Just when you thought it couldn’t get no weirder:

I woke up this morning, fresh home from lumbar surgery at University of Wisconsin Hospital, to read that a Kaibab Plateau event, the Dragon Bravo Fire, burned down the National Park Service lodge on the venerable North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a place loved by generations of hikers, campers, explorers, and just regular old tourists like you and me. 

I call the North Rim venerable because it was there long before we ever even thought about it.

I’m tempted to say the fire waited until it knew I was down and couldn’t respond. 

I’m sure glad I got my chance at the place last May 15-16. A group of us, organized by the Road Scholar people, spent two nights on the North Rim after a longer stay on the South Rim. The majestic Grand Canyon Lodge was a perfect place to gather our thoughts and reflections in solitude after a week of exposure to the stunning 277-mile gorge of the Colorado River. 

Now it’s gone. Just like that.

But don’t you worry about a thing, Dear Reader. Our systems for meting out blame are already in action. 

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, according to the Associated Press, “called for a federal investigation into the Park Service’s handling of the fire, which was sparked by lightning July 4.

“ ‘Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,’ the governor said in a social media post Sunday. ‘The federal government chose to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.’”

It may be that National Park Service officials made a bad decision on how to respond to the fire when it first arose. Or it could be that officials with limited resources at their disposal sometimes guess wrong. Or perhaps there are some fires that will not be contained until they’re good and ready. 

Two or more of those things can even true at the same time. For the ultimate verdict of history, tune in again a hundred years from now. 

One near-term question that arises is, “Will the lodge be rebuilt?” And the answer, almost surely, will be: Not right away. 

It’s a very big project. Unless you’ve been there, you may not appreciate the ambition required to transport the needed tons of building materials to the remote site, high in the Arizona mountains, to reshape the land, build new service roads, provide essential infrastructure for construction—power, water, etc.—analyze architectural requirements (which will have changed since the lodge was built ninety years ago), etc. My guess is that to pull all these requisites together will take a few years, and then the actual construction will take a few more. 

The chief requirement, of course, is the political will to rebuild. But I can’t imagine that will be lacking. The site is simply too grand, too seminal; it simply looms too large in our national awareness to go untenanted for very long.

A more immediate question is water. That’s always the key question in the Southwest, but quite specifically: The sparsely-populated and lightly-touristed North Rim provides nearly all the water for the whole Grand Canyon National Park. The North Rim of the Canyon rests upon the Kaibab Plateau, a high-lifted (8,000-8,500’) rock shield that funnels water southward. According to a National Park Service website, “The Transcanyon Water Distribution Pipeline, known as the Transcanyon Waterline (TCWL), is a 12½-mile water pipeline constructed in the 1960s that conveys water from the Roaring Springs source on the North Rim to the Havasupai Gardens . . . pump station and ultimately to the South Rim. It provides the potable water and fire suppression for all facilities on the South Rim as well as some inner canyon facilities in the Cross Canyon Corridor including over 800 historic buildings.” 

It goes on to say: “The National Park Service (NPS) is replacing the TCWL as it is beyond its expected useful life, experiences frequent failures, and requires expensive and continuous inner canyon maintenance work to repair leaks.

“Since 2010, there have been over 85 major breaks in the TCWL that have each disrupted water delivery. The breaks are expensive to repair, occur in locations that pose dangers for responding employees, and negatively impacts the visitor experience. The cost for a single waterline break often exceeds $25,000. Access to the inner canyon, where breaks occur, is by trail and helicopter only.” 

Fortunately, the needed upgrade work is already underway, but it comes as a package of discrete projects, which are scheduled over the course of several years. 

It seems that a water treatment (chlorination) facility has been affected by the Dragon Bravo Fire, and perhaps other parts of the water system as well.

If the fire has caused an outage of potable water for the five million tourists who will visit the South Rim this year, that will have to be addressed posthaste. 

As for the rest, well, as I said, it’s going to take some time. 

It’s a good thing we have time available in which to make it right. At moments like this I treasure the wisdom of Christ as mediated by Dame Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English mystic: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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