Over a mid-September weekend, some of the most heavily used (and littered) portions of the Grand Canyon鈥檚 South Rim will get their annual tidy-up. But collecting trash from ledges that dangle some 5,000 feet over a massive hole in the earth is no task for your average sanitation crew. Instead, the park鈥檚 Preventive Search and Rescue Program (PSAR) will issue a special-use permit to the聽Arizona Mountaineering Club (AMC), about 50 of whose member-volunteers will rappel over the canyon鈥檚 edge to collect hundreds of gallons of plastic bottles, bags, sunhats, coins, and snack wrappers.
The cleanup does more than ameliorate a serious eyesore in an otherwise spectacular landscape. 鈥淭rash puts a [strain] on the natural environment that we really see on our wildlife. Specifically birds, but also megafauna like bighorn sheep and deer,鈥� says Ben Cooper, who supervises Grand Canyon鈥檚 PSAR and also offers logistical support to AMC鈥檚 garbage roundup. With visitation at the park up 33 percent over the last three years, and hitting聽6 million visitors in 2016, that strain is only fixing to get worse. With few skilled on-staff climbers and a stagnant budget, much of which goes toward educating tourists on safety and providing imperiled hikers with emergency services, Cooper says, 鈥淲e need to engage our community partners鈥� in the cleanup.
The poster child for the urgency of these efforts? The endangered California condor. Its numbers across Arizona and Utah have slowly climbed聽from zero to 74聽over the past 30 years. But between 2007 and 2011, at least two condors died from eating the coins that some tourists toss into the canyon for luck. Coins cause blockages in the birds鈥� guts, causing them to eventually starve to death鈥斺�淎 gruesome way to go,鈥� as park wildlife biologist Miranda Terwilliger puts it. But at least as concerning to her, as far as types of garbage go, is plastic, much of which is also microtrash: bottle caps, rings from around bottle necks, sandwich bags. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the stuff,鈥� says Cooper, 鈥渢hat gets blown around, and people just go, 鈥楳eh, that鈥檚 no big deal.鈥欌��
According to Terwilliger, though, that鈥檚 the stuff that actually has the potential to do the most damage to the park鈥檚 abundant and diverse animal populations. Bags, for instance, end up ensnaring and suffocating critters.聽Other microtrash can get lodged in animals鈥� guts, causing the same sorts of impactions as coins; this is an enormous problem with plastic bottle caps.聽鈥淲e don鈥檛 know why, but everything eats them,鈥� says Terwilliger, citing the fact that two elk died from consuming bottle caps and other plastic last year. Plastic microtrash also often turns up in birds鈥� nests and in the Colorado River. Not only does it take generations to decompose, but plastic affects ecosystems in ways that are not yet fully understood.
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