What are these people doing?

This is the new glass-bottom Skywalk unveiled today at the Grand Canyon, where you can now get a birds-eye view of the bottom of the canyon by actually peeking between your boots.

That’s right. This $30 million bridge extends over the canyon’s rim, and the glass floor allows visitors to look straight-down 4,000 feet into the depths below.

Now, The Fish Hack is no Mensa. Proves that with every new post here and with most Thursdays in The Fish Wrap. But I do know a thing or two about Darwin. And I think he’d consider glass-bottom sky bridges a hell of a recruiting tool. Like screen doors fitted onto submarines, or Siegfreid and Roy.

This over-accessorizing of the natural world is something that The Fish Hack can’t endorse. You shouldn’t use fake accents to the real thing. But if you do, the last product to incorporate into the natural world, short of DDT, is glass. Remember the Bottle Bill? Hello?

What’s next? A glass-bottom driftboat, so you can see the rock that sinks you? Glass-bottomed four-wheelers so Sand People can see the dunes they cross? Shouldn’t part of experiencing the ruggeds of nature include doing something natural, or maybe even a little rugged?

Fish Bowls might be a good after-market add-on for the Pope Mobile, or for Bubble Boys looking for more permanent digs. Hell, glass slippers provide a sanitary option for guys with foot fetishes. But stapling some glass bridge to the side of one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World is just wrong.

You shouldn’t have glass IN the Grand Canyon, so you shouldn’t have glass OVER the Grand Canyon.

And they better not keep the glass too clean and transparent. Some condor might fly into it, and there’s no squee-gee big enough to clean that mess.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Outdoor Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.