The Grand Canyon is an international symbol of awe and wonder for people worldwide, ranging from the connection of the Native American tribes to their sacred homelands, to the tourists who visit for 15 minutes, on to scientists and river runners.

Learn how the pressures of modern society threaten this timeless icon of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I am veteran river guide and conservationist Tillie Walton Join me as I lead different groups down the great rivers of the American west.

Wow!

Oh.

It█s like so narrow.

We█re driving a houseboat.

Between Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the Colorado River runs through one of the most pristine landscapes on earth.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, a UNESCO heritage site, which is the Grand Canyon.

And on one side of the river is the national park, and on the other side are the sovereign nations of the various Native American tribes.

One would think that this stretch of river between these two dams would be one of the most protected places on earth.

But this national treasure is faced by many threats.

You would look at this place and you wouldn't think that there are 11 affiliated tribes associated with this place.

And we currently were working with Grand Canyon National Park to try to change that up, highlighting the issues of threats that are happening around Grand Canyon like Canyon Mine, the hydroelectric dams on the Little Colorado River, other water issues, the droughts that are happening within not just the around the Grand Canyon, but all over the southwest.

We can see the evidence of one of the worst droughts in recent history behind us with the lake levels.

The white line signifies where the lake used to be, and over the last 20 years, it's dropped over 140 feet.

So we're draining our bank account of water savings.

And when it's gone, 40 million people across the West depend on this river for drinking water.

It comes as kind of a surprise to many visitors to Grand Canyon to learn that upstream is a dam that blocks and controls all the flow, pretty much all the flow coming through Grand Canyon.

A little bit comes in through the tributaries in Grand Canyon, but not very much.

So Grand Canyon exists between these two dams.

It's bookended by Lake Powell at the upper end, Lake Mead at the lower end.

Both dams affect the structure of the river, the ecological integrity of the river ecosystem, water temperature, sediment supplies, flow fluctuations are all affected by the operations of Glen Canyon Dam.

We are traveling upstream to the base of Glen Canyon Dam with members of the Navajo and Hopi tribes to visit sacred homelands.

Many of the sacred sites were flooded by the waters of Lake Powell when Glen Canyon Dam was built in the 1960s.

When you put a dam on a river, not only do you change everything downstream of the dam, but you also change everything upstream of the dam.

Behind Glen Canyon Dam is a place called Glen Canyon, and it's kind of called the place that nobody knew because it was one of the most gorgeous canyons that was along the Colorado River.

And it's now underneath the water of Lake Powell.

Some of the most dense sites of the Native American people that once lived here were also flooded.

In our ways, Navajos, Native Americans, we are part of the earth.

We're part of the water.

We're part of the rock sand.

When we go to the next world, we go back into the earth.

And that's where we came from.

It's been there for millions of years.

And my grandmother used to say, "Do not disturb the spiritual beings when you yell.

There's the echo that goes down the canyon", she said.

Those are the human souls that live there.

The canyon at the opening is where we emerge into this world and where we go back to when we leave this world.

that█s why, for a female, it's a very powerful place because it's a place of life, but it's also a place of that powerful after life.

And there's a lot of shrines and things in this area.

And from the little insects to even the soil, like everything has a purpose.

We think of these rivers, and especially this one is like they're the life, the veins of the earth, our lifeblood of the earth.

And you see sites all over the southwest and we see that is our footprints.

And those are our spiritual connections that were laid by our ancestors upon, from our emergence.

They migrated in all directions.

As they left, we were given specific instructions on how to live on this earth, the Fourth World that we are now inhabiting.

(Hopi language) the ones that came before us.

They went and they traversed the globe.

We see it as petroglyphs, pictographs, pottery sherds and sites that you see all over the southwest and all over the country and down even south into Mexico.

These clan migrations go all over.

So those they were told to leave those footprints for us now as our claims to these places, so we would remember.

And there are also spiritual connections that are like spiritual pathways.

We need to remember why these places are important.

So that's what I would say to the world, who█s living in a city, all the money in the world will not save you if you do not have water or clean air or arable land.

On the rim here, the average person spends about 15 minutes taking in this amazing wonder.

Over 6 million visitors come to the rim each year and only 20,000 go along the river.

And the people who actually know this place and live here and are deeply connected are all the tribes.

For them, this is their homeland.

This is where they were born.

This is their place of creation.

This magical place touches everybody across the world.

Just outside of the park's boundaries, on some of the tribe's most sacred sites, the Grand Canyon is threatened by uranium mines.

Many are concerned if these mines are allowed to operate again, that a spill could contaminate the groundwater.

Which then could poison drinking water supplies.

We are the guardians of the Grand Canyon.

We call ourselves Havsuw' Baaja.

The Havasupai people means people of the blue green water.

This is our Aboriginal territory that I'm standing on and all around here are ancient, sacred archeological sites.

But now we only have 776 tribal members left.

This mine here sits right above the Red Wall Moab aquifer.

And we need to protect that water.

And three miles from here is our sacred mountain called Red Butte.

We also call it (Havasupai language) means the lungs of our Mother Earth.

And this is one of the many bifurcations of our creation stories.

There's not just one creation story.

It relates back to different migrational sections of the land.

And Red Butte is one of the greatest, significant family heirlooms that we have as Havasupai people.

This connects us to the land.

to the sky people, the hawk, the eagle, the buzzard, the crow.

My ancestors are here.

I could feel them in the wind.

The song was.

Written.

I sometimes see them through our animals and I miss them.

I miss my ancestors.

But I know they're here with me through the wind.

It's a very spiritual place, not just for me and my whole tribe.

(Havasupai language) The song I'm gonna sing is about the spring water that comes off the mountains.

And the earth comes out, too.

To be a river you call Colorado River.

Many springs...

This water, If it's gone, it's going to impact so many people.

And that is a very big concern and it's going to change the ecosystem.

Whatever happens upstream is going to happen greatly downstream.

(Havasupai language) The Colorado River traverses through the Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world... wild rapids, pristine waterfalls and ancient ruins.

Our group includes future leaders of the Walapi and Hopi tribes, as well as river running friends, including Dr. Larry Stevens, who wrote the Grand Canyon River Guide.

A lot of times we end the trip here and this time we're beginning our trip here, River Mile 225.

And the plan is to go down and run the last granite gorge of the Grand Canyon.

And so we're going through some of the oldest rock on earth.

Because the canyon walls kind of rise up and squeezed together, we're going to get some great white water through here.

As one of the many tribes along the river, like Navajo, the Hopi and the Havasupai, the Walapai live In this stretch.

They have put a skywalk over the Grand Canyon and developments.

They also run river trips and helicopter tours.

In these reaches of the river, the rock is so hard and ancient and resistant to erosion that the river tends to be very deep.

The rapids tend to be very large.

We have the biggest rapids on the entire river downstream of us here.

We won't go through those because they're covered over by Lake Mead now.

And we're in what's called the Lower Colorado River Basin.

So Lee█s Ferry is the dividing point between the upper river basin and the Lower basin.

Lee█s Ferry is mile zero.

The Grand Canyon officially leaves the Colorado Plateau here about mile 278 or so.

So it's a very long river system.

Kind of dynamics of it, though, are are really based on what the dam does.

So this pristine river system that we have in the in the middle of the Grand Canyon, it's almost bookend.

It's like bookended by both, both dams.

By two of the biggest dams in the US.

The Lake Powell upstream was constructed to be just a tiny bit smaller than Lake Mead, and that allows us for about four years of water storage.

If both reservoirs are full.

And there's only four years of water storage, if they're both full?

You know, it comes as a surprise to most people to learn that more than half of the water in the Colorado River is groundwater.

It's come out of the springs.

And some of those springs.

are very ancient features.

The river wears many different colors down here.

What we have in this muddy water actually looks closer to what the original Colorado River look like are the Rio, Colorado, the Red River.

Along the the river here, there's many different hidden gems.

And even some of the side canyons have a surreal turquoise blue water.

So where we started out with kind of clear green water at the beginning, just below the dam flows into the Paria which is a kind of a light, whitish color and into the little Colorado, which is one of the major tributaries distributing a lot of sand and mud down into the river.

And most likely a lot of this water here is coming from a recent flash flood on the Little Colorado River.

But when the Little Colorado River isn't flooding, it has this gorgeous, surreal turquoise blue color.

When you go to Havasu, the water there is turquoise and green, blue.

And that's why the Havasupai people are known as the people, the blue green waters.

The amazing thing about the Grand Canyon is that any natural environment you can imagine has occurred right here, from the deepest ocean to the tallest mountains, to the desert to the estuaries, you name it.

Any environment that you can think of has occurred right here It's like a history book and we're like looking at the pages of time and all these different various layers.

The canyon is such a place to understand our insignificance in the universe.

I think you know, we get a very vague sense of what 2 billion years has doing to this part of the planet.

Down here is one of one of the narrowest places on the entire river.

And there's a plunge pool at the bottom.

Some of these plunge pools can be 80 or 90 feet deep.

Floating on the rock here again, is the result of the pre-dam river carrying massive amounts of sand, scouring and churning along the shoreline and carving this incredibly hard rock into into these beautiful patterns, vertical patterns.

And you can see that as you go up, it tends to fade out.

And we get into kind of rock is not so polished as we get up higher there because this is the zone that the river flowed in pre-dam time The earth is only 4.6 billion, but that's the age of the earth.

And we have rocks that date back to 3.8 billion.

What really makes the geology so spectacular here is that you've got so much of the Earth's story told in an undeformed way, stacks of rocks on top of each other, each of them from their own environment, telling a story about what the earth was like at that time, going back almost, almost half the history of the whole Earth.

This is one of the narrowest spots of the lower canyon, and that's why it was a proposed site for the Bridge Canyon Dam back in the late fifties.

I found an old annual report from the Arizona Power Authority, and it had a an artist's rendition of this part of the canyon as a reservoir.

And people were this water skiing.

There was also one proposed on the little Colorado at the same time, and then Marble Canyon and Glen Canyon.

And I mean, it just seems insane.

Lots of dams being proposed on this stretch.

It's not new to the canyon.

No, no, no power for Arizona.

It was looked at as like an incredible, great thing.

And underneath Lake Powell and underneath Lake Mead are all these hidden gems and canyons.

Oh my gosh, yeah.

I mean, this would have been a reservoir backed up to reservoir, backed up to reservoir.

And at that time, they the Grand Canyon National Park was only 60 miles long.

And so they had a 60 mile stretch that actually wouldn't have been backed up.

And so they were like, we're not damming the national park.

And a couple a couple folks down here like David Brower and Martin Litton, they actually took out full page ads in the New York Times that asked, would you flood the Sistine Chapel to get a better view of the ceiling?

And that's what the equivalent would have been down here if we were up floating on a jet boat somewhere up top and we'd never know what was down here.

All the cultural sites, all of the hidden gems, the waterfalls.

Most of the places here nobody has ever set foot on.

Clearly.

So, yeah, we don't have places like that.

What's the point?

We're part of the lucky few who get to experience the river this way.

Most people come and peer over into this vast Grand Canyon, and here on the river you have a fully immersive experience camping out alongside the river, moving camps each night, carrying all of your gear and supplies with you.

Springs everywhere are endangered by livestock grazing, by groundwater pumping by fracking and water pollution of the aquifer.

Those factors everywhere in the world are playing a role in the health of our springs and pretty much all of those can be managed pretty well with the exception of climate change and perhaps some of the big aquifer impacts from mining.

Whatever.

Here in the Western science world, we regard the hydrologic cycle as a mechanical feature.

Pretty much every Native American four that I've talked to regards the hydrologic cycle as a living process, bringing life from the from the heavens, through the earth and up on the land.

Our perspective on hydrology is very much based on understand adding how much water is coming through so that we can allocate it and use it as a commodity that's so different than pretty much every other culture on earth deals with its water.

The springs are literally.

the█re jewels of life and and cultural value in the landscape.

A river is the backbone of Mother Earth.

It's the spine, it's the Mother Earth.

And there's a lot of stories that have emerged and stories that have depended on the canyon.

And we use the resources and we used the water and we used everything that was surrounding us to help us survive.

My dad told me about the the the treks and the pilgrimages that the men used to do to (Hopi language) which is the Salt, Salt Canyon.

And we're talking just the most crazy physical feats, near-death experiences, spiritual awakenings, preparation.

I mean, it just it's hard it's hard to wrap your mind around, but I mean, that's what's necessary to come down here.

That's the power it has and the spirituality has.

You know, there's the confluence, the emergence points, (Hopi language) (Hopi language) I mean, it's just this is it.

This is where everything came from and this is where the world that we entered and saw everything (Hopi language) (Hopi language) on everything.

And so it's really ground zero for for the base of the religion and tradition.

This is this is where we all came from and went the directions and learned everything.

And then now we're here.

So this is point A.

So it's really hard to to really understand if you were raised out in the modern world.

But I think I'm finally starting to, so.

Just ten miles up river where we saw the gorgeous fluting that's now 60 feet below us under the water, because we've hit the backwaters of Lake Mead.

The Colorado River occupies an enormous basin.

It's a 250,000 square mile landscape.

It involves the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

Those are called the upper basin states.

And the lower basin includes Arizona, Nevada and California.

And then the river drains into northern Mexico.

That huge basin in an arid region.

And the river is the life support system for 40 million people.

And since 1922, the Colorado River has been overallocated.

With drought coming on now, especially in the in the 21st century here, that drought has exacerbated issues like snowpack in the Rockies, which deliver most of the water to the river.

And we ended up with an even more overallocated river than we had before.

In times of drought, we don't rely as much on surface water as we do on groundwater, and therefore more pumping of groundwater goes goes on further limiting our water supplies.

This is a very big issue for the sustainability of human life in the Southwest.

We want to manage Grand Canyon to be the healthiest ecosystem that we have.

And at the same time, we're managing the river for economic purposes that are clearly laid out in the law.

Bringing those two together is the challenge of the future, and it's a challenge that we've met by having an adaptive management program here for the Colorado River in Grand Canyon.

Development and mining and collecting resources is going to happen no matter what.

We just got to find the new area of being ethically and morally respectful to the land and to the people that surround it.

Newer perspectives of a corporate and business mindset and just kind of taking on the respect that indigenous peoples have towards themselves and using that type of mindset to keep us going in a really brighter and green and eco friendly future.

Many people care deeply about this place and and are working at it from different angles, whether it's from the science angle or from the spiritual angle or from a deep connection to the land, or whether just in enjoying being here floating down the river on a boat.

Everybody is deeply connected to this place.

And in my mind they're all kind of saying the same thing, but just in different ways.

Amazing.

Dory on Lake Mead, right around the corner is Hoover Dam.

150 feet above us is where the water level once was.

And since then, over the last the course of the last 40 years, it's drained all the way down over 150 feet.

And just in the last year alone, 50 feet of that.

Question is, what does it mean for all the people that depend on this river for water, the country of Mexico, cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix down river of us, we have $1,000,000,000 winter lettuce growing crop in, you know, in Yuma, Arizona, the West is starting to face water shortages for the first time in history.

And this is unprecedented time.

And this has led to the collapse of civilizations in the past, and it will remain to be seen what happens and how we adjust and adapt to these very different conditions.

I want to share a song for all the Native people and all the people of the world.

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I invite you to visit us at wildriverswithtillie dot org or wildriverswithtillie dot com