On the western slope of Arizona’s highest landmark, Humphreys Peak, and approximately 4.8 miles from its 12,633-foot-tall summit, rests the skeleton of a 777-acre-wide ski resort.

The Arizona Snowbowl, a piece of engineering made up of eight lifts that serve 61 runs, is beloved by some but resented by others. It’s been torn between these two sides since 1938, the year it first started serving skiers from Arizona and beyond on its groomed runs, tree-lined back bowls and terrain parks.

Flagstaff meteorologist Mark Stubblefield has been riding the Snowbowl’s slopes almost every winter since 1987. He explained he loves the chance to ski in what he now considers his hometown, but in 2012 something sparked a little concern in his thoughts.

“One day, I went up there when they were making snow and I was hit by the sprinkles of water that were in the air,” Stubblefield said. “And I thought, do I really want to be breathing this stuff?” 

Eventually, he dismissed the nagging doubt by reminding himself that, on that night, he had breathed in Class A+ water, reclaimed water of the highest quality, certified by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. In his mind, it was still better than most water sources around the world.

The stuff Stubblefield refers to is partially treated sewage water, also known as effluent, that the City of Flagstaff agreed to provide to the Arizona Snowbowl in 2002 for making artificial snow. 

Three years later, in 2005, the U.S. Forest Service made a decision that outraged 13 of the oldest Indigenous tribes in North America, including the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Havasupai, Yavapai-Apache, White Mountain Apache, Tonto Apache and Zuni.

That decision was to officially approve the Snowbowl’s use of disinfected wastewater, treated for 18–24 hours at Flagstaff’s Rio de Flag Sewage Treatment Plant to make snow for its ski slopes. At the treatment plant, even as brown water moves through the clarifying tanks, a strong toilet-like smell still lingers in the air. Once a 14.8-mile pipeline was completed to carry the treated sewage water beneath the mountain’s trails, snowmaking began. However, the land used for this snowmaking, the volcanic San Francisco Peaks (Sierra de San Francisco) is sacred to those 13 Native tribes, who have worshiped it for generations.

“The Earth, with its air, water, food, soil and living trees, and this Mountain, are my extended family,” Navajo rights activist Cora Maxx-Phillips said. “We need to protect it.”

“My ancestors have shed tears, like I do, saying that this place is holy and it’s sacred, nobody paid attention, and they left this world with their tears,” Phillips said. “To this day, we’re still shedding tears but we will never give up, that’s who we are as Indigenous Nations.” 

Called Dook’oʼoosłííd in Diné Bizaad, Nuva’tukya’ovi in Hopìikwa and Sunha K’hak’a in Zuni, the range of peaks is a living, breathing, life-giving force for these tribes, who hold it in their hearts with deep spiritual, cultural and physical meaning. 

“This mountain has so much strength that it brings all the clouds in, and then it rains here,” Navajo rights activist Shawn Mulford said. Dook’oʼoosłííd, for instance, like a woman, adorned with a crown of clouds or snow, brings moisture, therefore life to the sacred land. 

“These mountains are beacons,” Dianna Sue White Dove Ukualla said. She’s among the last Havasupai still living 3,000 feet below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Ukualla’s people are the “Guardians of the Grand Canyon,” she said, having shaped it for more than 800 years. “These Mountains, the Peaks, grow a lot of medicine, and these white trees are powerful trees in our ways, of the Supai people,” Ukualla said, pointing to the white-barked Aspens bordering the boundary of the Arizona Snowbowl. 

Ukualla told an oral story of two twin heroes, born in a spring at San Francisco Peaks by a healer. This story reflects the Supai’s deep reverence for the Peaks’ snowmelt, which fed the aquifers and springs essential to their survival in their Canyon homeland.

However, as Mulford pointed out, there are small signs at Snowbowl warning people not to ingest the treated wastewater that is now being used on the slopes of Dook’oʼoosłííd.

As up to 178 million gallons of reclaimed wastewater are blown into the air to make artificial snow over the course of a skiing season, geologist Richard Hereford explained that the 13 tribes view this as a profound violation of their spirituality and, by extension, their health. It desecrates their sacred lands, harms the ecosystem and continues the erasure of their ancestral culture.

The beloved spring where the twins came to life in the Supai people’s legend is now contaminated.

“We can’t go there anymore because we don’t know what this snowmelt has done to it,” Ukualla said. “People take drugs, and those drugs come back out into this nature,” she added, referring to the treated sewage used to make snow on the slopes in front of her. “We never wanted them to make snow like this, it seeps into Mother [Nature] and it hurts her, because it’s impure. I want this place to restore its harmony with the trees, the animals, all that is on the land.”

“We can’t go harvest on the Peaks anymore, we don’t know what’s in those plants with the drugs, the chemicals, the hormones, birth control pills, and that’s something we can’t ingest, that’s not medicinal for us,” Hualapai Ka-Voka Jackson said. She’s one of the 2,300 People of the Tall Pines that inhabit the region along the Southern Rim of the Grand Canyon. “The springs we collected water from, it’s not the water it used to be,” Jackson said.  

Jackson noted that when there’s pain and destruction happening on the land, Indigenous people can no longer go there because it’s no longer a place of healing. She points to her shirt, which reads, “No Desecration for Recreation.” 

In 2007, the Navajo Nation sued the U.S. Forest Service on the grounds that the daily use of millions of gallons of treated sewage effluent to make snow on the western slope of Humphreys Peak violated the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act,which prohibits the government from substantially burdening the free exercise of religion, and that the research on the environmental impacts of that snowmelt was still insufficient.

To this day, research on those long-term impacts remains insufficient.

Among the few investigations that have been conducted, geologist Richard Hereford stands out. After sampling the stormwater runoff from the Arizona Snowbowl into the Hart Prairie, he found a high excess of nutrients, phosphorus and nitrogen, in the soil, which were not naturally occurring.

“Reclaimed water contains phosphorus and nitrogen that isn’t removed in the treating process,” Hereford said. “They would need to have a whole new level of treatment at the [Rio de Flag] Plant to get it out, so, when the snow melts it goes into the soil, and with the rains, all the runoff enters the drainage system, and gets out here [Hart Prairie] rich in nutrients.” 

“The nutrient-rich water affects the ecosystem because it acts like a fertilizer in an area that was pristine, so it disrupts it,” Hereford said.

Although studies on how that nutrient-loaded water affects the ecosystem in the long term are lacking, Mulford is working with an environmental engineer from Florida to test the water for sucralose, an artificial sweetener that does not break down in treated wastewater. However, the lawsuit did not end in the Navajo Nation’s favor. They lost the case, and the Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.

“I feel their defeat,” University of Arizona engineer Pedro Sanchez said. “That resort shouldn’t even exist. It’s run with artificial snow and uses so many resources.” 

“The government can’t kill the Native Americans anymore, so the genocide has now shifted to politics and the environment,” Sanchez also said. “They kill them with integration, education in our schools, splitting up their families, making it so that the young people move away and never come back to their homelands, taking away their resources, constructing and polluting their sacred sites.”  

In 2022, after a 33-year career with the Forest Service, seven of those as supervisor of the Coconino National Forest, Laura Jo West resigned out of respect for the tribes who had shared with her their stories of love and sorrow tied to the sacred Peaks.