Volunteers are Rockin’ the Colorado Plateau

“The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
Marge Piercy

This summer hundreds of GCT volunteers are burning hundreds of thousands of calories to protect and restore the Colorado Plateau. Every single day in the field our volunteers give their time to work long hours doing extremely physical work and make it so much fun! The Volunteer Program staff is constantly fulfilled and uplifted by the spirit volunteers bring to both work and camp life.


Volunteer projects on the Kane and Two Mile ranches ranged from monitoring invasive cheatgrass to building a dozen long term exclosures to study the potential impacts of both bison and cattle on the ecosystems of the Kaibab Plateau. These science-based projects will provide land managers with the tools for management practices in the future. In Utah volunteers are covering lots of ground on the Aquarius Plateau, to assess the upper reaches of the famed Escalante Watershed to assess potential habitat that would support the reintroduction of beavers. Several groups of youth from area reservations and as far away as the East Coast are keeping the legacy of traditional agriculture alive at North Leupp Family Farms on the Navajo Reservation. These young volunteers helped plant over 4 acres of desert-adapted heirloom seeds.


Together we are building a community of smart and committed land stewards dedicated to the future of the Colorado Plateau. This sentiment is best reflected by a comment from a recent volunteer: “My experience with Lauren and Joshua and others on the trip has rekindled my hope that there are too many of us kindred spirits to allow the short-sightedness of man to destroy the world we so love.”

There are many upcoming opportunities with Colorado Plateau springs as a spring steward volunteer. Check out our trip schedule to get in on the action!

Making Conservation Real-Unforgettable Landscapes and People

By Kate Watters

The country that we work in is unparalleled in its ability to wrench hearts over and over with its sweeping dramatic beauty. We follow the Rio de Flag until it flows into the Little Colorado River at North Leupp Family Farm, where we camp beneath old cottonwood trees and the San Francisco Peaks rise out of an endless plain. Storm clouds hover around them, while the Hopis and Navajos dance and pray for them to grace their fields with rain.

We traverse the Painted Desert of the Navajo reservation, passing the rolling hills of Chinle Shale and the corn fields along the sandy wash along the Echo Cliffs. We continue north to across the Colorado River where we watch condors glide off the Navajo Bridge. Turning west we traverse the House Rock Valley, through the heart of the Kane Ranch where we watch the way that the sun blazes its way across the Vermillion Cliffs. The Paria Plateau rises above to the north as a sandy island heading straight to the Grand Staircase Escalante and drops sharply into the silty ribbon of the Paria River and joins the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry.

We fall in love with the long, indigo blue slice of Kaibab Plateau, the mountain lying down, as the Paiute know it. It is our diving board into the Grand Canyon, where we traverse the equivalent of Baja, California to the top of the San Francisco Peaks in a hike from the North Rim to Phantom Ranch. Plants linger in hard-to-find places and springs offer refuge to wildlife and humans alike, and the glorious Colorado River cuts deep into the earth exposing the oldest rocks on the planet. On the west side of the Kaibab we are overpowered by the fragrance of cliffrose and daunted by a sea of invasive cheatgrass. Further west we encounter the fingers of the Kanab Creek watershed, named from the Paiute word for the willows that once flourished and today struggle to survive in a world dominated by invasive tamarisk trees.

The people we take with us are as diverse as the landscapes of the Plateau. Val is a veteran of the Vietnam War who lives between a piece of land in Chino Valley and out of his old truck in the forest and has gone on every trip for the last four years. Val has probably cut down more tamarisk trees in the Grand Canyon Watershed than anyone else. Levi is a 10-year-old boy from Phoenix found out about us by Googling “National Public Lands Day” and now he and his mother make mule deer habitat restoration trip an annual event. There are the newly retired folks who are ready to begin their next career in hydrology or botany, and recent transplants from the Midwest anxious to learn more about their new home. We take high school and college students from Chicago, West Virginia, Boston, Hopi, Apache and Navajoland on their first camping adventure.

Our job is to provide the opportunity for our volunteers to experience this landscape by rolling up their sleeves and becoming an active participant in the form of tangible, often physically challenging work. We taste the dust and sometimes wear the dirt for many days before washing. We feel the long days in the sun on our skin, our chapped lips, our bodies ache with new demands placed upon them. The energy it takes to get us there alone is sometimes the greatest adventure of all.

We share the stories that make this land come alive: the near extinction and reintroduction of the California condor; the rich human history and cultural legacies that continue to persist. We introduce people to their first buckwheat blooming in yellow extravagance and then feel their excitement when they are able to distinguish it from a snakeweed bush with the help of a hand lens that they proudly wear around their neck like a medal of honor. We discuss our philosophies of restoration in the shade of a pinyon tree.

We become connected to the dynamic places of the Colorado Plateau and to a larger community of people who have dedicated themselves to protecting it. JOIN US....

We hope to see you in the field in 2010!