Paria Canyon Paroxysms: BLM website is the pits

Our troop plans to hike Paria Canyon during Spring Break in March.  Paria is a wonderful slot canyon that begins in Utah and comes out at Lees Ferry along the Colorado River in Arizona.  Hikers slosh along--often in the river--for 38 miles.  At its narrowest, the canyon is about 15 feet wide with sandstone walls that go up hundreds of feet.  A wonderful place, but not one to be caught in during a summertime flash flood.  That's one reason we go during Spring Break.


Paria, alas, has been on the cover of Backpacker magazine a couple of times, and the resulting upswing in hikers has caused the BLM to severely limit the number of people who can enter this delicate canyon at any given time to 20 per day.  I have no problem with that; Paria is a resource that should be protected.

I do have a big problem with the way reservations are handled.  Yesterday, the BLM opened up the month of March for reservations, and four individuals in our troop sat down to try to secure permits for three crews of 10 people each.  At noon, we all began filling out the web-based form.   Like many web ordering systems, this one has one of those "type-in-these-letters-for-security" deals.  No problem.

Until we tried to make it work.  Not one of us, using Apple or PCs with a variety of browsers, could make the security system work.  It was maddening.  I finally called a phone number and some nameless bureaucratic soul took pity on me and laboriously filled out three on-line forms, all containing the same information.  We got the permits.

The BLM's reservation system is a mess.  I can't even get on their website today.