The proposed $1 billion Grand Canyon Escalade development is a complex of restaurants, boutique hotels, stores and a trailer park clustered around a gondola that would whisk visitors down to a restaurant, an Indian cultural center and an elevated river walk on a part of the canyon floor that is Navajo land, just outside the park boundary. The proposed development, on 420 acres of rabbit brush and grass with stunning views of the canyon, is the latest — and perhaps the most ambitious — in a long and contentious history of attempts by developers to build near a national landmark that draws 4.5 million people a year. But the Escalade is hardly the only challenge facing Grand Canyon National Park these days. Indeed, this symbol of the national park system seems almost under siege. ~ A group of Italian developers is planning three million square feet of retail construction, plus 2,200 homes, in Tusayan, a newly incorporated village with a population of just 587 at the entrance to the park, posing what park officials describe as a major threat to the water supply for the Colorado River. A skywalk finished in 2007 over the western rim of the Grand Canyon, on land owned by the Hualapai tribe, has become an overwhelming success, drawing thousands of visitors a year, most from Las Vegas. Some then take a helicopter ride to the bottom of the canyon, to the distress of conservationists.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:10:12 +0000
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