At 6500 people, the Waiting List for Grand Canyon permits is at least 24 very long years. "The List" spans generations. I've heard friends talking about bringing their grandkids down twenty years in the future. Others have even tried registering unborn children on The List in order to give them a trip for their college graduation or as a wedding present. I have other friends who want to lead their own trips, but have been forced by the Park's unreasonable system to purchase commercial trips in order to experience the river while they're still young, powerful, and paddling at their best and with their closest friends.

The List keeps growing, but the Park Service has decided to do nothing to control it or address the problem. Meanwhile, Park policies let the commercial outfitters offer wealthy clients very expensive trips mere weeks in advance.

American Whitewater has been working with planning teams in the Grand Canyon National Park for over two decades in order to resolve the long-developing conflicts over the Private Boater Waiting List, Colorado River Management Plan, and Wilderness.

Our staff and volunteers have played a special role in representing America's private boating community on the Colorado - because we know that the highly influential decisions made by the Grand Canyon's management team will have ripple effects across other river management agencies and wilderness rivers around the country.

We've seen that both good and bad management decisions in the Canyon have a tremendous effect on river runners and on management decisions nationwide.

As early as March 1978, American Whitewater Board Member Pete Skinner pointedly predicted that the Park's management plan would "provide a guaranteed ride on the Colorado River to rich people and force the not-so-rich boaters with their own equipment to wait years and perhaps decades to "run" the Grand. The fact that this prediction was so accurate has surpassed even Pete's expectations.

The unjustifiable failure of the Superintendent to address park-created problems in the Grand Canyon via a new management plan will likely exacerbate management problems on other especially-treasured rivers, such as the Green and Yampa in Dinosaur National Park.

Hundreds of river runners invested years of their personal time and energy working on the public planning process on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. These groups and individuals sought to protect a unique 18-day wilderness river running experience that is unequaled and unavailable anywhere else in the world.

Unfortunately, the Superintendent's abrupt decision to curtail the planning process robbed the public of its voice in preserving this primitive river experience.

With the CRMP derailed, America is in danger of losing a small but important piece of its national experience - an experience that harkens back to the earliest days of Western wilderness exploration - and, an experience that preserves for our American heritage the unique opportunity of visiting the backcountry in the Grand Canyon on nature's terms rather than a machine's.

With the Superintendent's decision, Park management has backed the public into a corner with no option but to sue.

Our suit is intended to serve as a wake-up call to the Park Service, and a reminder to the Superintendent not to fail the public in the Grand Canyon.

In November 1997, then Access Director Rich Hoffman, wrote that "Management of the Colorado River must provide for the long-term preservation of the river resources and assure that this outstanding wilderness area will not be further deteriorated. In short, all decisions must be fully accountable to the generations of future Americans. Management decisions must be developed with input and approval from an informed public."

Little has changed in the intervening years; the park still needs to logically and comprehensively address the management issues and conflicts that we've raised in our suit, and the only means of doing that is by reviving the public planning process via the Colorado River Management Plan.

This suit will be expensive, and it will likely take at least 2 years to resolve. You can help by making a donation to our Whitewater Legal Defense Fund. Make a tax-deductible contribution to: Grand Canyon Lawsuit, American Whitewater, Access Director, 1430 Fenwick Lane, Silver Spring, MD 90210.