The Grand Canyon's remote North Rim seems like a world away from its more famous South Rim, only a sliver of the nearly five million people who visit the national park each year make it here.
At 8,000 feet above sea level, the North Rim's broad plateaus that drop into the canyon are thickly forested with pine trees.
Businesses of any kind are few and far between, making places like the Jacob Lake Inn a sort of beacon in the wilderness. It offers the only fresh cookies for at least 25 miles in any direction, and on a recent bustling Sunday morning visitors lined up at the counter for these famous delicacies. One couple eagerly ordered a chocolate chip and a chocolate parfait, and for good measure, an apple turnover for breakfast.
But two months ago, it was very different scene at Jacob Lake. Employees, guests and residents were forced to hastily evacuate as a wildfire bore down.
Melinda Rich Marshall's great-grandparents opened the inn more than 100 years ago. The business, which also includes a restaurant and a gift shop filled with Native American jewelry and other curios, largely depends on visitors to the national park. Over the years it has seen its share of wildfires.
"In my lifetime, I can think of, like, six that have created economic problems for our family and for Jacob Lake," says Rich Marshall.
Days after they evacuated, a second blaze, the Dragon Bravo Fire, exploded in size, closing the North Rim indefinitely. Rich Marshall says she's had to refund about $350,000 in reservations.
"We don't even know how to imagine what the winter's going to be like because we don't know how we're going to actually make it through financially," she says. "Right now, we're just really trying to be creative just like our ancestors were."
Scores of local businesses in northern Arizona's national park gateway communities like Jacob Lake have felt the pinch after a particularly damaging wildfire season. More than 200,000 acres burned on the north side of the Grand Canyon alone in July and August. Rich Marshall and others are pressing officials to reopen some North Rim viewpoints in hopes for a return of tourists this fall.
But the ecological affects of the Dragon Bravo Fire may be less dire than initially feared.
'Good for forest health'
"When we came into this, we were expecting to look at devastation," says TJ Clifford, who led a crew of federal specialists known as a Burned Area Emergency Response Team. "So, I was more buoyant as soon as I flew over it and said, 'Okay, we can do this.'"
The BAER Team includes soil specialists, botanists, wildlife biologists and others who assess a wide variety of possible wildfire damage to the national park and adjacent national forest. Clifford says their analysis found that nearly three-quarters of the area inside the Dragon Bravo Fire's perimeter either did not burn or burned at a low severity. And while some stretches do resemble a moonscape with charred vegetation and thick ash coating the ground, he expects most of the area to recover quickly.
"My overall opinion is this was a good tool for forest health," he says. "It's providing the diversity that we need out there. It's also showing that past fuels treatments and past wildfire did a good thing for preventing that devastating impact."
Fire managers in the West often let lightning-caused wildfires burn under certain conditions for forest health, as they did early on with the Dragon Bravo Fire, which was ignited by lightning on July 4. In social media posts and public statements at the time, the National Park Service said it was using what it called a "confine and contain strategy."
But when the weather shifted a week later, historically dry and windy conditions caused the fire to blow up. It destroyed the century-old Grand Canyon Lodge perched on the North Rim along with employee housing and more than 100 park structures. Arizona's elected leaders quickly called for investigations, but some say they are still waiting for answers.
"At this point, we have not received any information or any response that makes us think that they're even really fully grasping what occurred and how it occurred," says Arizona Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego.
In July he and Democratic Senator Mark Kelly wrote a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum demanding answers about management of the fire. Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona has also requested more information and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has called for an independent investigation.
"The administration and the National Park Service really needs to answer what happened so we could potentially stop this from happening in the future," says Gallego.
Since the lodge burned, Park Service officials have said they intended to fully suppress the Dragon Bravo Fire from the start. And even though it is now all but extinguished, fire managers still have not declared it fully contained. In all, it has burned 145,000 acres and has cost nearly $130 million to fight.
The Park Service would not agree to an interview for this story.
But in an emailed statement, Grand Canyon National Park Public Affairs Officer Joëlle Baird said, "An interagency review team will be delegated the task to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the fire's management and operational response. These national-level reviews are thorough and can take months to complete."
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