(upbeat music) - For over the past 60 years, Arizona PBS has told incredible stories of Arizona's distinctive people, beautiful landscapes, and treasured history.

Now relive those memories we've pulled "From the Vault."

Hello, I'm a Alberto Rios.

It's a marvel that's bigger than the entire state of Rhode Island.

Explore the beauty, the people, and the river that makes up the magnificent Grand Canyon.

Travel with us as we discover what the next 100 years hold for this natural wonder.

"From the Vault" presents "Beyond the Rim."

(soft uplifting music) - [Narrator] "The Grand Canyon fills me with awe.

It is beyond comparison, beyond description, absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world."

In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt said those words while taking in the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Official preservation of the canyon as a national park came years later in 1919.

It is now one of the most visited national parks in the country, with an average of nearly five million visitors a year.

(soft uplifting music continues) - The first time I saw Grand Canyon in 1988, I fell in love.

(soft pleasant music) My husband jokes, if the Grand Canyon had been a man, he'd be divorced.

Any time it was a vacation, time to go someplace, this is the only place I wanted to come.

So when it was time to retire, it was the only logical place to go.

We came here in 2013.

We actually had a house built for us in 2009 about 20 miles south of the park.

That's as close as I could get.

They wouldn't sell me any land up here on the rim.

I just could not stay away.

It's like this giant magnet.

As a Junior Ranger.

- [Kids] As a Junior Ranger.

- [Ann] I promise.

- [Kids] I promise.

- To learn all I can.

- [Kids] To learn all I can.

- About Grand Canyon.

- [Kids] About Grand Canyon.

- My mother volunteered at the hospital, my father was involved in a lot of community activities, so it was just logical that I would do that too.

Since I had many opportunities given to me, I should give back.

And this is my third season with interpretation, and I just finished my third season with PSAR.

PSAR stands for Preventive Search and Rescue, and the goal is to find people below the rim who might get themselves in trouble and need to be rescued and shortcut that.

So I try to talk them into doing something that's a little more reasonable that they can succeed at, get themselves out of the canyon on their own and not have to be rescued.

They'll feel better about their visit and so will we.

Be safe.

- [Visitor] Yes.

- [Visitor] Thank you.

- Next.

- We have volunteers working in lots of different divisions in the park.

We have folks in the administrative division, we have folks in the interpretive division.

There's volunteers in every little niche of the Grand Canyon that really make the park shine.

There's one gentleman that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at a place called Phantom Ranch.

(water rushing) - I've been down here about 30 years.

So I came here in 1988.

They hired me down here for like three months, and then I never left.

(laughs) I just kept going.

It was just amazing to me.

It was like, "Well, I can't, you know, believe I'm in a place like this."

And, you know, to be able to stay that long a period in one spot, you know, that's how I think it just grew on me.

(soft serene music) So I do spend lots of time here, probably more than any place on the planet.

I got to watch the plants that I planted in the ground grow and watch the animals that go in and out.

It feels like it's home, that's for sure.

(laughs) Being here all the time, you know, you begin to learn who's around, like this particular bird that showed up like two weeks ago.

In the summer I go water the trees, collect seeds, and stuff like that.

I talk to a lot of people because a lot of people have never been here before.

Some are worried about the hike out so they need, you know, some kind of support, sometimes psychological support.

I think the best thing for me is actually talking to the visitors.

Morning.

Almost every job that I'd had that I got paid was not as good as this one so maybe I have this phobia that if I get paid, it won't be as good.

I don't know.

(laughs) This is the place where humans and nature come together.

It's fun to show people and share the experiences I have here.

It makes me feel good that I'm part the national parks and what they stand for.

Sometimes I'm down here and it's super hot and I see somebody sprawled out under a tree just trying to survive.

And I think, "Wow, I planted that tree."

(laughs) It makes me feel good, you know, to be part of all that.

Bye!

- People always thank me.

They're always appreciative of what I do.

I don't do it for the thanks, but it's nice to know people do appreciate it.

And I know, with resources as tight as they are all over the government, one of the ways we will keep something like Grand Canyon going is with people like me who are willing to give of our time.

- [Visitor] Thank you.

- You're welcome.

Enjoy your stay.

It's everything I hoped for and more.

In fact, there are still times that I get goosebumps and sort of have to pinch myself.

I said, "Is this real?

Did they really give me keys to Grand Canyon National Park?"

And they did.

So it is the culmination of my dream.

(soft serene music continues) - Among our people, the canyon is a number of things.

(soft flute music) It's a place of pilgrimage.

It's a place of awe.

It's a place of fear.

It's a place of wonder.

It's a place of beauty.

It's a place of majesty, but it's a place also that reminds us how minute we are on this landscape and even in this world.

I feel like, the canyon, it's a very major spiritual center point for our culture.

(Ed speaking in Native language) My name is Ed Kabotie.

I'm from the Hopi village of Shungopavi about 100 miles to the east.

(chuckles) My grandfather did the murals on the next floor back in 1932.

(soft solemn music) My grandfather was born in 1900.

During that time in history, the policy of the government was kill the Indian, save the man.

But fortunately for my grandfather, he was part of a renegade superintendency that encouraged him in his culture.

They encouraged him to paint.

It was a Harvey Company condition that he came out here to do these particular murals.

In the mural, he tells the story of the first guy to go down to Colorado River in our memory.

In the park service, that's attributed to a guy named Major Powell, but in our culture, that happened probably about 1,200 years ago.

To me, when I come to the watchtower, it's a place that, by analogy, should project light and understanding.

A lot of what I think Mary Jane Colter wanted to do was to bring honor to the ancient peoples of the Southwest.

In that sense, I think it's very important in this modern time to also bring light and understanding to the contemporary peoples of the Southwest.

(soft solemn music continues) - This area is called Supai Camp Loop.

Actually, this house right here, before it was renovated, it had no electricity, no water, no bathroom, no sink.

And it was just one big room where I grew up at while I was going to school here at Grand Canyon.

(cheerful upbeat music) My people, they live in Supai now, but before being pushed out from Grand Canyon National Park, they used to roam this area for hunting during the winter season for the deer, the elk, the rabbit, all that, and the herbal medicines that they collected.

My people are still fighting for the land trying to protect it, you know, our mother, we call it our mother, the Earth, because it sustains us.

The way I see it is, the national park, the forest service are all benefiting from my resource, my mother, and I would like to see my own people benefit from it.

(soft majestic music) - The canyon anchors the stories of so many people, the history, the culture.

What the national park service can do is dedicate the watchtower and the surrounding area to telling the stories, and even better, providing a space where our tribal partners can tell their own stories.

We've been working with each of the tribes for about three years now on this specific area in this demonstrator program.

The foundation of this change at Desert View has been authenticity, letting tribes speak for themselves.

We defer to the tribal governments.

They tell us who they would like to represent them, who they feel are appropriate artists to tell their story.

We want every visitor who interacts with a demonstrator to come away with a truthful understanding of the connection that so many tribes have to Grand Canyon.

- I got to work on the ceiling.

That was my job this year.

The objective, again, is to carry the message of the people and plight of the Colorado Plateau to an ever-expanding audience, and I feel like this is a really a tremendous opportunity to share that.

I think what I want them to walk away with is an awe and reverence for this place that we call home.

- We have so much to tell about the canyon and what it means to our people and for our survival, not just now, but for our future generations as well.

I was just asked the other day by a little girl why I like living at the Grand Canyon National Park, and my response to her was, "Grand Canyon is my home and my home is the best."

(soft majestic music continues) (water burbling) (soft serene music) - Water has so many different abilities.

It can smooth rocks to, like a silky smooth texture that you just wanna lay in and it can carve enormous canyons.

The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the Southwest.

It is the heart of Grand Canyon.

(soft upbeat music) This green is not the natural color of the river.

Her name is the Colorado, which does not mean the beautiful, bright-green, clear river.

(laughs) It means the red river.

The Glen Canyon Dam trapped all the sediment that would come downstream through the canyon so this part of the river is almost never red.

So the dam has really changed, 'cause now we actually have vegetation on shore.

They never existed before the dam, 'cause the river would flood in the spring and it would flood everything right by the river level.

You know, everything would get washed away.

(soft lilting music) - The humpback chub has probably been here as long as the Grand Canyon itself.

So it might be four to five million years old.

It's a real unique fish.

It's a about yay big.

It's a member of the minnow family.

It has this unique hump on its back.

Nobody really knows what the hump is for.

It's a warm water fish.

Right after the dam, there were cold water releases, like really cold.

So you'd dive in the river and get a ice cream headache, right?

And as Lake Powell has dropped, then it's releasing warmer water, right?

And Grand Canyon, it's gone through a period of severe decline up until about the mid '90s or 2000.

And now there's a lot of them.

It's really looking good now.

- Compared to other rivers in the Colorado River Basin and other rivers elsewhere, we have really low insect diversity.

We don't have any mayflies or stoneflies or caddisflies.

And that trio is usually considered desirable because they like healthy streams and they create good, healthy food webs.

(water burbling) - We actually began to realize that the way the dam was operated for hydropower production was creating this life-history bottleneck for aquatic insects.

We proposed that if managers wanted a healthier river with more insects that they might try stabilizing flows on the weekends when hydropower isn't as valuable.

And so any eggs that were laid down on the weekends are gonna stay wet and have a chance to hatch.

That was tested from May to August, and it looks like it minimally affects hydropower.

It doesn't affect water delivery requirements, so a potential win-win solution where we can still meet society's needs for renewable hydropower but also get a healthier river.

(soft pleasant music) - [Christa] These rivers are life ways.

They are literally the veins of the land.

We lose these rivers and life ceases.

I would hope people would care about this river simply because it has the right to exist.

And without it, Grand Canyon National Park is impoverished if we don't have this river, if we don't this healthy river and healthy ecosystems here.

(soft pleasant music continues) (gentle upbeat music) - Grand Canyon's a special place.

And when you look over to the chasm, it's like holy mackerel.

It's such an incredible, beautiful place.

Coming from a perspective as a botanist, it still needed a lot more work done with knowing what plants occur in the canyon, better documenting them.

So looking at it from a botanist's point of view, I knew this is what I wanted to do.

The canyon has almost half the total number of plant species of Arizona, and Arizona ranks about fourth in the country for total number of species.

It has such a wonderful reservoir of plant genetic diversity that is critical.

(raven cawing) There's a saying we have, you can't manage an area without knowing what's there and so we're trying to figure out what plants do occur there.

We work in collaboration with, of course, Grand Canyon National Park, as well as the Grand Canyon Conservancy and Native American groups.

We work a lot with the Hualapai Nation.

And one of the exciting things that we're working on too is the discovery of new species in the canyon.

There are several undescribed species that we have overlooked.

This one was described with this second one.

They're in the genus Mentzelia, or stick leaf, and we described this as new in 2015.

All these are just about ready to go to Grand Canyon National Park Herbarium.

Hopefully people will continue and build on the work that we do.

And that's the value too of herbarium specimens that we make in documenting these plants.

They're forever if they're taken care of.

So they are catching that snippet of time where that plant occurred at a particular place or a particular time and we can still get information from that collection.

(upbeat music) - Everything here is native to Grand Canyon.

And the Grand Canyon is so big that we have many different ecosystems within Grand Canyon.

So we have to separate them out by their park areas and their regions.

And we wanna basically encourage the native plants to thrive to preserve what we have here and the ecosystem is balanced.

- One of the neat things about this place, one of my favorite things about this place is just how ecologically diverse the Grand Canyon is.

A visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon can easily yield sightings of deer and elk.

Heading down in the canyon, it gets hotter, it gets drier, and we transition kind of gradually into an actual desert-like climate where you will find many of those classic desert animals.

But even in that desert, you have springs, you have sinks, you have waterfalls, you have the Colorado River.

When you look at this park, especially from the rim, it tends to be kind of this large, almost desolate experience of rock and light and heat.

But once you get down in it, you find quite a bit.

- In the winter time, I do the condor monitoring on my off time even though it's actually still for the park.

(soft uplifting music) (tracker busing) I hike up about 800 feet above the ranch so I can pick up their frequencies from their transmitters.

You know, the condors went down to 22 birds, and for the whole plant.

There was only 22 birds.

So they captured them, bred them, then they started to release them.

In the '90s, they start releasing in Arizona.

Throughout that time, there was a couple that showed up here.

Finally, they established a nest cave.

But to have a chick, you know, that was a big deal.

So to sit there and actually be able to watch this chick jump out of the the cave and do this first flight.

I will say at about a week, it actually started to fly.

And then it went higher up on the cliff and higher up on the cliff.

It's 11 years old, and it's still somewhere out there.

(chuckles) I hope that people will come and look at it like a living museum.

- We live in an amazing world.

One thing that I've learned in all my years as a researcher and scientist is we don't know hardly anything about what's going on out there.

But what I hope to do is to answer some questions, but as importantly, provide opportunities to bring up more questions.

To have a better idea of our resources in the canyon, having more information will help us, will guide us to better stewardship of the park.

The more we know, the more that we appreciate about it and then the more we take care of it.

(soft uplifting music continues) (soft uplifting music) (visitors chattering) - One of my favorite experiences is honestly the chance to get to see visitors' first experience.

It just takes their breath away when they walk up to the edge and they don't say anything for a moment and they just kind of scan.

The mouth is a little open and they just have to pause and kind of take it all in.

I think everybody needs to see the rim of the canyon.

There are a lot of different ways to explore this park, but until you see it from the rim, you never really have a good sense of perspective on the canyon.

Roughly maybe about 20% of our visitation of the park actually ever goes into the Grand Canyon.

So it's only, you know, a small fraction of our visitors actually set foot on those trails.

It's somewhere around 5% of that 20% will actually make it down to Phantom Ranch, down to the Colorado River.

- Keep on going.

- Right, right.

- I have never been below the rim before this.

We are doing a project in honor of the Grand Canyon National Park's 100th birthday to do a hundred things in or related to the Grand Canyon.

And so this was our big trip, hiking down into the canyon.

- It's the ideal picture of me.

(laughs) - That's right.

Going below the rim is a very different experience.

You really get a sense for the geologic processes that created this, like the different colored rocks and the shapes and the ways they're moving.

And it's just a different feeling versus being on the rim, where you're just like, "Oh, that's cool, a hole in the ground."

So it's amazing views, but a lot of people are like, "Okay I saw it," and they walk away.

- This canyon brought us together.

- That's right.

We have a lot of friends who've grown up here, have been living here who've never been here.

And getting to know my own backyard is important to me.

Because we come here a lot, we've raised the awareness to our friends.

Like, "The Grand Canyon is cool."

- There it is.

(hiker laughs) Got it.

As we were kind of talking and brainstorming different things, we came up with lots of funny ideas of things that we could do.

And this just seemed like the right thing to like really just immerse ourselves in the canyon and see different things and see things from different perspectives and learn more about it.

I think the more that you can see things from different views and perspectives, in life in general, not just with the canyon, the more understanding you have about it and the more appreciation you have for it.

A couple years ago, I was injured hiking.

I broke my elbow, and I haven't really done a big hike since then.

And knowing that I can do it is just a really empowering thing.

(soft inspirational music) - In a spiritual sense, you want to be able to sit somewhere in different areas and take in what you're seeing.

What you're seeing is one of the most sublime elements of nature you're ever gonna see anywhere.

There's nothing like it.

It doesn't matter where else you go, there's only one Grand Canyon.

You have to go and experience all levels of it and you're gonna get a sense of the depth of how many different things there are in the Grand Canyon.

It's not just some foreboding place with nothing in it.

And you get to see it for what it really is, and not just from 1% of it, and you get to take it in properly.

And you cannot experience it without seeing the night sky.

(soft wondering music) - There's a common misconception that, when you go to the Grand Canyon, you see it during the day and then that's it.

But that's not the case at all.

In fact, there is a movement within the National Park System that, you know, there's stuff to do both day and night.

The Grand Canyon is a great place for stargazing because it's so dark.

And most of Arizona is dark if you get away from the cities, but at the Grand Canyon it's dark, but it's also mysterious because you're standing at this mile-deep chasm.

So it's really a magical place to view the sky.

- The Grand Canyon National Park we set aside to protect, you know, the scenic and and natural wonder, this unique landscape.

But in protecting the Grand Canyon, we also ended up protecting a lot of other stuff, whether it was just the solitude, wilderness.

And one that we've really been focusing on lately, the night skies.

On a good dark night, with the new moon or no moon at all, you can really see some amazing wonders of our solar system, of our galaxy.

- In the night is when the big epiphanies occur, in my opinion.

Whereas this is very beautiful during the day and I can see it's very beautiful, but at night, it actually puts you in your place.

It lets you know where you are in the universe.

So at night, you get that other huge piece of wisdom, which is that a lot of your problems are tiny problems.

A lot of your issues and worries are tiny things when you compare it to what we're seeing up there.

- When we look at the canyon, we are looking at vast amounts of time.

The stories told in these rocks are ancient stories from way, way deep in the Earth's past.

An important factor of the canyon is just that slice of nature being preserved as it is.

And I hope that it'll still be relevant, that people will still come here and find some awe, some beauty in a landscape that hasn't been disturbed.

(soft wondering music continues) (moves to soft inspirational music)