Grand Canyon National Park moves to Stage 2 fire restrictions on June 21st

This morning saw a move by Grand Canyon National Park to Stage 2 fire restrictions, effectively squashing campfires of any kind – anywhere – within the park’s over 1.2 million acres.

That means not just restrictions on backcountry camping, that’s on all established campgrounds, too, from Mather, Desert View, and Tusayan Montane on the South Rim across the way to DeMotte on the North Rim. The restrictions aren’t just for your classic wood campfires, either – they include charcoal grills while in camp, while also expand to simply smoking cigarettes outdoors or running gas generators at your RV campground.

The entirety of the rules are laid out in the National Park Service’s press release, which notes the Stage 2 restrictions begin today (June 21st) at 8 AM local time and have no set expiration.

The move to these restrictions comes as Coconino County, Arizona is experiencing abnormal and moderate levels of drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. While that is far from the most extreme level of drought they could be experiencing, it’s dry enough there for the Sayer Fire – currently burning over 1,000 acres with limited containment some 20 miles south of Tusayan in the Kaibab National Forest – to have ignited on Sunday of this week.

The Sayer Fire just south of the park comes on the heels of the now-contained Black Fire just northwest of the park, which was thwarted by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) fire crews within the last month at just 77 acres.

Temperatures in nearby Tusayan are supposed to push 90 degrees with no cold front in sight for the next two weeks, and there’s no predictable, moving weather system that’s going to bring rain with any certainty beyond thunderstorms – and those are known fire starters themselves. In other words, the hot, dry desert has entered it’s hot & dry stage this first day of summer, and the NPS is asking those recreating in the park to take the most drastic of actions to help quell the chance of fire spreading within the park.

You can still go to Grand Canyon! You can still camp, stare at the Milky Way, enjoy the depths of the canyon during sunlight hours, and even cook over your gas stove! Just know that you won’t be able to have a ‘campfire’ in its classic sense for the time being in order to help limit our human impact on the tinder box the park has become for the time being.