Alicyn Gitlin, Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, 520-491-9528, alicyn.gitlin@sierraclub.org
Sandy Bahr, Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, 602-999-5790, sandy.bahr@sierraclub.org
Grand Canyon, AZ—Yesterday, the National Park Service announced plans to partially open Grand Canyon National Park this weekend. A decision to irresponsibly reopen the park comes in the midst of a pandemic that is devastating the nearby Navajo Nation, which has announced 147 new cases and 16 more deaths, and as deaths due to COVID-19 continue to rise.
“This is a terrible time to encourage widescale travel through the Navajo Nation and northern Arizona,” said Alicyn Gitlin, Grand Canyon Program Manager for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “Cases in Coconino County where Grand Canyon's South Rim is located are still rising. The large population that lives at Grand Canyon and all nearby communities are put at risk by this move. Inviting tourists into a limited area, telling them not to drop below the Canyon's rim, and making only a few well-obscured toilet facilities available, is asking for a patrolling and enforcement nightmare. While the Navajo Nation has been enforcing travel curfews for its own residents, it is unable to stop people from travelling through the reservation on state highways—and many people visiting from the north are likely to travel through.”
Employees who live in accommodations in Grand Canyon National Park staged a campaign earlier this year to temporarily close the park during the pandemic. Close living quarters would make an outbreak of COVID-19 in the park's employee housing difficult to contain.
Other local communities are also pleading with people to not take pandemic vacations. To the south, the popular recreation community of Sedona, Arizona took to closing numerous trailheads and erecting highway signs saying "TRAILS CLOSED - GO HOME."
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About the Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with more than 3.5 million members and supporters. In addition to protecting every person's right to get outdoors and access the healing power of nature, the Sierra Club works to promote clean energy, safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and legal action. For more information, visit www.sierraclub.org.