Find Us Online
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Grand Canyon Wildlands Council
- Website
- http://www.grandcanyonwildlands.org/
- Contact Name
- Kelly Burke
- Contact Email
- kelly@antispamgrandcanyonwildlands.org
- Past Grants
- 2011 · $30,000
- 1999 · $20,000
- Grand Total
- $50,000
Grand Canyon Wildlands Council is a network of scientists, river runners, professors, hikers, resource managers, and other conservationists. We came together in 1996, inspired to merge our talents to provide creative, science-based solutions for conservation challenges faced by land stewards and citizens in the Grand Canyon Ecoregion. We rely on hundreds of volunteers and numerous experts and conservation partners to achieve our mission.
Our vision weaves passion and science to save and heal wild nature, providing safe havens and safe passages for all the Grand Canyon regions native wild creatures great and small. Applying the principles of conservation biology, we designed the Grand Canyon Wildlands Network map, a network of protected core habitats or safe havens, with connecting landscapes providing safe passage, including wildlife corridors.
The 36 million acre Grand Canyon ecoregion, on the southern Colorado Plateau, sweeps from the Mogollon Rim in Arizona north to the High Plateaus of Utah, and east to the headwaters of the Little Colorado River in New Mexico. This land is home to animal species as diverse as the Gila monster, Grand Canyon pink rattlesnake, northern goshawk, and California condor. A vast variety of habitats,from arid grasslands to Rocky Mountain boreal forests, supports the last large population of bighorn sheep, as well as black bear, pronghorn antelope, mountain lion, and southwest river otter.
As a partner with The Wildlands Network™, we work to protect and connect critical landscapes and habitat for a variety of species—gaining new land protections like national monument, wilderness, and wild and scenic river designations.
We are working for additional conservation and protecton of the Grand Canyon watershed. At its heart is the unique landscape of the North Kaibab Plateau and the Colorado River, which provides water for millions of people in Arizona, Nevada, and California and sustains migratory songbirds, waterfowl, and the rich web of aquatic, riparian and upland life. It is home to 22 sensitive species, some of which occur nowhere else in the world.
Project Update
A Unique Landscape
At the heart of a new national monument proposal in Arizona is the North Kaibab Plateau, which forms the north rim of Grand Canyon, extends north of Grand Canyon National Park and borders the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. This gigantic “mountain lying down,” through which the Colorado River carves the Grand Canyon, rises to over nine thousand feet above sea level and supports habitats from semi-desert grasslands to stately ancient conifer forests. The Plateau encompasses the watershed of the Colorado River, which provides water for millions of people in Arizona, Nevada, and California. It is home to 22 sensitive species, some of which occur nowhere else in the world.
U.S. Presidents from Benjamin Harrison to Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, who all recognized the North Kaibab’s uniqueness and importance, included the Plateau in sweeping designations of forest and game preserves and a smaller national landmark. Unlike surrounding areas since transferred into national parks and monuments, and despite proposals from the late 1880s to as recently as the 2001 Arizona monument designations, the Plateau has remained under the orginal Grand Canyon Game Preserve status, dating from 1906 and offering only limited protection of a few game species—and endured land management practices incompatible with the original conservation intent.
An Endangered Ecosystem
The Plateau contains the most intact, largely unprotected old-growth forest in the Southwest, including old growth ponderosa pine forests—which constitute one of America’s most endangered ecosystems. Together with the adjacent House Rock alley, and the Kaibab-Paunsagunt Wildlife Corridor, the Plateau includes areas of critical and significant biological diversity, providing crucial habitat and wildlife movement corridors for a host of unique species, including the Kaibab squirrel, northern goshawk, the Kaibab-Paunsagunt mule deer herd, mountain lion, and the iconic and endangered California condor. Also included in the proposed monument area are the uranium withdrawal areas south of the Grand Canyon and west of Kanab Creek.
As the Southwest faces climate change and increasing probability of drought, preservation of remaining intact ecosystems is critical not only for wildlife, but for humans as well. We will post new updates as this project unfolds including photos and ecology sweet bites from our esteemed Senior Ecologist Dr. Larry Stevens. Jump in and get talking about this amazing area on our Facebook pge and Twitter.
For the wild ones...Kelly, Kim and Larry