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Someone in a private message to me in July felt this fire was a result of dei hires. I discounted this at the time, but could he have been correct?

I know nothing about the identity of the people who made the management decisions over the days leading up to the lodge being urban renewed, but there definitely seems to have been either a high level of incompetence, or a strong desire to push the limits of acceptable burn parameters.

If the public was more rational, and the NPS had the resources, perhaps this sort of thing would not have happened the way it did as the forest between the fire origin and the lodge would have been actively managed, both making it easier to have a managed wildfire and suppress when it became riskier with the wind increases and humidity drop.

Jim
Yes, perhaps white male park superintendent Ed Keable, appointed by Trump's administration in 2020, was indeed a DEI hire.

Jim
NPS calls the shots here, and all responsibility here ultimately bubbles up to the park superintendent.

From the MSN article:

Smith said he was unable to answer their questions about the fire’s early days because he wasn't there. He was assigned to work on the blaze weeks later, starting July 30.

Instead, those decisions were up to leaders like Keable, the park superintendent. Residents asked to hear from Keable, but he did not attend the community meeting.

...

Keable was out of the office at the time of the Page meeting. The park superindent said he left for a preplanned annual leave 23 days after the lodge burned. Keable said he had worked the first weeks of the fire for 12-18 hours a day.

So yes, if there's a "DEI hire" to blame here, it's Ed Keable.

@Jim
I looked into the background of the Keable individual who is the Grand Canyon Park Superintendent. I expected to find that he had extensive experience in park and forest management. Instead, he had no such experience at all.

For the last 23 years Keable was a government attorney in Washington DC. Keable has said that he has a "social justice focus" and that among his priorities in the Grand Canyon are"social justice for indigenous peoples" and studying the inpact of climate change on the humpback chub and the razorback sucker.

I could see someone like Keable becoming superintendent of say the Gateway Arch National Park in downtown St. Louis, but not to a park as important as the Grand Canyon.

Nonetheless Keable and his husband left Washington DC and headed to Arizona.

Draw your own conclusion as to whether or not this is a merit based hire. What is clear is that a devastating and grossly mismanaged fire took place at the North Rim under Keable's watch....but at least the name "Indian Garden" has been changed, which to date is Keable's crowning achievement

@DixieFlyer
It seems that in addition to not exactly being someone you or I might think was in his element, national park travelers thought he was not a likely choice, as well.

Outwardly, Keable seems an unlikely choice for the job as he has no on-the-ground experience with the Park Service. Indeed, the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks attacked his appointment, saying the lawyer "is not qualified to manage and lead a complicated park such as the Grand Canyon. While Mr. Keable may possess the ‘passion’ and ‘leadership skills’ that Acting Director (David) Vela referenced in his statement, it does not mean that Mr. Keable has the knowledge, skills, and ability to be superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the most high-profile, complex, and heavily visited national park operations in the System."

But the 1.2-million-acre Grand Canyon is not just any park in the National Park System.

https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2 ... enging-job

This appointment comes after a prior super who may also have been a dei hire, had quite a bit of controversy around her. You can follow the article links if you want.

Even still, when I wrote about a dei hire causing this, I was and still am thinking that the person or persons managing the fire from July 4 to the 11th or 12th, may not have been the right person for the job. If the fire's use in that area was against the park management plan, why? Why was it done so sloppily? That really doesn't sound like the work of someone with 15 or 20 years of experience on the ground running a fire. That sounds a lot more like someone thrust into a position who didn't know what they were doing and who might have been trying to do something to prove themselves, but didn't know when to change course. Was Keable part of this? More information is required to answer that. It is laughable to believe he was out on the fire actively giving orders, though.


Oh, here is Ed's Alumni Spotlight article:
https://www.vermontlaw.edu/blog/ed-keable

A quick read leaves one with the impression that he knew all the right buzzwords and said all the correct things to be given a dei posting for a job where he had no prior experience. Being a lawyer isn't the same as being a manager in a park for 10 or 15+ years. This should be the top of the career for someone who spent decades in the National Parks, not:

Keable had spent seven years as a staff attorney in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Generals’ Corps; six years as a staff attorney with DOI’s legal office; and seventeen years leading DOI’s legal office in three different positions, serving at the pleasure of the secretary. Upon entering Bernhardt’s office that day, Keable was greeted with a major opportunity—an offer to become the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

His legacy will read, “He destroyed the North Rim, but gave us a second Havasu.” lol

Social justice: Achieved!

Not that it makes any difference regarding the topic, but I have met Ed Keable several times and talked to him. He goes on a river trip every year, and I was always involved in transporting his group. He is very likeable. Appointed as an outsider, for a reason, during the previous Trump Administration. The park needed an outsider, in my opinion. I don't know if the fire was his fault or not but, I'm pretty sure that fire managers make those decisions, not superintendents. Correct me if I'm wrong.

azbackpackr wrote: ↑Aug 28 2025 9:10 am Not that it makes any difference regarding the topic, but I have met Ed Keable several times and talked to him. He goes on a river trip every year, and I was always involved in transporting his group. He is very likeable. Appointed as an outsider, for a reason, during the previous Trump Administration. The park needed an outsider, in my opinion. I don't know if the fire was his fault or not but, I'm pretty sure that fire managers make those decisions, not superintendents. Correct me if I'm wrong.

He may have technically made the final sign-off, but as an outsider he most likely followed the advice of those represented to him (by themselves or others) as being subject matter experts.

There are some consequences when you root out members of the so-called deep state who have a lifetime of knowledge and experience across many functions of government and replace them with people who align with a political worldview (or just worship you). It's not currently en vogue, but putting people in charge of agencies who are specialists in the field they are tasked with managing seems like a good idea to me.

Keable seems to be an easy target here though (the guy at the top usually is), but I agree with Jim here — it seems unlikely that Keable was making the decisions about how to fight this fire, and was more likely to have been Ed Waldron or somebody on his staff. Ed, for anybody who thinks it's relevant, has a wife . He was also previously employed in fire management roles at Crater Lake NP, Big Bend NP, and Zion NP. None of which preclude him from making poor decisions or following the park's fire management plan to which he signed his name.

If you read the chain, it should be clear that the focus shifted to Keable as a result of the "Chief Defender of the Faith" insisting that Keable and Keable alone, was the dei hire. This was obviously a deflection by making it seem that Keable simply couldn't be due to his being a white man appointed during Trump's first term, even though evidence suggests that by checking lots of the usual boxes he very well may have been. Outsider or not, he was a choice that others not on this board though was questionable. That an outsider was wanted, doesn't actually do much to suggest the NPS has lots of well qualified staff, since his predecessor came from San Francisco and wasn't someone promoted from the South RIm office, and there appear to be decades of issues at GCNP.

Back to the entire point of this. As stated, several times, the incident manager is who I look to for fire management decisions. Not the Park Superintendent. There likely is a fire officer in the park C-suite or whatever equivalent they have, who communicates to the Park Super, but the incident manager should be the individual(s) making the decisions on the ground as conditions change through-out the day. Conditions like erratic high winds, low humidities, high temperatures, fuel loads, fuel moisture content, proximity to the developed areas, those sorts of things that should have factored into a decision to change from a managed fire to a suppression event.

I can just imagine the communications threads--
Guys on the line-- Hey, WTF this thing is getting ready to blow the F up! It's too dry and we don't have resources!
Middle Management guy to the line: Ok, hold on, the weather report is not that bad and it's only a few acres yet.
Middle Management guy to upper management-- It's going great! You'll be able to record that we successfully fire treated X number of acres!
Upper management to middle-- Looks good, let us know how it goes and what you need
Middle management-- we're good
Guys on the line-- well its all f'd now
Middle management-- What do you mean!
Guys on the line-- The lodge and the North Rim facilities burned down
Middle management--WTF!! WTH!!
Upper management to middle management-- WTF!! WTH!!
PR-- working overtime to crank out the CYA media notices.

Jim
I'm basically just asking you to provide some evidence for your absurd claim that a "DEI hire" caused this. These are clearly all white men calling the shots here. Do you just use that term as a catch-all for anybody whose ideology doesn't align with your own? Perhaps the problem here was a lack of diversity in opinions resulting in nobody challenging the decisions that were being made.

@ShatteredArm
A white guy can't be a DEI hire?? Clearly you hadn't met a couple of my old bosses. In that they got their positions not thru their intelligence, capability and job strengths.

@RedRoxx44
Which part of "Diversity, equity, and inclusivity" would you call an old, incompetent white guy? The point of DEI is to give someone else a chance instead of those old bosses. So no, by definition a white guy can't be a "DEI hire" unless we're using a completely arbitrary definition of the term.

@ShatteredArm
I guess I view DEI as competency not cultural, racial. My people were often referred to as "poor white trash"; and worked very hard to improve and make their way on their own merits. I guess I believe in is it meritocracy over DEI?? What does it matter the background or appearance of a person if they are not qualified.

@RedRoxx44
DEI in its pure form is meritocracy. That's the "equity" part. In my experience, the people who feel threatened by DEI are the white males who believe they are entitled to an unfair advantage. I work for a large company that I would say is pro-DEI, and I have never once been told to consider race or gender in making a hiring recommendation. The idea that underqualified people are being hired because they're minorities is largely a myth.