The Grand Canyon closed Wednesday after local health officials raised concerns about its continued operations at a time when venues are closed and pressure mounts for national parks to halt operations to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The National Park Service said it closed one of the top tourist destinations in America until further notice after receiving a letter from officials in Coconino County, Ariz.
“As soon as we received the letter from the Health and Human Services Director and Chief Health Officer for Coconino County recommending the closure of Grand Canyon National Park, we closed the park,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.
The move comes after a Grand Canyon park employee tested positive for the virus and was then been put in isolation, Grand Canyon Acting Superintendent Mary Risser said in a message relayed by the Tusayan Fire Department.
The action follows a letter this week from 10 members of Congress, including House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) expressing concern that one of the most visited parks in the country was still open.
Grijalva said this week that he believed the park should be closed, saying, “Why expose both the public and the workforce of the park to the situation of this virus?”
Local officials, including a county chief health officer wrote to the Grand Canyon’s superintendent last week with “extreme concern for any decision to keep the Grand Canyon National Park open in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Coconino County, Ariz., Board Chair Liz Archuleta said in an interview that the county had been in “constant contact” with the federal government to advocate for the park’s closure.
She said that she was “pleased” with today’s decision to close the park, but prior to that “it was difficult to hear that the Grand Canyon was not closing as each day went by because people are being put at risk.”
Acting Grand Canyon Superintendent Mary Risser recently said that a Grand Canyon Village resident tested positive in a statement shared through the fire department in Tusayan, Ariz.
A number of other national parks and monuments, including Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty, have already closed, and the NPS has said decisions about whether to close parks are being made on a “park-by-park basis by the respective superintendent.”
