The Grand Canyon fire has North Rim residents wary of the future

Melinda Rich Marshall pointed her white SUV toward a billowing tower of smoke on Tuesday and gunned it down the now-empty roads leading to the charred North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

A few days earlier, she had joined hundreds of tourists and seasonal employees who fled a wildfire roaring through the parched sagebrush and ponderosa pines. Now, she was headed back to check on the Jacob Lake Inn, her family’s 102-year-old lodge just outside Grand Canyon National Park.

“We don’t know how we’ll pay our employees,” Marshall, 43, said, looking toward months or years of economic losses as the park rebuilds from one of the most destructive fires in its history. “What do we do? How do we live?”

Residents like Marshall, along with Arizona’s political leaders, are asking why the Dragon Bravo fire, sparked by lightning on July 4, was allowed to burn for days in hot, dry conditions before it exploded beyond containment lines and tore through the heart of the North Rim. Some are also demanding to know whether the Trump administration’s budget freezes and U.S. Forest Service layoffs could be playing a role, not just at the Grand Canyon but at fires raging around national parks in Colorado and Washington as well.

Fire crews initially decided to manage the fire in a way that would allow the fire to burn through excess vegetation, and would maintain the health of the landscape, according to the park’s social media updates. But howling nighttime winds over the weekend launched the fire into the heart of the North Rim, destroying the century-old Grand Canyon Lodge, along with a visitors center, tourist cabins and some employee housing.

“There’s other ways to take care of this than letting it burn,” said Julie Langi, whose great-grandparents founded the Jacob Lake Inn, and who is now one of its owners.

Wildfires are both part of the ecosystem and continual threat around the Grand Canyon, their recent history written on scorched tree trunks and scarred ravines. But drought, a warming climate and decades of firefighting policies that suppressed natural fires have turned many grasslands and forests here and across the West into tinderboxes.

Some people who live and work along the North Rim have long joked that their side of the canyon is the neglected stepchild of an American icon. Getting there from the more popular South Rim takes a winding, four-hour drive, and the North Rim is serviced by only a handful of seasonal campgrounds and lodges. Fewer than 10% of the roughly 5 million tourists who flock to the Grand Canyon annually make it to that side.

“The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is like another world,” said Ethan Aumack, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, who has fond memories of skiing through the woods to the rim after the lone road that leads there closes for the winter. “It feels like a much more personal place.”

The campers and road-tripping families who do venture out, to hike from rim to rim or to stand atop the 8,800-foot-high Point Imperial lookout, provide an economic lifeline for the outfitters, guides and small towns along the sparsely populated border between Utah and Arizona.

Now, that lifeline has been charred. By Wednesday, the Dragon Bravo fire had grown to more than 9,200 acres and was continuing to burn with zero percent containment. Fire crews said that a second wildfire that has cut off access to other canyons and scenic vistas in the area, the 50,000-acre White Sage fire, was 4% contained on Wednesday.

As hundreds of firefighters fought to contain the two fires by the Grand Canyon, the National Park Service was also grappling with wildfires that have closed the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in southwest Colorado, and part of Olympic National Park in Washington state.

In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, called for an investigation into whether the federal government had responded aggressively enough to the Dragon Bravo fire, saying it had been treated “as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.”

Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, both Arizona Democrats, sent a letter to Trump administration officials asking for an explanation into the firefighting response, and whether the federal government had provided enough resources. Earlier this year, the Trump administration cut thousands of U.S. Forest Service workers and froze programs aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the U.S. Interior Department, which oversees national parks, defended the firefighting approach, saying the Dragon Bravo fire had been “under a full suppression strategy from Day One.” She pointed out that no one had been reported hurt or killed in the fires.

“Our firefighters were responding aggressively and appropriately, with public safety as the top priority,” she said in an email. “While elected officials are entitled to ask questions, we encourage a fact-based understanding of wildfire operations and respect for the interagency teams still risking their lives on the front lines.”

The political sparring means little to dislocated parks employees or tourism-dependent businesses in towns like Kanab, Utah, a hub for people making the “Grand Circle” trip to visit the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.

“Folks are leaving town,” said Melanie Rader, co-owner of Willow Canyon Outdoor, which normally does a brisk business selling espresso, outdoor guidebooks and hiking packs.

On Tuesday afternoon, the family that runs the Jacob Lake Inn got some relief when they pulled into their lodge and saw for themselves that it had survived the fires.

Situated in an unburnt area between the two wildfires, Jacob Lake had become a staging ground for the firefighting effort. Camping areas were filled with firefighters’ tents, and crews sawed down pine trees and cleared branches from the roadsides.

Marshall, Langi and the other relatives who had driven out in a caravan with a Forest Service escort got to work scouring their kitchens for spoiled food, checking water tanks and boxing up an 80-year-old guest registry and other heirlooms.

They said they did not know how soon they would be able to return, whether tourists would come back, or whether another fire would force them to flee all over again a few years from now.

“We have no idea what anything is going to be,” Marshall said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.