Grand Canyon River Trips

Out on the river, with the sheer, many-colored cliffs of the Grand Canyon looming overhead, one woman said she felt terror as a fellow National Park Service employee yelled at her drunkenly, an ax in one of his hands.

Another woman recalled how a supervisor harassed and belittled her after she rejected his attempts to flirt. He questioned her abilities in front of colleagues, insisting she should never have been hired. And she thought that he was the one who placed ammunition cans filled with human waste outside her tent.

Still more claimed that one of the boatmen on their team would refuse to take them to their work sites if they rejected his sexual advances. One employee even said that the boatman withheld food from those who refused him.

Women on these Park Service boat trips, that employee told Interior Department investigators, were forced to “walk the line” between “not being hated and not being desired.” It was a near impossible balancing act.

These details come from a federal investigation into allegations of harassment on National Park Service river trips through the Grand Canyon. A report published Tuesday found “evidence of a long-term pattern of sexual harassment and hostile work environment” for at least 19 people during these trips at one of America’s most spectacular natural wonders, as boatmen and a supervisor pressured female colleagues for sex and retaliated against some who refused or reported them.

The long river trips — which are used for a combination of research, education and maintenance of trails and shorelines and staffed by a mix of Grand Canyon National Park employees and outside contractors — were known for their “laissez faire” culture, one human resources manager told federal investigators. There was a sense that, “what happens on the river, stays on the river, ” she said.

Co-workers would spend weeks at a time on the narrow waterway that snakes between the Grand Canyon’s towering walls, cut off from cellphone service and most signs of civilization and with no one to interact with but each other.

Another human resources specialist said that the park was a “good ol’ boy network” and that female victims of misconduct had a hard time getting their complaints taken seriously.