be built, they should build it entirely underground with just a handful of few holes at the top and a couple at the bottom. Each room gets its own fixed camera projecting outside view to the room as well as remotely controlled camera drones for lazy visitors.

please sign this petition to stop the tramway from the Grand Canyon. <a href="http://grandcanyontrust.nonprofitsoapbox.com/escalade" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;grandcanyontrust.nonprofitsoapbox.com&#x2F;escalade</a>

I agree that the park is beautiful, and perhaps development should consider better locations. However the Grand Canyon national park is huge. Something like 2000 square miles. Anyone claiming that there should be no development, or that this will &#x27;ruin the grand canyon&#x27; is incorrect.

Is it me?

&gt;A holy war is being fought<p>I guess I know which side I&#x27;m on.