THE GLACIER DISCOVERY WALK HAS BEEN REBRANDED: GLACIER SKYWALK.
HOW MIGHT BREWSTER TRANSPORTATION HAVE COME UP WITH THIS IDEA?
The Viad Corporation (VEE-ahd) purchased Brewster Transportation in May 1996. The Viad Corporation's head office is in Phoenix, Arizona, 253 miles by road from "Grand Canyon West," the location of the Grand Canyon Skywalk. That structure (pictured immediately above), was built on the Hualapai (WALL-uh-pie) Reservation on a formerly remote section of the Grand Canyon rim. The Skywalk opened on March 28, 2007. The development has been replete with much controversy, both within the Hualapai First Nation and on the outside. " An engineering marvel or a colossal eyesore, depending on who is describing it..." is how Julie Cart, a writer for the Los Angeles Times portrayed the structure. For a candid impression of the Grand Canyon Skywalk, click here.
In 2009, on the 103-storey Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) in Chicago, developers added The Ledge, a cantilevered glass box that allows visitors to look straight down to the city streets. On May 30, 2011, Edward Rothstein wrote a piece about The Ledge in the New York Times. Here is an excerpt from that column that makes reference to the Grand Canyon Skywalk:
"But there’s also an exhilaration that you don’t get if you visit a distant relative of the Ledge: the Grand Canyon Skywalk. That attraction opened two years before these Chicago extensions and promised to be far more spectacular: a transparent-floored observation deck stretching outward 70 feet from the canyon’s rim and suspended 4,000 feet above the Colorado River (as high as 900 Oprahs and an impossible number of deep-dish pizzas).
It was built on land owned by the Hualapai Indians, who had great hopes that, along with bellicose helicopter rides into the canyon and quaint displays of folk culture, the Skywalk would guarantee the tribe a rosy economic future. I visited the Skywalk soon after its opening and was astounded not at seeing Nature’s expansive dimensions open at my feet, but at the sheer irrelevance of the enterprise. The expense, hype and setting couldn’t match Nature’s own spectacle at the main part of the canyon, run by the National Park Service — an immensity that makes all human enterprise seem like petty gimcrackery.
The Skywalk has recently come under the shadow of various legal squabbles between the tribe and the developer, but there also may be something inherently flawed in the concept. It might be that apart from such unusual activities as a space walk or a sky dive, the natural world presents itself to us with as much power when seen horizontally as vertically. We don’t need vertigo to get the point."
"But there’s also an exhilaration that you don’t get if you visit a distant relative of the Ledge: the Grand Canyon Skywalk. That attraction opened two years before these Chicago extensions and promised to be far more spectacular: a transparent-floored observation deck stretching outward 70 feet from the canyon’s rim and suspended 4,000 feet above the Colorado River (as high as 900 Oprahs and an impossible number of deep-dish pizzas).
It was built on land owned by the Hualapai Indians, who had great hopes that, along with bellicose helicopter rides into the canyon and quaint displays of folk culture, the Skywalk would guarantee the tribe a rosy economic future. I visited the Skywalk soon after its opening and was astounded not at seeing Nature’s expansive dimensions open at my feet, but at the sheer irrelevance of the enterprise. The expense, hype and setting couldn’t match Nature’s own spectacle at the main part of the canyon, run by the National Park Service — an immensity that makes all human enterprise seem like petty gimcrackery.
The Skywalk has recently come under the shadow of various legal squabbles between the tribe and the developer, but there also may be something inherently flawed in the concept. It might be that apart from such unusual activities as a space walk or a sky dive, the natural world presents itself to us with as much power when seen horizontally as vertically. We don’t need vertigo to get the point."