Wish You Weren’t Here

As bad as it is now in the Grand Canyon, it will get lots worse. The park is hammered by roughly 55,000 tour flights a year, but the FAA has set the allotment at 93,971. Meanwhile, Las Vegas is planning a new airport (almost abutting the Mojave National Preserve) that will further damage Grand Canyon soundscapes. Seeking to preserve their impossible dream of unlimited growth, Nevada politicians supported helicopter-tour operators when they professed to be bothering no one save a few Grand Canyon backpackers. But so many Las Vegas Valley residents complained about the racket that the legislature funded a Southern Regional Heliport to get the tour operators away from town.

The Grand Canyon is just one of 91 national park units collectively blighted by about 365,000 tour flights a year; according to the FAA, this figure will increase over the next decade to at least 2 million. The Overflights Act of 1987 spawned the National Park Air Tour Management Act of 2000, which requires the FAA and the Park Service to design management plans for each park unit where air tours happen, except Grand Canyon National Park (covered by the 1987 legislation), Rocky Mountain National Park (where tour flights are banned thanks to activists led by the League of Women Voters), and park units in Alaska. Until plans are in place, air-tour operators are grandfathered at the existing numbers of flights, which the FAA determined by asking them and which are therefore every bit as accurate as “usual bedtimes” reported by children to their babysitters. The Park Service, which politely calls the numbers “inflated,” heard from operators who claimed to have conducted tours over units that are caves as well as units that hadn’t existed at the time of the alleged flights. Even today the FAA chooses not to require operators to even report the number of flights they make or the routes they take. According to the Government Accountability Office, this lack of record-keeping is depriving the cash-strapped Park Service of income it needs to help restore natural quiet. When the GAO looked at 21 tour operators from 2000 through 2003, it found that 13 hadn’t paid their required fees.

Seven years after passage of the Air Tour Management Act, the dysfunctional dual-agency management team has yet to hatch its first plan.

Heads sandwiched between headsets, Hingson and I find more quietude looking down from a Twin Otter than looking up at one. Grand Canyon Airlines, the park’s first air-tour operator, now in its 80th year of service, announces on its inflight tape that because it wants to be a “good neighbor” it has installed “low-noise propellers.” I’ve flown in lots of Twin Otters, and if there’s a difference, I can’t detect it. Drifting over the park at only 100 mph, we peruse it through “panoramic windows,” as if we were seated in an IMAX theater (which Hingson figures would be better for everyone). Visibility is impeded only by the curvature of the earth. Snow blankets the north rim. The Little Colorado River runs turquoise. The finest old-growth ponderosa pine stand in the nation stretches across the Kaibab Plateau. To my surprise, Hingson allows that some of this kind of air touring “might be appropriate” for 1,218,375-acre Grand Canyon National Park. “Ration it, though,” he says. “Like we ration mule trips and lodging.”

But each park is unique. How appropriate are air tours for, say, 37,277-acre Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, about 60 percent of which is proposed for designation as federal wilderness “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man”? I found out on April 25, 2007. The helicopter tour I took—with Bryce Canyon Airlines—was much louder and bumpier than the ride I’d had in a fixed-wing plane over the Grand Canyon, and it didn’t offer any advantage I could see. We flew low and close, blasting backpackers on wilderness trails. The big draw of helicopters is more the amusement-park–style ride than scrutiny and contemplation of grand landscapes.

The park’s aptly named “amphitheaters” are crowded with hoodoos—tall, impossibly precarious pillars of limestone, all brilliantly colored by oxidized minerals (red, pink, and orange from iron; purple from manganese; white from limestone). The Paiute Indians identified them as “legend people” turned to stone by Coyote. Back on the ground, I contemplated these and other features from a vantage point halfway up the rim trail on the west end ironically named Silent City. Eighty-two miles to the south Navajo Mountain rose through immaculate air, looking close enough to hit with a frisbee. At mid-elevations the bases of the hoodoos were rimmed with snow. Pinyon pine, juniper, Gambel oak, and yucca clawed their way up from the gray, 60-million-year-old bottom of the Cretaceous Seaway. Higher up they gave way to ponderosa pine and manzanita. Bristlecone pines adorned white limestone knolls. The mood of this special spot is not enhanced by the constant beep of backing tour buses I kept hearing, nor the drone of tour planes and the roar and slap of helicopters—all concentrated and reflected by the park’s biggest amphitheater.

Life itself is dangerous, but it struck me that it wouldn’t be much more so if the park made the bus drivers at Bryce turn off their beepers or asked them not to back up. And while there’s little of the park you can see from the air that you can’t see from the rim trails, 15 companies currently offer 3,448 air tours a year, and six new applicants are requesting 956 more.

Guiding me were Bryce Canyon National Park’s resources chief Kristin Legg and physical scientist Chad Moore. Both are young, idealistic, and passionately committed to the restoration of natural soundscapes. But with the FAA’s abject disinterest in nature (it thinks of noise in terms of urban airports) and the starvation diet on which the Bush administration has placed the Park Service, the process moves at the speed of continental drift. The park has yet to analyze sound data it has been collecting since 2002. “We’re looking at all types of noise for our soundscapes management plan,” declared Moore. “It’s like peeling an onion; if you remove one dominant source, something else becomes dominant. We’re going to be addressing and prioritizing all sources. We’re going to figure out visitor expectations and decide what our goals are as managers and executor stewards of this land.”

Bryce is a work in progress. Ice forms here 200 days a year, and the relentless cycle of freezing and thawing is still sculpting sandstone. When human-generated din abates long enough, you can hear the park evolving. Usually it’s just pebbles trickling from cliffs and hoodoos, but on December 21, 2006, Moore and park ranger Angie Richman were snowshoeing the Paria ski trail when they heard what they thought was thunder. As they gained the rim they saw that the whole amphitheater was filled with red dust. A hoodoo had toppled. Seven months earlier 300 tons of rubble had fallen on the Navajo Loop Trail, providing an auditory perception of park evolution more graphic than anyone could have hoped for (especially the hikers who narrowly escaped with their lives). The trail is still closed, but Legg plans to reroute it on top of the debris and put up interpretive signage.

For some visitors—me, for example—the park’s 200 bird species are even more important than its geologic features. Birders identify most birds they encounter only by their vocalizations, and when you see a bird it’s often because you heard it first. I would not have seen the Townsend’s solitaire perched atop the tall ponderosa pine had I not detected its soft, bell-like call. But how many had I missed?