Grand Canyon mainstay taking down its shingle

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — At a time when tourists visited the Grand Canyon in stagecoaches, they did their souvenir shopping at a tent set up by a man named John George Verkamp.

It was 1898, before the Grand Canyon was a national park, before there was a National Park Service and before Arizona was even a state. Not many had the means to visit the mile-deep gorge, so it was mostly just a handful of adventurers, prospectors, the American Indians whose people had lived there for centuries, and the Verkamps.

These days, the Grand Canyon has luxury lodges and cute coffee shops. The only thing it won't have come September is the Verkamps.

The family's final chapter at the canyon began in 1998, when Congress passed a law that reversed giving preference to established businesses when issuing contracts. A company that had never operated at a given park now could outbid anyone if it had a better proposal — even if the competition had been there for more than a century.

The Verkamps scrambled, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on appraisals, environmental consultants, financial advisers and lawyers — all in an effort to prepare to face off against major corporations that could vie to run the gift shop Verkamp opened in a permanent building on the South Rim in 1906.

When the National Park Service issued the store's final prospectus last July, the family chose to give in to what they call "bureaucratic process fatigue."

"There's just so many hoops to do what you've always been doing," said Susie Verkamp, the 60-year-old granddaughter of John George Verkamp. "It kind of wears you out."

Susie Verkamp said there also was really no one left in the family to run the shop, which has been managed by someone other than a family member since 1995, although the Verkamps have maintained an active involvement.

Park Service spokesman Jeffrey Olson said the 1998 law shows the public that there is no favoritism in issuing contracts to concessionaires.

He acknowledged that not everybody is happy with the law but said small businesses shouldn't lose sight of their own advantages.

"If I were a big business going up against somebody who had been in business for generations, I don't know that I would think I had this thing in the bag," he said. "Incumbency, when you talk about political circles, has a lot of weight."