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More Helicopter Tours Spark Contention in Utah's Backcountry

Pinnacle Helicopters
Moab experiencing more flight tours, causes concern amongst users.

Eight companies are approved to conduct scenic air tours over Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, including Redtail Aviation, which said it has tripled in size in the last 10 years. Two years ago, Pinnacle Helicopters was added to the mix.

At the time, operator Ben Black said he had no desire to fly within the canyons and wouldn’t go where hikers go.

Pinnacle is not permitted to fly over the parks, but has an already popular new tour that flies around the entire boundary of Arches. Black said helicopters are just one more machine in the areas that he flies.

“These are typically canyons that are already heavily impacted by Jeeps and ATVs and dirt bikes, places that have very much used trails. So if anybody goes into one of those canyons expecting some sort of natural quiet, and it’s been disturbed by a helicopter, that would be kind of an odd thing,” Black said.

There are local hikers and climbers who take issue with that, including Bill Love, who had an encounter at Fisher Towers.

“I was there camping at daybreak. They came across with the helicopters circling the towers. They circled the tower for about an hour, an hour and a half,” Love said.

Or local climber Kiley Miller.

“We were in Mineral Bottom, just outside the park, climbing on a tower down there on the other side of the Green River, and I heard the thump thump thump thump of them coming. They were definitely below the top of the canyon wall,” Miller said.

Eve Tallman is another climber from Moab who encountered a group of three helicopters near the Needles district of Canyonlands.

“I was pretty far back in a deep canyon and there was a helicopter that repeatedly flew below the rim, back and forth before us, and it was loud and distracting," Tallman said. "But more than that it seemed quite dangerous because there were dozens of climbers at the base of the cliffs, and if the helicopter had failed somehow it would have hurt or killed a lot of people.” 

It’s not always scenic flights. Local river guide John Weisheit was at the Canyon Rims area, overlooking the La Sal Mountains.

“We went for a hike and all of a sudden we see this big orange helicopter. Then we saw it again, and again, and again. What they were doing was hauling these big bundles of seismic gear. So it was an oil company and that was our first day, and the second day it happened again,” Weisheit said.

On Tripadvisor.com, Pinnacle’s satisfied customers confirm that they flew dramatically low and within the canyons. But there are no federal height restrictions, only recommendations, that say flights should be 2,000 feet above sensitive areas. That’s 2,000 feet above the canyon walls, not the canyon floor, but every pilot interprets things differently, including Ben Black.

“Some people think that helicopters are held to the same standards as planes. They’re not," Black said. "Helicopters, their altitude is limited by the discretion of the pilots. That is because of a helicopter’s ability to auto rotate. If a helicopter loses power you can put it down anywhere. So we are allowed to fly at a much lower altitude than planes.”

Kiley Miller remains convinced that helicopters are not just another multiple use vehicle.

“The impacts from helicopters or even scenic flights is just a totally different level of invasion in the back country," Miller said. "The quiet users are losing in all of this.”

Nationwide, air tours operate over the vast majority of national parks. They were only recently required to report numbers. In 2014 there were a reported 549 scenic flights over Canyonlands and Arches. 

Originally from Wyoming, Jon Kovash has practiced journalism throughout the intermountain west. He was editor of the student paper at Denver’s Metropolitan College and an early editor at the Aspen Daily News. He served as KOTO/Telluride’s news director for fifteen years, during which time he developed and produced Thin Air, an award-winning regional radio news magazine that ran on 20 community stations in the Four Corners states. In Utah his reports have been featured on KUER/SLC and KZMU/Moab. Kovash is a senior correspondent for Mountain Gazette and plays alto sax in “Moab’s largest garage band."