This post has been updated since it was originally posted. The title has been changed from "The First Recorded Descent of the Grand Canyon Was 150 Years Ago," to the present title, to avoid implying that European-Americans were the first to descend the Grand Canyon.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first recorded non-Indigenous descent down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon.
In 1869, an intrepid group of men, led by the one-armed Civil War Veteran John Wesley Powell, embarked on a journey down the Grand Canyon through the foaming rapids of the Colorado River, pushing both bravery and their ill-suited wooden boats to the limit.
The journey would ultimately contribute to western science’s understanding of geology, geography and anthropology, and play a part in Powell’s farsighted policy recommendations for future water use in the American West.
The intervening 150 years would seem insubstantial against Grand Canyon’s display of deep geologic time. Yet the past 150 years have wrought some of the most rapid and significant changes in the canyon's more than 6 million year history.
The completion of the Glen Canyon Dam upstream of the Grand Canyon in 1963 resulted in reverberating changes to the canyon’s water and sediment flows. These changes have altered the evolution and morphology, or the physical shape, of the Colorado River, along with the surrounding landscapes and the living things that evolved along the riverway.
Well-documented changes to the river system include variation in water temperature, the timing and duration of flood events and lack of replenishing sediment, all resulting from the regulated releases of cold, sediment-free water from Lake Powell.
Physical changes to the river system resulted in substantial changes to invertebrate communities, native fish populations and food webs. These changes have culminated in the near extinction of multiple native fish species found only in the Colorado River system.
On the banks above the river, riparian plants have filled in the once expansive sandy beaches that were historically deposited then scoured by floods.
The historically dynamic and open river channel that Powell passed through has narrowed and stabilized, further changing the physical structure of the river and increasing the presence of invasive plant species and altering bird habitat along the banks.
The clear water and vegetated beaches now seen at the bottom of the Grand Canyon would be unrecognizable to John Wesley Powell and his men.
But the presence of the upstream dam and the resultant physical changes are not the only changes within the Grand Canyon. The human story of this canyon has also changed dramatically in the intervening years since John Wesley Powell’s science expedition passed through.
Havasupai people, who lived in and around the Grand Canyon at the time of Powell’s journey, were forcibly removed from places like Indian Gardens and confined to a 518-acre village in 1882, just 13 years after Powell traveled downriver.
The designation of Grand Canyon National Park in 1919, and the ensuing regulations in access to and use of the canyon, altered the at least 10,000-year history of human interaction with the landscape. These changes acutely affected native peoples in the region with ties to the Grand Canyon, which include the Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Diné, Zuni, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah (representing the Shivwits Paiute), Las Vegas Paiute, Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, San Juan Southern Paiute, and Yavapai-Apache (representing the White Mountain, San Carlos, Yavapai and Tonto nations).
The U.S. Geological Survey, an organization established by none other than John Wesley Powell, found in a 2015 study that many cultural resources within the canyon are being eroded and undercut as they no longer receive the sediment from upstream which kept them buried. Damage to these culturally significant places as a result of human land use can greatly impact tribes that hold these places as significant.
In the last three decades, there have been substantial efforts to address the physical, ecological and anthropogenic changes occurring within the Grand Canyon. In 1996, the first controlled flood was released from Glen Canyon Dam to bring much-needed sediment downstream.
Since then, flood events of different magnitudes and timings have roared down canyon, extensively monitored by scientists along the way.
A 2018 scientific paper that compiled two decades of flooding experiments concluded the impacts of experimental floods have been mixed, with sand bars and beaches increasing along some river sections and staying the same in others.
In 2001 beetles were released to help combat the spread of invasive tamarisk trees along streambanks throughout the southwest. The beetle reached Grand Canyon around 2009, and while tamarisk presence along the river is decreasing, the plants that will ultimately fill that open niche remains unclear.
Removal of invasive fish species and the reintroduction of native fish have resulted in an increase in the presence of native fish within a few major tributaries and within the Colorado River itself.
The fraught human history within the Grand Canyon is also slowly being addressed. In 1975, Congress returned some traditional lands to the Havasupai. The reservation today covers over 185,000 acres within and alongside the Grand Canyon.
Tribal members and conservation groups are currently calling for historically Havasupai areas within Grand Canyon National Park to be renamed in a way that reflects Indigenous presence and history.
Ultimately, the changes that have occurred since John Wesley Powell rowed the wooden boat he named Emma Dean down the Grand Canyon have transformed and rippled in ways we are still trying to understand and control.
As climate change portends more water scarcity and human alterations continue to have substantial impacts to the river system, it is unclear how the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon might change in another 150 years.
When setting out on his journey, John Wesley Powell famously penned “we have an unknown river yet to explore.” At this sesquicentennial of Powell’s launch, we have an uncertain climate to navigate and an altered riverway to manage.
Let’s hope that, like Powell and his men, we are up for the challenge.
