Quinn: What do you see as some of the future concerns for hiking in the Canyon and
backcountry management?
Steck: Well, backcountry management is geared at the moment to reducing impact, so they've just reduced the size
of groups and parties so that the total number of people allowed in the Park over a year's time is substantially
reduced. That's an upper limit, because actually the number of people, even under the old regulations, oh, they
allowed six people in a party, or eight people in a party, for example, and yet the average party size was only
like two-and-a-half. The problem that they're having is with groups, church groups, Boy Scout groups, large extended
family groups, that are bigger than the eleven that's currently allowed. They're pushing to have a larger upper
limit. I don't have a strong feeling, although I unfortunately have somewhat of a bias against Boy Scouts, because
I think . . . . Of course there's stories, maybe they aren't true, but one Scoutmaster not very long ago came out
of the Canyon minus two of his troop. They'd just been too slow so he left them behind and they spent the night
out by themselves and struggled out the next day. They did get out, but for a while it was thought they might be
lost. I don't think that's a good idea.
Of course these two fires at Deer Creek that I know about, they weren't started by Boy Scouts, but I probably shouldn't
say. I think of them generally as people bossing the kids around, don't do a good enough job. And neither does
the Sierra Club, for that matter. They have a new rule now--well, it's now an OLD rule -where you have to carry
out your own toilet paper. That seemed a little strict at the beginning but now it seems sensible, especially in
view of these fires that are started by people burning their toilet paper.
They've changed the rules now on the removal of waste by boat parties. It used to be that you could put the waste
in a plastic bag and put it in a rocket box or something and carry it out. You can't do that anymore because the
plastic bags in which this stuff was stored tended to clog up the things that it was then put into at the end of
the trip. So now they require them to carry that out in rocket boxes, just loose, which then have to be sterilized
and treated chemically at the end of the trip before they can be used again.
This recent questionnaire for future modification for the Backcountry Management Plan inquired about the general
problems of carrying out your toilet paper, and I'm thinking, "Now [since] they changed the rules pertaining
to waste by boat parties, maybe they'll change them for hiking parties." Presumably they wouldn't do it unless
there was some reasonable solution to the problem, and I've been thinking about what might be reasonable solutions,
how you would dehydrate the waste quickly. How much extra fuel would it take to incinerate it, turn it into something
crisp? I don't know, but I think maybe in a hundred years, backpackers might be required to carry out their waste,
although I don't know how you'd enforce that. (chuckles) Just think of what the last night's camp before you reach
the rim would be like, when people have . . . . No, wait, that wouldn't be what would happen. I guess maybe that
would be the only CLEAN camp, because that you WOULD be carrying out.
The number of people: are there too many people in the backcountry? They're thinking about limiting the number
of people on the Bright Angel Trail. I don't think that's necessary. I think that anybody that wants to go down
there should be able to. It might be less and less appealing as time goes on if you're joining the crowds, but
I'd hate to think of a time when at your birth you're given a certain number of reservations (both chuckle) to
the various parks in this country. Of course you could trade those: a day at Zion for a day at Grand Canyon.
I have a solution [that] I've thought about for some time. After I read that over the hundred years, let's say,
between 1800 and 1900, the average height of an American grew at approximately an inch a decade, so that a person
born in 1900 would be about ten inches taller than somebody born in 1800. Those dates may be off, but it was over
a century's time. As our nutrition improves, we get taller. So why couldn't this be reversed, by maybe an operation
on the pituitary or something, but gradually, over a century make people smaller again. Over two centuries they
might be twenty inches [smaller]; in three centuries, thirty inches [smaller].
So think of the savings! If you're half as tall, your house would have to be just one-eighth the volume. Your car
would weigh one-eighth of what it weighs now. Food supplies would stretch farther. In connection with what's called
the population bomb that as the number of people on the planet increases, and when the bomb goes off, presumably
it increases to infinity, people have gradually become smaller and smaller, so that when the bomb goes off, you
become vanishingly smaller. The only thing that would be constant would be the total weight of the number of people
on the planet that would stay approximately a constant.
Well, this originally occurred to me when I watched ants along the trail, thinking, "Would there ever be an
ant that wanted to walk from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other? What kind of a trip would it be?" They
can climb up walls, the Redwall would be no problem at all, just go. But other things might be a problem. I decided,
well, yeah, they could do it, it would just take a long time, so that you could make people smaller, they could
still do all their camping. The only thing is that you'd have to make sure that the predators also were made smaller
as time went on, because you wouldn't want something like a chipmunk or a ringtail to gobble you up during the
night. Or imagine what camping in the Grand Canyon will be like after they reintroduce the wolf, assuming there
ever WAS a wolf. Or the condor? Things that swoop down in the night and carry you off. So it could be different
in the future than it is now. I like to think that it will be. |
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