Grand Canyon Part I: Haulapai Skywalk

Beginning last Sunday until this most recent Sunday, I was in Arizona on a family vacation. We spent a couple days at the Grand Canyon, then the remainder of our time surrounded by the red rocks of Sedona. After landing in Phoenix Sunday afternoon, we started our adventure by driving three hours to Kingman. This would be our base of operations for the next two days.

Monday morning the five of us started on the one and a half hour journey to the Haulapai Indian Reservation, site of the famed and controversial Grand Canyon Skywalk. The rural highway passed through a Joshua Tree forest and over a dusty desert road, unpaved for 13 miles. Our destination was an inflatable visitor center perched near the Canyon's precipice. Tickets for the skywalk are exorbitantly priced, but it's a once in a lifetime proposition. The worst part of the racket is they don't even let you take cameras on the skywalk. There's a metal detector to prevent you from doing so. You have to purchase--for an outrageous sum--pictures taken on the skywalk by employees.

In spite of the touristy feel, the experience is astounding. A bus from the visitor center first takes guests to Eagle Point so named for a giant rock formation resembling an eagle in flight. Loud gasps erupt aboard the bus when the Canyon first comes into view. Then most visitors go to pose near the edge of the Canyon for spectacular but slightly terrifying photo ops. It seemed like a lot of the tourists were foreign and had flown down for the day from Las Vegas.

There's a minor wait to get out on to the skywalk and you have to put on cloth booties before you venture onto the glass bridge so your shoes don't scuff it. The sensation on the skywalk is unnatural and eerie. One of the signs as visitors wait in line likens it to walking on air. I pointlessly clung to the railing when I first stepped out on the glass before gathering up the courage to lay down and peer between the tiny gaps in the glass plates at the rocky floor 4,000 feet below.

During the entire ordeal there was a deep unease in the pit of my stomach, but I was simultaneously enthralled by the view above and below. In all, we were only on the skywalk for about 10 minutes but it was a span in which each of the 600 seconds was keenly felt.

Our last stop on the Haulapai Reservation was Guano Point where we ate lunch and took in panoramic views showing off the Canyon's epic scale. Site of the 1959 film Edge of Eternity, Guano Point is named for a decades-ago operation which strung a cable car across the Canyon there in an effort to mine petrified bat dung or guano from a cave on the opposite wall. Neither the mine nor the cable car are in service any longer but the cable car's metal ruins remain.

The views from the Ant Hill, the tallest point at this junction of the Grand Canyon, are incomparable to behold. Sheer brown walls step and slope down for almost a mile to the jagged banks of the Colorado River, diligently continuing the erosive process that has been going on at this location for the past five or six million years. I wonder if the Canyon will be twice as deep in another five or six million.