Evolution of Grand Canyon Science: Jan Balsom

So when you look at the history of science in the Grand Canyon, it was so focused on geology.

Yes.

And on landscapes and on forests.

The archaeology was an afterthought.

Nobody considered it something important.

So it was a bit of a struggle even to get recognized.

At one point in my first season, They didn't have enough money and they needed either to get a mapping tool, an Allidade fixed, or to be able to provide salary for me.

And it was a choice between do we keep her hired or do we get the equipment fixed? And my supervisor at the time said, well, we could get the equipment fixed, but if we don't have her to use it, it's kind of useless.

So we kind of need both.

Um, so there wasn't much of a interest.

Uh, Bob Euler was the parts anthropologist.

They had finally gotten a permanent archaeologist and that was Tranquil Jones.

Um, and I was like, they were, I was their first seasonal.

Um,

so there wasn't a lot of attention paid to that.

It was really a lot of work on, um, natural resources, on wildlife, on geology, although the park didn't even have a park geologist at that point in time.

And the only reason there was an archaeologist is because of the National Historic Preservation Act and the legal compliance requirements.

So there wasn't a lot of focus on science at all.

The resource management staff was tiny, kind of stuck in the back of a trailer a building at the clinic at the wherever they could find a place and there wasn't the thought that we were managing the park with resource values was something that seemed to be a little foreign to the managers in the 70s and 80s and 80s when I started and it started to grow with more and more environmental concerns and it really came to a and about the forefront with the high water of 1983 with operations and dams, which all of a sudden laser focused folks on what was going on ecologically.

They'd been looking at some of the stuff on the river.

They did a river management plan in the late 70s They started understanding the values of wilderness and motors in the wilderness and the effects of those things.

And some of the earlier work in the 70s, really, you go from like the John Wesley Powell, the early USGS, the bird's eye expeditions, all that stuff done nothing.

And then all of a sudden you've got resurgence nationwide of the interest in wilderness, of recreational values, of non-use values, just the fact that places exist.

of the ecological systems and the fact that you can't take one piece without the other.

Let's get rid of all the predators.