How to Make Your Visit to the Grand Canyon Greener

If you’re aiming to make your overall travel a little greener in the future, and you’re also traveling to the Grand Canyon soon, you’ll want to pick your transportation and lodging options carefully. Two offerings from Xanterra can help.

For transportation, Xanterra’s Grand Canyon Railway takes travelers from Williams, Arizona, to the canyon’s South Rim, eliminating vehicle traffic from the park and getting you where you need to go in eco-friendly fashion. The train’s engines run on recycled waste vegetable oil from local restaurants, reducing emissions. For water, steam engines use rainwater and snow melt to avoid taking more of this valuable resource from the surrounding area.

Each journey recycles 1,200 gallons of used vegetable oil, and the use of rainwater and snow melt has reduced water consumption by 1.2 million gallons to date.

© Xanterra Travel Collection

When it’s time to pick a stay, Xanterra’s Grand Canyon National Park Lodges help the planet by feeding restaurant food scraps to the park’s famed trail mules. Then, the mules produce manure, which then goes to local farmers and plant nurseries, completing the cycle.

Each year, the lodges’ food scraps (and the donkeys, of course!) produce about 2 million pounds of manure.