Arizona's Unique Grand Falls Waterfall Phenomenon Near Flagstaff May Be Closed Forever For One Upsetting Reason

We humans can make a mess of things, especially when we behave badly as tourists. There was that guy who unbelievably scrawled his name on the Colosseum in Rome in 2023, saying that he somehow didn't understand how old the structure was (per the BBC). Residents of Kyoto, Japan are totally fed up with disrespectful tourists at sacred sites, to the point where a temple priest in 2025 said that "co-existence [with tourists] is impossible" (per Unseen Japan). Now, we can add one more site to the list: Grand Falls (known as Adah'iilíní in the Navajo language), a series of unique, terraced "chocolate waterfalls" in the Navajo Nation near Flagstaff, Arizona, the world's first designated dark sky city. But this time, the consequences are serious and might be permanent. 

Following a post-COVID resurgence in tourism, signs started showing up along the road to Grand Falls saying that Grand Falls was closed. Naturally, people ignored the signs and went anyway. This was on top of general mayhem, environmental destruction, and profoundly thoughtless behavior that had been accumulating for years. Heaps of trash and broken beer bottles, ATVs carving trails through the land and chasing livestock, drones flying over private homesteads, people swimming nude in the muddy water, visitors shooting off guns for fun and scaring residents: All of this and more led to the completely understandable decision to shut down the falls in 2023, possibly for good.

One Navajo rancher likened the invasiveness and ignorance of such visitors to using a stranger's backyard as a personal playpen. Per AZ Central, Navajo singer Radmilla Cody pointed out that Grand Falls has been a sacred prayer site for generations. "It's time for Adah'iilíní to rest and the residents to recover from the trauma and invasive behaviors," Cody said. There's no word if the falls will ever be opened again. One respectful Grand Falls reviewer on TripAdvisor said that she was "heartbroken but completely understood" the decision. 

For now, would-be visitors to Grand Falls will have to cross the site off their bucket lists, barring some news from the Navajo Nation. Thankfully, though, many other locations in this part of Arizona remain pristine and open to visitors and don't show signs of dreaded overtourism — not yet anyway. If you have your heart set on visiting incredible waterfalls, consider a hiking or helicopter trip into Havasu Canyon, an incredibly magical red rock canyon just west of Grand Canyon National Park, where a series of world-famous ethereal waterfalls flow into blue-green pools.

If deserts are what you're after, head to the Painted Desert near the Hopi Reservation and Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. You will be wowed by the striated, multi-hued, conical rock formations in this surreal landscape. Less than an hour's drive from the Painted Desert is Petrified Forest National Park, an area littered with tons of colorful petrified logs and Triassic fossils. The final spot in this part of Arizona that you shouldn't miss if you appreciate natural phenomena is the overlooked meteorite crater left behind from a 50,000-year-old impact, located an hour-and-a-half drive west from the Painted Desert, just off the main highway I-40. None of these locations are the same as Grand Falls, but what made this falls so special in the first place was its utter singularity.