Wish You Weren’t Here

April 23, 2007: On this day of sleet and snow, air tours have been canceled; tourists hunker in the heat of vehicles and lodges; and for the first time I hear the Grand Canyon.

The National Park Service values quietude and, as part of its effort to preserve what little is left here, has gated off the road to Yaki Point. Filtering through pinyon pine and juniper and stepping over crimson clumps of devil’s paintbrush, Dick Hingson, natural quiet/overflights specialist for the Sierra Club, and I hike to the rim. The canyon walls glow pink, red, orange, yellow, purple, and violet. To the east a shaft of afternoon sunlight sets ablaze the orange sandstone of Newton Butte. Zoroaster Temple and Wotan’s Throne soar above tumbling clouds. A mile below us shadows clutch 1.8-billion-year-old gneiss and schist.

Preservation of such natural landscapes is part of the National Park Service’s mission. But so is preservation of what the agency calls natural “soundscapes.” Today the silence of this park seems strange, like when a power outage kills the hum of your refrigerator. But the termination of unnatural din and even the manmade noise my brain had filtered out allows the sounds of nature to reappear—the distant croak of ravens, the stirring of conifer needles, the rustle of unseen birds, the whistle and lisp of mountain chickadees, the scratching of rodents, the canyon wind. . . . On rare days like this you can even hear the Colorado River from Pima and Yavapai Points.

By law the Park Service must protect natural soundscapes in all our parks, but even in these sanctuaries that resource is being destroyed by such noise polluters as aircraft, buses, off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and jetskis.

Hingson sits on the 19-member, multi-interest working group that’s supposed to help the Park Service and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) meet their joint mandate under the 1987 National Parks Overflights Act: “restoring natural quiet” to Grand Canyon National Park by 2008. It’s not going to happen. This despite the fact that the Park Service has defined “natural quiet” as half-silent for 75 percent to 100 percent of the day, and has imposed an enormous handicap that discounts the first 10 decibels of din in the developed area, from the park boundary north to the south rim (including everything along the east and west rim roads), the Bright Angel Point developed area on the north rim, all of the Marble Canyon part of the park from Saddle Mountain north to Lees Ferry, and the park’s entire western third. 

“Noise increases exponentially, not linearly,” says Karen Trevino, director of the Park Service’s Natural Sounds Program Center. “In any given area an increase of three decibels reduces our ability to hear by 50 percent. That means that if I can hear a bird singing 100 feet away and a noise intrusion raises the ambient baseline by 3 decibels, I would have to move to within 70 feet of the bird to still hear it. People often assume that a 5- or 10-decibel increase is insignificant or barely noticeable. That’s not the case.” 

If the only source of noise pollution were the tour flights, the park would meet the pathetically modest goal of being a little less than half noisy at least three-quarters of the time. But the steady parade of jetliners overhead renders it 99 percent out of compliance. When the FAA proclaimed that it shouldn’t figure in jet noise because it was “de minimus” (trifling), the Grand Canyon Trust, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Parks Conservation Association, and others successfully sued. “It wouldn’t be much of a problem to move the jet route 5 or 10 miles south,” says Hingson. “That would be a huge help, but the FAA won’t hear of it.”

Early on April 24 the park is reinvaded by sunlight, warmth, insects, tourists, and noise. Hingson and I hike to the Zuni Corridor—one of the broad swaths over which tour flights are allowed. We sit on deadfalls where I record the soundscape on a notepad: a tour-flight Twin Otter at 11:05 a.m.; another prop plane, higher, possibly general aviation: 11:06; insect: 11:08; commercial jet: 11:09; insects: 11:10; birds: 11:11; car: 11:14; bird: 11:15; insect: 11:15; birds and car: 11:15; tour-flight helicopter, very loud with rotor slap: 11:17; another even louder helicopter: 11:18; bird: 11:19; helicopter and Twin Otter: 11:20; rodent: 11:22; insects: 11:25; bird: 11:25; jet: 11:26; bird: 11:26; jet: 11:28; insects: 11:30; car: 11:30; Twin Otter: 11:31; insect: 11:32; jet: 11:33; birds: 11:34; jet: 11:34; bird: 11:35; insects and birds, much more noticeable in this lull: 11:35 to 11:39; wind freshening in canyon: 11:40; helicopter: 11:42; jet: 11:48; jet: 11:52; helicopter and Twin Otter: 12:13; Twin Otter: 12:23.

“By June this air-tour traffic will double,” says Hingson. “And the Zuni Corridor is nothing compared to the Dragon Corridor, where helicopters can go to the north rim and back again.” In 1994 the Park Service recommended closing the Dragon Corridor, where air tours pass over wilderness trails. The FAA refused. Next the Park Service tried to make the corridor one-way. The FAA went into permanent stall mode.

Opposing missions of the two agencies make the forced marriage unhappy and unworkable. The Park Service’s 1916 organic act requires it to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life [of the parks] and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” A large part of the FAA’s once-official and now self-assigned mission is the promotion of air traffic.