Kelly Burke-BIO PAGE
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By Brandon Loomis for The Arizona Republic (May 2026)
Maybe it was inevitable that Kelly Burke would fall in love with the Grand Canyon and then spend decades helping to protect it and the vast wildlands surrounding the national park. She had moved to Flagstaff and Northern Arizona University in 1986 to complete a master’s in geology, a pursuit custom-made for drawing inspiration from the famed chasm north of town — colorful rocks laid down in sedimentary deposits and volcanic flows and cut through by the awesome power of the Colorado River. And Burke, the daughter of a hard-rock miner, clearly was a fan of big Western landscapes, having grown up in Colorado traveling “in the backpack,” she said, “until I could carry the backpack.” She started college at Smith, but couldn't stay in the East. It all portended a life outdoors.
Nonetheless, it was a series of serendipitous visits to the river and then deep into the canyon that led her to the places and people who would connect her with her life’s work. The first occurred when she had finished her graduate coursework but still needed some income to sustain her push to finish a thesis. Someone was going on a river trip and needed a shuttle driver, a gig she accepted and that gave her a first glimpse of the magical red sandstones and the churning Paria Riffle downstream from the Lees Ferry boat launch.
Sitting in the shade there for an interview this March, Burke, 65, gazed out at that same Colorado River riffle — and then toward the greenery of a beach restoration that her organization, then known as Grand Canyons Wildlands Council, completed earlier this decade.
Cottonwood leaves fluttered in the breeze, the product of natural germination from a previous restoration she had spearheaded to replace non-native trees nearer the boat launch. Such natural tree generation has been rare since Glen Canyon Dam altered the flows and the ecosystem in the early 1960s. Her work at Lees Ferry will give river runners a more natural entry into Grand Canyon for years, whether they think about it or not. The riffle is one that she had bumped along on in a raft countless times after that first shuttle job. A pioneering river guide named Kim Claypool, one of a few women working the canyon in the 1980s, had rented her a room and then taught her the life. She ended up crewing for science trips, sometimes spending 200 days a year on the water.
She also worked to remove invasive tamarisk and restore native vegetation in dozens of tributary streams within the canyon, in places less affected by the dam and therefore more hospitable to natural regeneration. “This is one of my favorite places on the planet,” Burke said at Paria Beach. “It’s kind of a gateway to the canyon. You go through that riffle and you get the feel of the canyon. For me, it’s always (like) I’m home again.”
How science has guided Canyon land protections
Burke would become so at home in Grand Canyon that it felt like things were in order only during a river trip. “Your life is total chaos when you’re in town,” she said. And on the river she would learn from an ecologist and from a river ranger who eventually would join her in co-founding the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council — recently renamed Southwest Wildlands. They dedicated it to the goal of creating a network of connected lands for flora and fauna, the same concept that underpinned a group then called the Wildlands Project, which ultimately split into two groups, the Wildlands Network and the Rewilding Institute.
One was Larry Stevens, an ecologist who back then was studying the effects of Glen Canyon Dam operations on river sediment and beaches. The other was Kim Crumbo, a river ranger turned wilderness coordinator who wrote what he hoped would become a first wilderness plan for the national park. It was never adopted, but Crumbo went on to a renowned conservation career, including with the Rewilding Institute, before he went missing during a Yellowstone canoe trip in 2021.
The friends formed their Grand Canyon group with the goal of using science to underpin a widening patchwork of land protections around the park. They mapped critical wildlife habitats and migration corridors, Burke said, and those maps became the basis for national monuments that President Bill Clinton designated on more than 1 million acres: Grand Canyon-Parashant and Vermilion Cliffs (the latter rising to block the western horizon from Lees Ferry).
Those monuments provide safe haven for endangered condors, maintain a migration route for Arizona’s Kaibab deer herd to reach Utah’s Grand Staircase country, and buffer a transition zone from the Colorado Plateau to the basin-and-range features to the northwest, Burke said.
The monument boundaries drew heavily on the group’s science, which Burke said helped convince Clinton’s interior secretary, former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt. The research showed, among other things, that a north-south orientation for Grand Canyon-Parashant would protect important hawk migration zones.
“It was very compelling,” she said.
Cottonwood trees are signs of hard work
Stevens said he has worked more than half a century in the canyon and had never seen natural cottonwood generation in the dam-afflicted river corridor until trees sprung up on Paria Beach after the Lees Ferry restoration. Other native plants and shrubs took their time emerging on the beach’s upland side after being dispersed by Page High School students, then exploded into a thicket after the first good monsoon season.
All of it was possible only because Burke made it happen, he said. She was the organizational thread that had always kept the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council going, partly because she knew how to write grants from her days of trying to get by as a young grad student.
“Kelly is soft-spoken and very dedicated to the issues of species and habitat protection in Grand Canyon and throughout the Southwest,” Stevens said.
Cottonwood trees and other vegetation are signs of a beach restoration project at Paria Beach near Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. After their first trip together on the river, Burke eventually graduated from river crew to river science when she got work with the U.S. Geological Survey and then under contract with the Bureau of Reclamation in the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies program that the government created to measure the dam’s effects in the 1980s.
After adoption of the Grand Canyon Protection Act in the 1990s, that program would become the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program, a Reclamation-led interdisciplinary effort to offset the dam’s environmental damage. It’s the program that periodically recommends opening the dam’s bypass tubes to generate floods that churn up sand to rebuild canyon beaches, or altering river flows to benefit fish, insects or other resources.
'A passionate advocate for Grand Canyon'
Burke has long since left government work for a career in conservation advocacy, but both she and Stevens still represent environmental interests on the program’s advisory committees.
Burke’s and Stevens’s contributions to the adaptive management program have helped build trust among interest groups and put science first in discussions of river management, said Lynn Hamilton, executive director of the Grand Canyon River Guides, a nonprofit educational and environmental group. Hamilton has known Burke since they both attended the University of California in the early '80s.
“She’s brilliant,” Hamilton said. “She is such a passionate advocate for Grand Canyon, for the wildlife, for every aspect of it.”
A recent conservation win, and one of Burke’s proudest, came when President Joe Biden designated about a million more acres north and south of Grand Canyon as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in 2023. Crumbo had proposed it before his death, she said, and it was the fulfillment of long desires to protect lands and waters that environmentalists and tribes, including the Havasupai, feared could be tainted by future uranium mining.
Cottonwood trees and other vegetation are signs of a beach restoration project at Paria Beach near Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. That monument angered Mohave County officials and led Arizona Republican leaders to call for a reversal by President Donald Trump, similar to how he had downsized Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante at Utah’s request during his first term. Burke acknowledged that there’s great concern among conservationists, but said it’s important to keep working “proactively” for a future of protected wildlands. That’s how she and her colleagues had always approached mapping out sustainable ecosystems for the region.
“It’s really always about hope,” she said.
It was sad that Crumbo didn’t live to see his proposal enacted, Burke said, but none of them were ever destined to see their goal of protecting the region and its people 100 years in the future. Conservation measures sometimes generate pushback requiring still more work.
“We don’t get to see the last episode of the season,” Burke said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to go into this total defensive mode.”
'Be a part of the mystery' of this planet
Today Burke focuses some of her attention on pushing conservation even farther afield from Grand Canyon. The goal is to develop a trail and associated land protections along the rocky, forested Mogollon Rim to connect Grand Canyon with the Gila Wilderness in western New Mexico. There’s a history of ocelots and jaguars in that wild country, and preserving it would further the goal of protecting the Southwest’s biodiversity. It’s part of the reason the group’s name has changed to more broadly represent the Southwest. She also works part-time for the Rewilding Institute, a group with similar goals.
“That is an amazing corridor. It’s where (Mexican) gray wolves are, coming up this way,” Burke said. “You’re just following this pattern of life.”
Burke made her last trip down-river in 2009, hiking in to meet boats on a mission to transplant native fish, humpback chubs, at Shinumo Creek. Since then, a multiple sclerosis diagnosis has ended both her hiking adventures and her time on rafts. She walks with the aid of two hiking poles and she stays off cold water, which causes her leg to stiffen if she falls in.
Multiple sclerosis also contributed to her decision to leave Flagstaff after 35 years, because she developed temperature sensitivities, with cold bothering her more than heat. She moved to Rimrock in the Verde Valley, a lower-elevation area that’s also closer to a horse she boards and rides in that valley.
The transplanted chubs at Shinumo fell victim to ash flows following a subsequent wildfire. Still, the experience of putting them there is a favorite memory because of what it represented: hope.
It’s what she said she gets a renewed dose of every time she visits her neurologist to discuss how she’s holding up. It’s what drives her to keep working for land protections. And it’s what she recommends to young conservationists just starting out, along with a commitment to getting out and enjoying the real world.
It can be a serendipitous path that leads to a life of wonder and great partnerships.
“Have fun. Live life. We have this incredible planet,” she said, and it needs people who revel in and protect its majesty. “If you can be a part of keeping that going, be a part of the mystery of this wild planet, do that. It’ll be fun.”
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at [email protected].
