Only days after finishing the 2008 Main Lottery, Grand Canyon National Park announced June 6, 2007, that there will be another River Lottery for 10 cancelled trips launching this year. The first trip will launch in 7 weeks. This lottery began today and will run through noon on June 12, 2007. According to the National Park Service, the lottery drawings will take place on June 13th.
The trips offered include 3 launch dates which are for half size groups (1 to 8 people) and are on July 29, 2007, August 8 and 18, 2007, and 7 trips for standard size groups (1 to 16 people) and which are on August 11, 18, and 27, 2007, September 5, 2007, November 1, and 24 2007, and December 29, 2007.
Interested individuals must have set up a profile with Grand Canyon National Park to be eligible to apply for the lottery. The lottery is also off limits to any participant "of other noncommercial or commercial trips launching in calendar year 2008", excluding paid commercial staff.
River Runners for Wilderness continues to offer lottery assistance through email and a phone hotline for the daunting 25 webpage sign-up and lottery application process. The RRFW telephone assistance Help-line is available at (928) 856-9065 throughout this lottery, on a first-come first-serve basis. Additionally, lottery applicants can refer to the RRFW online lottery tutorial, available for download as an Adobe PDF file of 9.5MB at
http://www.rrfw.org/lotteryguide/ by clicking on the link Lottery Primer.
The Grand Canyon River Permits Office also offers help at 1-800-959-9164 or by email to grca_riv@nps.gov.
Statistics on the just completed 2008 lottery released by Grand Canyon National Park show that for December, 2008, there were 64 attempts to win the 29 full sized trip dates offered. Five of the December dates had no applications at all.
This is in stark contrast with June, 2008, which offered 8 standard trips and 8 half sized trips. Here, there were 1,771 attempts to win one of the 8 standard trips, and 270 tries seeking the 8 half sized trips.
River Runners for Wilderness has brought suit against Grand Canyon National Park for ignoring wilderness protection mandates for the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, and for the continued inequitable distribution of permits to self guided river runners. Intervening against the litigation are the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Trade Association and the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association.