Inside the government sh#tdown
Eleven days that shook Colorado River rafting
There are a lot of ways to make money off the Colorado River rafting business—renting boats and gear, preparing 20-day menus, guiding rafts or mule trips or helicopter extractions—which means there were lots of ways to lose money during the government shutdown that choked off Grand Canyon rafting trips for 11 days in early October. The Northern Arizona grocer lost $600 for every boat that didn’t go down the river. The butcher lost 30% of his usual October business. The raft guides lost their final seasonal wages of the year—unless their employers absorbed the losses, which some did. The outfitter who supplies private trips lost $80,000. The commercial raft companies lost $760,000. The gateway town at the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park lost $1.5 million.
But if you really want to appreciate the economic impact of the shutdown, you should follow the crap down the Colorado River. Without rafters on the water, the small businesses that dispose of human waste had their October yield go dry. As if to compound the absurdity, these businesses saw competition from unusual places. Because during the shutdown, Federal employees were literally begging rafters for their shit cans.
Colorado River rafters pack their own waste down the river in rocket boxes dubbed “groovers.” A few days into the shutdown, as a group of private rafters pulled up to Phantom Ranch, the lone dose of civilization along the 225-mile route, they were approached by a Park Service employee with an unusual request. He asked if he could borrow the trip’s groovers. Put another way, he wanted to get his hands on the trip’s cans of human shit.
With most backpackers chased out of the park and only rafting trips allowed to proceed, the rafters who had put on prior to Oct. 1 were among the only people on the river—the only source of crap going. Phantom had turned into a ghost town, and this Park Service employee had the unenviable job of maintaining the composting toilets, which rely on fragile enzymes that would die without sufficient human waste to feed upon. The trip gave up their groover cans and this fellow used the contents to feed his composting toilets.
“That’s true trickle down when you have a government worker asking private trips for poop,” said Scott Davis, founder of Ceiba, the outfitter for this particular private trip and one of the many small business clobbered by the 11-day closure of Grand Canyon National Park. Ceiba saw four trips cancelled during the shutdown, leaving 20 boats in the warehouse instead of on the river. At $17,000 to $20,000 per trip, that’s a loss of nearly $80,000 for the outfitter.
“October for all the private outfitters is the busiest month of the season,” said Davis. With commercial motor rigs not allowed down the Canyon after Sept. 16, private rafters take advantage of a quieter Canyon. “October carries outfitters through the offseason to the spring trips. So losing that revenue messes with your whole winter program as well as with your employees’ livelihood.”
Further downstream, the dwindling quantity of crap—call it the shitdown—had other implications. Flagstaff-based River Cans Clean disposes of most of the human waste that comes out of Canyon trip groovers. The owner, Reed Allen—known as the “groover guy”—relies on private October raft trips to make his revenue goals for the year. River Cans Clean usually cleans 130 groover boxes per week. When Reed—who doubles as a shuttle driver for Ceiba—picked up our trip from the Diamond Creek take-out on Oct. 13, he said his yield had already declined to 70 or 80 boxes per week. By the week of Oct. 25, the yield had dipped to 25 boxes.
With most private Canyon trips lasting 18-21 days, vendors like River Cans Clean that service trips at the take out had yet to feel the full brunt of 11 days without raft trips even as the park reopened. With all trips putting on between Oct. 1 and Oct. 11 cancelled, the revenue shock for small business that serve raft trips through the Grand Canyon is manifesting now, and the impact could be lasting. “We probably won’t know till the end of the year just how much this has cost,” said Donnie Dove, owner of Flagstaff-based raft outfitter Canyon REO.
The government shutdown may be over, but the small businesses that serve Colorado River rafters are still feeling the bite.
Image:
Line drawing from “Canyons of the Colorado,” John Wesley Powell, 1875.
Civil Disobedience
The Grand Canyon doesn’t care about the government shutdown. The cumulative lives of John Boehner, Harry Reid, Ted Cruz, and Barack Obama are specs of sediment in the grand scheme of 1.9 billion years of geologic history. But in the lives of a family, the 12 days I’d planned to spend on the Canyon were crucial.
The Tea Party hadn’t been invented yet back in 2008 when my dad first told me he was planning a Canyon trip for his 70th birthday. The Affordable Care Act was merely a notion, a memo in some Heritage Foundation filing cabinet. Politics were the last thing on our mind. The trip was to be my father’s 17th expedition down the Grand Canyon, marking his fifth decade with a Colorado River journey. Because of my day job, I couldn’t commit to the full 21-day trip and knew I’d have to settle for hiking in halfway, taking the Bright Angel Trail down to Phantom Ranch. After my dad secured a permit for a private rafting trip, my hike-in date became clear: Oct. 2, 2013.
By the time my dad’s expedition arrived at Lee’s Ferry to rig boats on Sept. 22 ahead of our Sept. 23 put in, an Oct. 1 government shutdown seemed like a real possibility. My dad gathered information from rangers, and got a good sense of what might happen. While I would be an entirely legal member of the rafting permit, I couldn’t get to the river without trespassing on Federal property, since trails would be closed. In the coming days, my dad called me from the river via satellite phone and we began to pull together a loose plan.
On the evening of Sept. 30, just before 9:00 on the west coast, I received a call from the satellite phone. I heard only silence for about 90 seconds. Then my dad’s voice growled through. “Is the government shut down?!” I confirmed the fact—the Congressional dickering had ended without a budget—and the line went dark. The short exchange conveyed the necessary news to the bottom of the Canyon: I was going to have to sneak in.
I caught an obscenely early flight from Seattle to Phoenix on the morning of Oct. 1, and was on the first US Airways flight from Phoenix to Flagstaff the morning of the shutdown. Multiple foreign tourists with enormous suitcases apparently had no clue about the Canyon’s closure.
I rented a red Mazda compact and set out on a reconnaissance mission. The constant stream of traffic heading the opposite direction on US-180 spoke volumes. When I arrived at the park entrance I saw a fleet of news crews and a line of cars and RVs, with most of them U-turning and heading back up the road. But the rangers were waving the occasional car through. I took a flyer on a half-truth. “We’ve got some rafters hiking up the Bright Angel Trail.” This was true—two members of the trip were supposed to hike out and take the car back to Flagstaff—though I failed to mention the part about me hiking in. The ranger waved me through.
The shutdown had only been underway for a few hours, and the transition provided cover. An abundance of exiting visitors and service vehicles helped me blend in. Visitors who were checked into the lodges at the South Rim prior to the shutdown were allowed to stay through the end of their reservations and were wandering around the rim extolling their political opinions.
The Bright Angel Trailhead was another matter. Two cherub-faced rangers in dress uniforms begrudgingly guarded the entry. I chatted them up, sympathizing with the thankless job. However much they may have resented the duty, their marching orders were clear: No one was allowed down the trail under any circumstance. I made a roundabout joke about rangers standing watch all night and got a nervous, non-informative laugh in return. The rules of this effort had come into focus: There would be no talking the rangers into it. If I wanted to get to the river I was going to have to sneak in unseen. I went looking for another way onto the trail other than the main trailhead and found a sketchy game trail that I hoped I’d never have to use. I set off back to Flagstaff to prepare for the expedition.
“Poverty with a view”
“Gateway communities” like Flagstaff rely on the National Parks to drive their local economy. Many jobs are seasonal, and wages can be low. Yet the cost of living can be high, which has earned Flagstaff the nickname “poverty with a view.” These factors make Flagstaff a fragile habitat for small businesses.
Flagstaff Farmers Market provides produce and dry goods to Canyon trips. For every boat that didn’t go down the Colorado River during the shutdown, owner Brian Yoskovich’s family business lost $600. That starts to add up with 12 multi-boat cancellations, and with another eight trips scaling down orders by 75%. “Losing October was killer, especially for a small grocery store going into the winter,” said Yoskovich.
Randal’s Fine Meats saw a similar impact, seeing a 30% dip in business in October. “It takes me a while to cut the steaks, cut the chicken, and freeze it,” said Randy Scholler. “Some of the big commercial companies took the product, because it was already frozen. It was the private trips that impacted me the most.”
Canyon Explorations, a 25-year fixture in Flagstaff, was among the hardest hit commercial rafting companies. They had 18 guides scheduled for trips in October and lost 7% of their annual business. “We’ve been sold out every year since 9/11,” said Canyon Explorations General Manager Laurie Lee Staveley. “We made the decision to partially compensate those guides.”
The six commercial Grand Canyon outfitters—half of which are Flagstaff-based—experienced nine total cancellations for a total loss of $760,000, according to the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association. Three October trips were salvaged after the shutdown ended, but those trips went out less than full, so the total losses may still climb.
Private outfitters like Ceiba were also hit hard. “You change your whole tone, your whole theme,” said Ceiba’s Davis. “Your employees are switching gears to keep people off the river. Not to mention our truck drivers are out of work and can’t do anything. Our warehouse guys have no boats to clean because all our boats are sitting on shelves doing nothing. The bottom line is people can’t come to work.”
When I went by Ceiba to drop off a bag on Oct. 1, their office didn’t resemble a rafting outfitter so much as something on K Street. C-Span showed in every room. The Congressional deliberations had become a matter of existential concern. They had a trip scheduled to rig boats at Lee’s Ferry that day, ahead of an Oct. 2 launch, and the situation upriver was bleak.
Festival of the Absurd
Private boaters used to wait years for a Grand Canyon permit. Then the Park Service established an annual lottery in 2006. Now every February a weighted lottery system determines which rafters will receive permits for the following year. Still, a private rafting permit on the Grand Canyon remains among the most cherished in North America, with many trips—like ours—planned years ahead of time. The put-in for these trips is Lee’s Ferry, the only easy access to the river for more than two-hundred miles.
Photo credit:
Ceiba Adventures
It usually takes Canyon trips a day to rig their boats at Lee’s Ferry in advance of the lengthy expedition. The private trips that had rigged on Sept. 30 encountered some lenience on the morning of Oct. 1—apparently the ranger told them they needed to be off the beach in short order or their trips would be cancelled. But the trips with Oct. 1 rig dates/Oct. 2 put-ins were one day too late.
The first trip to pull up to Lee’s Ferry Road that day, as the rangers barricaded the road, was headed by Alan and Elisha Cammack of Salida, CO. Their trip had been tracking the possibility of a shutdown for days, and had hoped to get to Lee’s Ferry early enough on Oct. 1 to slip in ahead of the full closure. One trip member had driven 23 straight hours from Oregon in the hopes of doing just that, and their outfitter, Ceiba, had accelerated their process in order to accommodate the expedited launch.
No such luck. The rangers at Lee’s Ferry—as my dad had discovered days before—had no desire to stop boaters from launching their Grand Canyon trips, and suffered from the same lack of information as the rafters, but they had clear instructions. “The rangers were forced to work to prevent us from getting down to the river,” said Alan Cammack. “It wasn’t their fault.”
The Cammacks and various other trips set up camp in the spot between Marble Lodge and Lee’s Ferry Road—a stretch of ground known by boaters as Dirt Eddy—and began to wait for a window onto the river.
Photo credit:
Brockett Hudson
On Oct. 3, a Canyon REO trip with 16 Austrians, most of whom had been river guides in the Tyrolean Alps, pulled into Dirt Eddy for their Oct. 4 put-in.
“Everyone was hoping at any moment the government would get their shit together,” said Canyon REO’s Dove, whose company saw a total of four cancelations.
The camp at Dirt Eddy swelled to 50 or 60 people. Some trips would arrive and some would exit each day. The camp “had the air of a festival, only without the music.”
Rather than riding rapids, the rafters suffered the ups and downs of the news cycle, taking solace in signs of Congressional progress. “You’d read a news article that would indicate there’d be movement the next day,” said Cammack. “You’d wake up all jazzed and energized and that newfound hope would get chiseled away as the next day went by.”
Campers pled their case where they could. The Austrians spent a lot of time on the phone with their consulate. Cammack remembers how “people spent more time on Facebook than you might in the course of several months.”
Further adding to the festival feel, some trips tapped into their 20-day alcohol supply, weathering this festival of the absurd with booze they’d planned to drink in the Canyon.
Eventually many Dirt Eddy groups—including the Cammack’s and the Austrians—cut their losses and set out for the only Colorado River trip available to them. Some 225 miles downstream, the Hualapai Tribe owns the river access at Diamond Creek—the same location where many trips take out—and the Tribe were “super gracious” in accommodating rafters seeking a permit to launch from tribal land on short notice.
The Cammack’s motto was “this doesn’t suck” but that view wasn’t shared by all. The Austrians left Arizona irritated. “By the end of the trip they were anti-American,” said Dove. The Austrians suggested that members of Congress wear NASCAR uniforms showcasing their corporate allegiances.
For the Cammacks and other cancelled private trips, the National Park System is reimbursing all park fees and has allowed rescheduled launches sometime between now and the end of 2016. The Cammacks are now looking forward to a 2014 put-in—though next year they are trying for a September launch. And the refunds, while helpful, can’t make up for the economic losses borne by rafters. “There was a huge monetary and opportunity cost, both for us and for Ceiba,” said Cammack. “All of this is just kind of down the drain.”
For commercial trips, the Park Service is rolling cancelled user days into next year’s allotment. “That’s unprecedented,” said John Dillon, executive director of the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association. “We are extremely grateful to the Park Superintendent and staff for doing everything within their power to help us recover our losses and accommodate our cancelled trips and passengers.” Of course for some visitors, like the 16 Austrians, rescheduling is an ambitious notion.
While the Park Service is doing everything it can to make up for the cancelled trips—and various people interviewed for this article went out of their way to laud the Park Service for their response—it’s fair to ask why it had to be this way. “The rangers at Lee’s Ferry spend no more than 90 minutes on orientation, and often this is done by a volunteer,” said Davis. “The park service does absolutely nothing as soon as a Canyon trip launches. They spent more time and money putting up barricades to keep people out. It would have been cheaper to have had a volunteer check in boaters and to have allowed those launches.”
Policies of Mass Economic Destruction
Just outside the park’s southern entrance, the Town of Tusayan is the quintessential gateway community. “We don’t make candles or wooden chairs,” says Tusayan Mayor Greg Bryan. “We exist solely to serve the visitors who come to Grand Canyon National Park.” As the shutdown neared, Bryan was well aware of what it would mean for his town’s economy. So he and other civic leaders dusted off the playbook from the 1995 shutdown, when private donations of $17,000 a day kept the park open. But on Oct. 1 they learned the park would be closing and that third-party funding would not be considered. As we now know, third-party funding—a combination of state money and private donations—would prove the eventual solution, but not until 11 days later. By then the damage had been done.
Bryan estimates the shutdown cost Tusayan around $1.5 million, which doesn’t include the more than $6 million lost by concessionaires inside the park. Faced with a complete economic vacuum, residents of Tusayan were plunged into a desperate situation. Phoenix-based St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance came to the rescue on Oct. 4, delivering food pallets both in Tusayan and inside the park.
Throughout the calamity—and absent an agreement on third-party funding—the town took the initiative to work toward a solution, with the town contributing $200,000 and private donations accounting for another $226,500. Private donations included $30,000 from Northwest River Supply, which contributed on the condition that any deal would incorporate a re-opening of Lee’s Ferry. I asked Bryan about this in particular. Lee’s Ferry is a 130-mile drive from Tusayan. How did this even fit into the town’s economic interests?
“We feel very strongly that people come from all over the world to experience Grand Canyon National Park,” Bryan said. “The negative press we experienced wasn’t helping us. It wasn’t any additional effort to include Lee’s Ferry. There were already too many dreams being shattered.” Among those with shattered dreams was Mayor Bryan’s own daughter, who had a wedding trip down the Colorado cancelled because of the shutdown.
Bryan ended up traveling to Washington DC to plead his town’s case, and even with the shutdown now over he is looking for a longer-term solution. “We’re looking to the future,” he said. “We’re pushing to have legislation brought forth that clarifies this questionable policy that there can’t be any third-party funding of National Parks. In the event of another government shutdown, if the community wants to provide those services and pay the actual cost, they should be able to do that so that we don’t have our National Parks used as pawns in a game.”
Under Cover of Darkness
As I reached Tusayan on the evening of Oct. 1, US Highway 180 had gone quiet. I wasn’t sure if the “picking up hikers” excuse would work again. Fortunately the ranger at the gate waved me through without asking any questions. But much had changed since that morning. The route I’d taken to the trailhead earlier had since been blocked by concrete barricades, and the only way through involved sweet-talking a tired ranger who eventually yielded.
When I got to the South Rim there were still tourists milling about, even as the Canyon fell into total darkness. I hunkered down for a nap in the Mazda, hoping to get some sleep, but that wasn’t happening. After two hours of ducking headlights as service vehicles drove by I did a lap and confirmed the coast was clear—no rangers guarding the trailhead, no need for sketchy game trails—save for an Ohioan taking time lapse photographs of the stars (he had a lot to say about John Boehner). Figuring that I was as likely to get caught waiting around the parking lot as anywhere, I hid the car keys, donned the backpack, and started down the Bright Angel Trail at around 9:30 PM.
It’s not unusual for people to hike this trail—which descends 4,400 feet from the rim to river in eight miles—at night. It’s the desert, after all, which can make night hiking preferable. My original plan had been to spend a short night at the Bright Angel Lodge and hit the trail around 3:00 AM, so I could cover the trail in time to meet the rafting trip on the morning of Oct. 2—my dad’s birthday. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when, about an hour in, I saw two headlamps working their way up the valley. Being the type who’s prone to paranoia, I began to contemplate the worst case scenario: The rangers were sweeping the trail. I considered hiding out in the bushes to let them pass, then saw the lights had reached the switchback immediately below. They had no doubt already seen my light. I continued, breathing a sigh of relief when I found they were just hikers. I asked them what they’d seen and they confirmed the rangers were out in force at the Indian Garden campground but that they hadn’t seen them elsewhere on the trail.
I pushed on. A hiker shelter sits at the elbow of a switchback three miles down—and someone or something was in there knocking rocks down the trail. I called out but received only rock throwing in response. I didn’t stick around to investigate.
After two hours I figured I was within a mile of Indian Garden, and noted it was far too early to pass through the most exposed portion of the hike, so I took refuge up a gully and munched on Cliff Bars, waiting for the night to deepen. At midnight I resumed the hike, taking pains to rely only on my headlamp, which was running out of batteries and had grown dim enough to perhaps be overlooked by watching eyes.
Adrenaline kicked into overdrive when I reached Indian Garden around 12:30 AM. Despite my efforts to wait them out there were people awake, wandering around the campground. Outbuildings with electric lights threatened to blow my cover. My foot caught on a rock and I took a spill that seemed like the loudest thing possible in that quiet place. I tried to remember the last time I did something this stupid.
South Rim Crackdown
It’s impossible to say how many people tried to sneak into the Grand Canyon during the shutdown, but most of the tension between trespassers and rangers came on the lone weekend of the shutdown—Oct. 5-6. USA Today reported at least 21 people were cited for criminal trespass as of Oct. 7, many of them apprehended while hiking off the South Rim that weekend. Each citation was referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Among those to receive a citation was a private raft trip permit holder named John Boone from Oakley, CA.
On the morning of Oct. 6, a private trip led by John and his wife Laurie awaited an uncertain exchange of rafters at the Phantom Ranch Boat Beach. The trip had launched from Lee’s Ferry on Sept. 30, and had five people—four of them grown men—departing from Phantom that day. The 12 people staying on for the second half would be pressed to complete the journey with six rafts to row, each with about 1000 pounds of gear. The group needed a few more bodies, especially with the most intense stretch of rapids on the whole river coming in the miles below Phantom. “We were worried about the safety of our 12 people,” said Laurie Boone.
As they waited for reinforcements at Boat Beach, the Boones had front row seats to the absurdity that had taken hold. Their trip was one of those solicited for their groover cans as the Park Service tried to preserve enzymes in composting toilets. Then around 5:30 AM they saw two hikers, dressed in black like ninjas, come running down the trail and across the suspension bridge at Phantom, with rangers in hot pursuit. It wasn’t your usual day on the Colorado.
Around the same time that the ninjas crossed the Colorado, Brian Kehoe and his 13-year-old daughter, of Chico, CA, left the South Rim on a “black ops” hike down the Kaibab Trail, with the idea of meeting up with the Boone’s trip (and Kehoe’s wife). Father and daughter had been hiding out at the rim, waiting for the first sign of light to begin their hike, so that they wouldn’t need to use flashlights. The Kehoe’s had heard that trespassers, if caught, could receive a $20,000 fine, a five-year ban from National Parks, and maybe even jail time, so they were taking a calculated risk. For the most part they had an uneventful journey, with only one encounter on the trail—a mule train, which was heading down the Kaibab to pick up the departing members of the trip. Somehow, with almost everything else closed down, the Boone group had been able to guarantee a mule extraction.
Further up the Kaibab Trail, another Boone reinforcement was heading toward the river. The Park Service had started to grant access to “certified oarsmen”—people with documented credentials to row a raft down the Colorado. The Boone’s daughter, 23-year-old Kaydee, had managed to secure such a credential. She recalls armed rangers guarding the trailhead who checked her identity via radio before letting her through.
The Kehoes arrived at Phantom about a half hour ahead of Kaydee—to find a ranger waiting at the bridge. The ranger told Kehoe they would be cited, that he was at risk of receiving jail time, and that father and daughter now needed to hike out. As trip leader, John Boone would also face punishment if the trip took on Kehoe, even though Kehoe was named on the permit.
Photo credit:
Canoe & Kayak
The group deliberated after learning the implications of accepting Kehoe on the trip and decided, for everyone’s safety, they wanted one more capable body. They headed downriver in the company of their vigilante boatman and safely completed their journey.
The day after returning home, Brian Kehoe and John Boone received summons in the mail. Kehoe was issued two citations, for entering the park during closure and for disregarding a lawful order (i.e., to hike out). Boone, as permit-holder, was charged with disregarding a lawful order. On the morning of Oct. 28, their lawyer secured a settlement, knocking the punishment down to a civil citation and lowering the fee to $750. There will be no jail time or suspensions.
“If I’d been fined twenty grand that would have been brutal but I had to hope that reason would prevail,” said Kehoe. “I have nothing but respect for that Canyon. My respect has grown tenfold for that Canyon. So I ended up with a $75 surcharge every day I’m on the river. It’s like the baggage fee. Pay it and go play.”
Whether or not the cost of apprehending these “trespassers” or hearing these cases in Federal court makes any particular sense in light of a budget-driven shutdown remains a fair question.
I got lucky. I made it past Indian Garden and arrived at Pipe Creek, where the Bright Angel Trail first encounters the river, around 3:00 AM on the morning of Oct. 2. The cool air off the river that morning was like the breath of liberty.
As the sun rose on my father’s birthday upriver at the Cremation campground, my dad tried to put a good face on what he would find downriver. Most of the trip later confessed they expected to find an empty beach, but my dad had faith. He knew how stubborn members of our gene pool could be. I can’t remember giving him a better birthday present than just being there at Pipe Creek that morning when he pulled up in his 18-foot oar rig.
A few hours after arriving at Pipe Creek, the author and his father were into some serious whitewater. Horn Creek Rapid. 10,000 cubic feet per second.
A lot can happen in 11 days, which is ironic considering that very little was accomplished politically during the course of the shutdown. By choking off the Colorado River rafting business for the first half of an essential month, the shutdown sent waves through the Northern Arizona economy, extracting well over a million dollars from small businesses and screwing over people from near and far. There are patches in place for private and commercial trips to eventually be made whole, but in some cases (16 Austrians?) the opportunity cost is too high. And another budget deadline still looms in January.
Eleven days is minuscule amount of time in the geologic terms that have carved the Grand Canyon, but it’s quite a while in biological terms, or it is from an enzymatic perspective. In the Boone camp the night before the Kehoe’s black ops mission, the ranger told the group that he’d ordered some dog food when he realized he didn’t have enough human shit to feed his composting toilets. The helicopter delivery would be expensive but at least the enzymes would have enough food to get through the shutdown. And since it’s easier to store dog food than it is to store human shit, it looks like there’s now a workable plan in place for keeping those toilets operational during the next shutdown. At least we have that one figured out.
