Joe Alston resigns as Superintendent of GCNP.

[hikeaz]

Joe Alston announced his resignation to his staff today. Steve
Martin will be the new superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park,
effective February 2007. The rumor mill claims that NPS wanted to
move Joe to Washington, and he chose to resign rather than go.

From a position of stagnation and mistrust, Alston moved a variety
of competing parties through the river rafting planning process, completing the Colorado River Management Plan and beginning to institute the biggest change in river management in Grand Canyon since the early 1970s. Alston was a boater from his earliest days as a seasonal in Dinosaur National Monument on the river patrol, where he pulled off
one legendary contact with a well-known historian for camp-trashing,
and one legendary arrest of a murderer who had thrown the bodies of
two of his victims off Haystack Rock. His time as assistant superintendent at Glen Canyon, and his experience during the revision of the Dinosaur Plan several decades ago, made him an excellent choice for an area where Superintendents had exacerbated river management problems when they treated them at all.



Superintendent to-be, Steve Martin, who was a patrol ranger in Grand Canyon in the early part of his career, was (by all accounts) a strong voice in support of the river rafting planning process in Grand Canyon from his position in Washington.