GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK: 1919-2019

STORIES ABOUT HOW THE GRAND CANYON BECAME a national park often begin with President Theodore Roosevelt disembarking from a railcar in 1903, peering over the South Rim from atop a white horse and exhorting Americans to "leave it as it is."

"Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you," he famously said.

Five years later, Roosevelt created Grand Canyon National Monument. He may have been the Canyon's most celebrated spokesman, but he wasn't its first. It was a senator from Indiana who first introduced legislation to preserve the Canyon as a "public park." But all three bills he introduced died in committee.

It wasn't until that senator, Benjamin Harrison, became president that he succeeded in declaring the Grand Canyon a forest reserve, in 1893. And it would take a third president, Woodrow Wilson, to sign into law the bill that finally made the Canyon a national park.

CELEBRATING ITS CENTENNIAL THIS MONTH, Grand Canyon National Park has become one of the country's most beloved sites. More than 6 million people visited the park in 2017; among national parks (excluding recreation areas, parkways and other types of National Park Service sites), only Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina, had more visitors. In hindsight, it seems obvious, even inevitable, that the Grand Canyon would be revered and protected.

In fact, the public's regard for the Canyon represents one of the most remarkable reversals in modern history. Today's veneration would have seemed unfathomable to the Spanish, who first happened upon the Canyon in 1540. One explorer described the Canyon as “a horrible abyss.” And a 19th century fur trapper saw it as “horrid mountains, which so cage [the Colorado River] as to deprive all human beings of the ability to descend to its banks and make use of its waters.” It wasn't until after the railroad came to Northern Arizona in 1882 that white men saw the Can-yon as anything but a horrendous obstacle.

Edward E. Ayer, who opened the first lumber company in Flagstaff, became the Canyon's first recorded tourist when he hired nearby sheep ranchers to guide him to the South Rim in 1884. The same year, John Hance, a prospector who eventually became a tourist guide, homesteaded a place on the South Rim. He later improved an old Indian trail into the Canyon. Twelve years later, and about 16 miles farther west, James Thurber built a cabin - the first structure ever built at the site of today's Grand Canyon Village.

But mining was the biggest draw, and prospectors built most of the early trails. Even Hance mined copper and asbestos in the slow season. In 1891, two years before the Grand Canyon became a forest reserve, a group of prospectors began work on Bright Angel Trail, improving a Havasupai footpath along the Bright Angel Fault.

The railroad was next to arrive. Businessmen in Flag-staff tried for years to raise money to build a passenger line from the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad to the South Rim. But William Owen "Buckey" O'Neill, who found time to prospect in the Canyon between his many other occupations, ultimately persuaded Lombard, Goode and Co. to construct a line from Williams. The company incorporated the Santa Fe and Grand Canyon Railroad in 1897.

After purchasing the railroad in 1901, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway completed the line to the South Rim, building its depot near Thurber's Bright Angel Hotel and nearby campground. For the first few years, the railroad maintained a partnership with Bright Angel, but it had something more luxurious in mind. In 1905, it opened El Tovar - named, ironically, for a member of the 1540 Spanish expedition who never saw the Canyon.

Entrepreneurs also saw opportunities to serve the growing tourist trade. In 1903, Emery and Ellsworth Kolb opened their photographic business in a tent before building a studio at Bright Angel Trailhead the following year. They later became the first to navigate the Colorado River from Wyoming to the Gulf of California, and the film they made of their voyage became a staple of Canyon tourism.

John George Verkamp's first venture, selling curios at Bright Angel Camps for Babbitt Brothers Trading Co., didn't last. But he returned in 1905 and built his own shop east of Hopi House, the Fred Harvey store.

And prospectors continued to locate mines. By 1900, Ralph Cameron had bought an interest in many of them, controlling some of the most scenic views in the Canyon, including Indian Garden and key spots along Bright Angel Trail.

When Roosevelt made his famous visit in 1903, he found a bustling community. But it was a quarrelsome place: Miners and pioneers were at odds with the rail-road, and everyone was at odds with Cameron, who bought the rights to Bright Angel Trail, built a gate at the entrance and began charging for its use.

Retaining control of the trail became Cameron's lifelong crusade. His battle against the railroad and the Park Service inspired construction of the Hermit and South Kaibab trails as alternatives. The fight reached the halls of Congress and spawned a flurry of lawsuits that reached the U.S. Supreme Court before the government wrested control of the trail in 1928.

The first bills to elevate the Grand Canyon to national park status failed in the early 1910s. But support for the idea grew, and on February 26, 1919, President Wilson signed Senate Bill 390, which made the Grand Canyon the nation's 15th national park. The Park Service, created just three years earlier, became its custodian. Under its management, the modern park began to take shape.

CONSTRUCTION OF TOURIST FACILITIES FELL to concessioners. In the 1920s, Fred Harvey built Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon, while the Utah Parks Co., a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, built the North Rim's Grand Canyon Lodge directly opposite El Tovar.

Ironically, the Great Depression spurred one of the largest building campaigns in the park's history. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program designed to put people back to work, devoted more money and labor to Grand Canyon National Park than to any other site in Arizona. The most notable of some 250 projects the CCC completed include Bright Angel Campground, near Phantom Ranch; the Clear Creek and Ribbon Falls trails; and the 2-mile River Trail, the most difficult and hazardous trail ever built in the Canyon. It also installed a trans-Canyon telephone system, a feat that required dangling from ropes above 400-foot ledges. In 1986, the system became the first U.S. telephone line placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

While visitation plunged during the Depression and World War II, tourists began arriving in droves in the 1950s. Most arrived in cars, which made planning for them difficult. In 1927, Fred Harvey built a motor lodge to accommodate motorists, but chronic shortages left travelers with nowhere to stay.

"Fred Harvey was usually filled for the whole summer," recalls Paul Schnur. For two summers, Schnur managed Kachina Lodge, built on a privately owned mining claim near Grand Canyon Village. He remembers tourists showing up hungry and frantic, with kids and without reservations.

"That's when we started building tents," Schnur recalls. "We'd save those for when people would show up with no place to stay and were desperate."

The country was also in the midst of the Cold War. In a 2013 interview with Arizona Highways, the late Mike Verkamp recalled seeing flashes from atomic blasts at the Nevada testing site from above his family's store on the South Rim. And in the early 1950s, amateur prospectors detected radiation on the inholding where Kachina Lodge was located.

It turned out the mining claim contained some of the highest-grade uranium in the country; for a time, the hotel's gift shop sold samples. Because the mine was patented before the Canyon's designation, the Park Service was powerless to stop the mushrooming operation.

The Canyon's most recent building boom also began in the 1950s. Planned to conclude with the Park Ser-

Zone, now known as Market Plaza, east of Grand Canyon Village. For the business zone's centerpiece, Doty designed a new visitors center. Now used as the park's headquarters, it was the first Mission 66 visitors center in the country.

Other projects expanded facilities at Desert View, Indian Garden, Phantom Ranch and the North Rim, and improved the park's roads and trails. And in 1965, work began on the Trans-Canyon Pipeline, which still transports water from Roaring Springs, below the North Rim, to facilities on the South Rim. Separately, administrators and residents raised money to build a new hospital, now the clinic, in 1968, and Shrine of the Ages, a generalpurpose building originally intended to be a church, in 1970.

For its part, Fred Harvey built Yavapai Lodge in 1958, Thunderbird Lodge in 1968 and a new Kachina Lodge in 1971. In the early 1980s, it replaced nearly 100 cabins at the motor lodge with two-story, multi-unit accommodations, renaming the facility Maswik Lodge.

Five years earlier, in 1975, the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act expanded the park to its current 1.2 million acres, absorbing two national monuments and returning 83,800 acres to the Havasupai Tribe.

About that time, park planners began grappling with increasing crowds, traffic and pollution caused by tourists and their cars. The park's 1995 General Management Plan aspired to solve the problem with a mandatory light-rail system - supplemented by shuttles, paths and bike trails - that would have eliminated cars from much of the South Rim by 2010.

The route would have originated outside park boundaries, near Tusayan, and delivered passengers to two depots built even before bids went out for the light-rail system: Maswik Transportation Center near Grand Canyon Village, built in the early 1990s, and Canyon View Information Plaza at Mather Point, opened in 2000.

But after a decade of planning, three members of Congress balked just as the Park Service was preparing to solicit bids. Citing cost, inconvenience and stagnating visitation, they derailed the plan. "Therein lies a cartbefore-the-horse story of the New West," wrote a New York Times reporter who described a train station with "neither tracks nor trains ... on a light-rail transit system that does not exist and is not being built."

Administrators ultimately rolled out a voluntary bus system. Seasonal buses now deliver passengers from Tusayan to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center at Mather Point, and the park now features expanded parking facilities and multiple bus routes that ferry visitors to South Rim destinations. In addition, the Greenway Trail extended the Rim Trail east to the South Kaibab Trail, with segments connecting the Grand Canyon Visitor Center to Tusayan, Market Plaza, Mather Campground and Trailer Village.

DURING THIS TIME, CONCESSIONERS WERE adjusting to new realities. With dwindling demand for rail service, the Santa Fe Railway began shedding its national park holdings in the 1950s. The company transferred some Grand Canyon properties to Fred Harvey and others to the government. It discontinued passenger service to the South Rim in the late 1960s and freight service in 1972, the same year the Utah Parks Co. donated its North Rim facilities to the Park Service.

Amfac Inc. purchased Fred Harvey's Grand Canyon assets in 1968. The company, which changed its name to Xanterra Parks and Resorts in 2002, still retains some of

the dining and lodging concessions on the South Rim. In 2007, Xanterra bought the Grand Canyon Railway from the couple who had revived passenger service in 1989, restoring the company's historical ties with the railroad. And the Park Service finally achieved its long-held goal of eliminating all of the park's inholdings. Ellsworth Kolb died in 1960, and his brother, Emery, sold his studio and residence to the agency in 1962, but he retained the right to live there and operate the studio until his death. Emery died in 1976, and the park's nonprofit partner, Grand Canyon Association (recently renamed Grand Canyon Conservancy), restored Kolb Studio in the 1990s and uses it today as a bookstore, information center and art display space. Through the mid-1960s, park administrators also tried to persuade the Verkamp family to raze their building and relocate to the Mather Business Zone, but the family resisted. "They never liked that building," Steve Verkamp recalls. "[Administrators] thought it was a crummy, old, simple-minded framed store ... an eyesore." But years later, Steve's sister, Susan, found evidence that John George Verkamp hired El Tovar architect Charles Whittlesey to design it. "So they were built at the same time by the same architect, basically," he says. After operating for more than 100 years, Verkamp's Curios closed in September 2008. Then, after finally conceding the building's historical value, the Park Service reopened it as Verkamp's Visitor Center later that year. Despite some of the other challenges, park officials did convince Babbitt Brothers Trading Co. to relocate.

Tourists began arriving in droves in the 1950s. Most arrived in cars, which made planning for them difficult. In 1927, Fred Harvey built a motor lodge to accommodate motorists, but chronic shortages left travelers with nowhere to stay.

The company, which built a general store at Grand Canyon Village in 1925, built new stores at Desert View in 1966 and the Mather Business Zone in 1969, then donated its original store to the Park Service. In 1999, the company sold its Grand Canyon properties to Delaware North, which today manages some of the South Rim concessions.

Janet Balsom, who has lived and worked in the park for 35 years, likens the Grand Canyon's past to the history of the country. Both are marked by westward expansion, the coming of the railroad, exploration and exploitation, and the rise of auto culture.

"It's not all great history," the senior adviser to the park's superintendent admits, because it largelyexcludes the Native Americans who first occupied the land. “It's taken many years to understand that relationship and ... recognize their history and heritage,” she adds. Administrators are now transforming the Desert View area into a cultural heritage site.

And what of the future? Today, park facilities face more than $300 million in deferred maintenance. One of the most pressing priorities is the aging water pipeline, which has logged more than 80 breaks since 2010. Repairs cost more than $35 million annually, the Park Service says - and the cost of replacing the pipeline would exceed $100 million.

The Grand Canyon is an amazing place that speaks to the past, present and future, Balsom says. And there's only one of it. Echoing Teddy Roosevelt, she says the question is simple: “How can we best protect its resources in a way that leaves them for future generations?” AH

WE MADE A NEW BOOK ABOUT AN OLD PARK. 1919-2019 GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK 10 DECADES OF STORIES & PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ARIZONA HIGHWAYS EDITED BY ROBERT STIEVE

On February 26, 2019, Grand Canyon National Park celebrates its 100th anniversary. To mark the occasion, we dug into the archive and pulled out some of our favorite stories.

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