The Grand Canyon Has a Water Problem
February 22, 2026
On July 4, 2025, around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, just as Americans were gearing up for a night of hot dogs and fireworks, a lightning strike on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park caused a spark that would soon grow into flames. For three months, hotshots battled the Dragon Bravo Fire—named for a nearby rock formation—under extremely difficult circumstances. High winds on July 11 whipped the blaze across several hundred acres, igniting lodges, a sewage treatment facility, and other crucial infrastructure in the national park. By the time the last embers were extinguished in late September, 145,504 acres were burned, and Grand Canyon officials were left to clean up the one of the worst natural disasters in the park’s history.
Among the casualties were historic buildings and employee housing on the North Rim, including the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge. In the fire’s aftermath, extensive burn scars left large portions of the landscape vulnerable to rockfall, debris flows, and flash flooding during monsoon storms. Portions of the North Kaibab Trail, the main trail that winds more than 14 miles from the North Rim down to the Colorado River, grew more treacherous as burned trees turned into widow-makers and fire-weakened slopes destabilized. Much of the North Rim, the park announced in January, would remain closed until at least May 15.
But one of the most consequential impacts of the Dragon Bravo Fire was its effect on the park’s water. Nearly all potable water for the South Rim and Inner Canyon corridor has historically come from Roaring Springs, a cave-fed spring system on the North Rim supplied by snowmelt and rain on the Kaibab Plateau and delivered through the 12.5-mile Transcanyon Waterline. That system, says the park, provides the drinking water for more than 5 million visitors a year, plus about 2,500 resident park employees.