The Grand Canyon Skywalk: A View from Above—and Below

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  09.08.08 | 10:37 AM ET

imageWe’ve read the big-league critiques and pondered potential stunts at the Hualapai Indians’ horseshoe-shaped glass perch that allows visitors to peer 4,000 feet down into the Grand Canyon. Now comes a personal view in Sierra Magazine from a young writer and environmentalist who visited the site with the hopes of understanding why the Hualapai have invested so much in it.

Dev Das’s Skywalk experience is visceral—as he presses his face to the glass he sees “the labyrinth of geologic incisions, jags and winds”—but so is his visit to the Hualapai town of Peach Springs, Arizona.

It’s a crumbling place, and one broken-down young man tells him: “The Skywalk’s making money, but ... look around, nothing’s changed. Uplift? It’s all bunk.”

Related on World Hum:
* Could the New Grand Canyon Skywalk Attract (Insane) BASE Jumpers?

Photo by ShutterCat7 via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Tags: Eco Travel, Outdoors, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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