Grand Canyon Skywalk Disappoints Early Visitors

Grand Canyon Skywalk Disappoints Early Visitors

Grand Canyon Skywalk :: Hicks-Wright.net Blog

"I was there in 2nd and 6th this month (April 2007). It's funny how they develop new strategies and rules each day, on Monday it was possible to go to the rim behind, so I guess west of the skywalk, on Friday a security guy was staying there and some self written signs telling no trespass allowed..."

This interesting blog, along with a slew of comments, accounts the disappointing experience that visitors are having at the new Grand Canyon Skywalk.

I have lived in northern Arizona for 20 years now and have been to the Hualapai Reservation a couple of times in that period. They have been trying to develop the Skywalk site for as long as I can remember. Most ventures, which included a casino at one time, have generally failed -- although I was surprised to learn recently that even without the Skywalk they received some 150,000 tourists a year. I believe that much of this is charter bus and air tours from Las Vegas, as they probably have the closest "Grand Canyon experience" to Las Vegas, short of going all the way to the National Park.

The blog post linked above is eye-opening and, unfortunately. not too surprising. The experiences listed by visitors to the Skywalk is fairly similar to my experiences on Indian lands in Arizona over the years, which is that agreements with off-reservations developers are not well thought through, and the attractions are often not ready for prime time.

Hopefully this will change over time, but will they be able to overcome the bad publicity and feelings that these initial experiences are creating? First impressions can have lasting consequences.

From Kingsley Dennis at 'New Mobilies (ce-more) (University of Lancaster)' blog:

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the modern use of maps:

"THE road map today is mostly virtual — an electronic image on a screen, at home or in the car, provided by Mapquest or a built-in satellite navigation system."

"The new digital equipment for mapping provides technical challenges, especially for those old enough to remember paper grasped in fleshy digits. But in at least one respect, the new stuff is easier to use: few motorists ever mastered the secret of correctly refolding a road map."

"Emo" Tourism

The panel session announcement below was in my inbox today.... While Dark Tourism is a concept that I have known about for several years, the idea that there is an annual academic conference on "Evil and Human Wickedness" kind of threw me for a loop.

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PANEL ON REALITY TOURS - Call for papers:

To be organized as part of the 8th Global Conference Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. Monday 19th March - Friday 23rd March 2007, Salzburg, Austria

Ground Zero, Katrina Tours, Chernobyl Tours, Favela Tours – tragedy and poverty attract more and more tourists, especially those seeking “ethical” or “authentic” experiences. The aim of this panel is to gather scholars from different disciplines who have as their main object of investigation these so-called reality tours. We are particularly interested on discussing how human misery, understood on its broader sense, is commercialized on various kinds of tourist experiences, therefore relating reflections on these phenomena to issues of Western contemporary moralities.
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I personally find Dark Tourism an interesting topic, which is why I subscribe to the Dark Tourism research email list, on which this announcement was posted. At the same time, I have not liked going scary movies since high school and I generally avoid the dark tourism's most morbid attractions -- which I find too depressing. There is, I think, a range of degrees of darkness. It is an edge phenomenon -- some people like to go close to the edge for the thrill, and a few people go over the edge into the depths of "evil and human wickedness."

This conference is put on by the American Political Science Association, not by tourism academics. Topics that are liste on the conference website include:

• the concept and language of 'evil' and 'wickedness'
• the nature and sources of evil and human wickedness
• moral intuitions about dreadful crimes
• psychopathic behaviour - mad or bad?
• choice, responsibility, and diminished responsibility
• social and cultural reactions to evil and human wickedness
• the portrayal of evil and human wickedness in the media and popular culture
• suffering in literature and film
• individual acts of evil, group violence, holocaust and genocide; obligations of bystanders
• terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing; the evils of terrorism, fear of terrorism, international relations especially with regard to the modern nation state, superpower interventionist strategies, post-war reorganisation following the evils of war
• the search for meaning and sense in evil and human wickedness
• the nature and tasks of theodicy
• religious understandings of evil and human wickedness
• postmodern approaches to evil and human wickedness
• ecocriticism, evil and suffering
• gender and evil
• evil and the use/abuse of technology; evil in cyberspace

Sounds more like sociology and psychology than political science -- but I guess that is the nature of contemporary social sciences. Like the concept of Dark Tourism, I wonder what kind of people are attacted to a conference like this? Goths? Emos? Nazis? Closet goths, emos or nazis? Old/Retired goths, emos, and nazis? I don't mean to insult anyone, but this is the edge again, that we are talking about. Since I was part-jock, part-hippy in high school, I would guess that they are probably not like me. But then who can tell with a closet emo?

Introduction + Purpose + Invitation

This is the start of a new Collaborative Blog on the topic of Tourism and Geography. The focus is on topics and commentaries that are primarily of interest to those who do research on the topic of tourism from a geographic perspective. The geographic perspective provdes a focus on topics that relate to (1) place development and experience, (2) the movement of people, ideas and things through geographic space, and (3) the relationship between the human and physical world. Since I consider most of tourism to be geographically based, this blog can potentially encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary research topics and interests from across the social sciences, physical sciences and business fields of study. Anyone who has an interest in these topics can contribute to this blog by simply contacting me at TravelGeographer@gmail.com.