At The Grand Canyon, Walking On Air
Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, didn't hesitate at all to step onto the glass walkway suspended 4000 feet in the air over the Grand Canyon. When I got a chance to get onto the Skywalk a little later, I have to admit my first steps were halting. Seeing the four thousand foot drop through the four inch glass floor made me just a little nervous. But the feeling passed as I walked out to the furthest point of the horseshoe shaped walkway and I began to just enjoy the view…both through the glass floor and the glass walls.
The Skywalk is clearly an engineering accomplishment but it also seems a little incongruous right now. The Skywalk's $30 million price tag was paid by a Las Vegas based tourism operator. It's built on the reservation of the Hualapai Indians whose tribal lands take in more than a hundred miles of the Canyon, outside Grand Canyon National Park. The Hualapai call their tourist area "Grand Canyon West"
The tribe has been working to pull in tourists for years, with only modest success. Only about a quarter million visit Grand Canyon West each year compared to more than four million who visit the south rim in Grand Canyon National Park. But it's the 40 million tourists who visit Las Vegas annually that the Skywalk is aimed at. Las Vegas is 120 miles away and flights into the Grand Canyon West airport make for an easy day trip.
For now, facilities at Grand Canyon West are limited. The only overnight accommodation is a dozen rooms in simple cabins. The cabins sit on a small rise about a mile from the rim of the Canyon and the view at sunrise and sunset is spectacular. I stayed in one of the cabins for two nights as I prepared my report on the Skywalk.
At dawn on the morning of Skywalk's opening, I traveled a mile down the gravel road from my cabin to a lookout on the Canyon rim. I stood there alone in wonderful silence watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. For fifteen minutes I had the Canyon all to myself, it seemed. And that, more than my brief stroll on the Skywalk, is the memory from this trip that I will treasure.
The tribe hopes the Skywalk will be the engine that drives a tourism boom.
But the real attraction, the Grand Canyon itself, needs no new work. The views from several lookouts on Hualapai land are spectacular, though somewhat challenging to get to.