The Skywalk extends about 70 feet over the Grand Canyon on the Hualapai Indian Reservation at Grand Canyon West.

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The glass Skywalk the Hualapai Indians have erected at the west end of the Grand Canyon is likely to attract most of its visitors from nearby Las Vegas.

That seems about right.

When the Skywalk opens to the public next Wednesday, visitors who spring for $75 per person — $50 each to get into Grand Canyon West and another $25 for the tour — will be able to walk out 70 feet on a glass platform that's 2.8 inches thick and weighs a million pounds. They can look between their toes and see the Colorado River and sandstone walls in a portion of the Grand Canyon some 4,000 feet below.

Visitors to Las Vegas, the capital of artifice, will no doubt find this moving, especially if they haven't seen the canyon from higher viewpoints in Grand Canyon National Park.

For years, buses from Las Vegas, two hours away, have been traveling a twisty dirt road off the paved highway to a piece of the Hualapai Reservation called Grand Canyon West, a part of canyon's landscape that isn't as dramatic as it is farther east.

The tribe had an airstrip there and a little overlook where visitors could look down at the muddy Colorado River as it catapulted toward nearby Lake Mead or gaze across the river to a cave where a miner once harvested bat guano.

The Indians have long believed the area had greater economic potential as a tourism draw for a reservation that doesn't have much to rely on for jobs or income. Kingman and Las Vegas are relatively close by to the west. But for years it was either those places or nothing; eventually, the tribe developed its daylong river rafting trips (Hualapai River Runners) that start where Diamond Creek empties into the Colorado, but that's merely a seasonal draw. Then they built a motel and "cowboy" town.

But nothing they've tried approaches the magnitude of the $30 million Skywalk that Las Vegas developer David Jin financed.

The Hualapai Reservation attracts about 300,000 tourists a year — 130,000 of them from Las Vegas alone. Most of the tourists ride the river rafts or stop on their way to the neighboring Havasupai Reservation, well-known for the travertine deposits that turn its waterfalls to a light turquoise.

Visitors to the Hualapai's Skywalk won't see any of those turquoise waters, however. Instead, they'll see a part of the Grand Canyon where it's not nearly as grand as it is from the higher country at Grand Canyon National Park on the South Rim and with none of the heart-stopping majesty of the North Rim.

The park's South Rim viewpoints are at about 7,000 feet; the North Rim, at close to 9,000 feet. The Hualapai's Skywalk is down to 4,000 feet. Nevertheless, the Skywalk will undoubtedly draw the Las Vegas crowds.

Marketing, of course, is as big a deal for some Indian reservations as it is for Las Vegas.

As Hualapai Chairman Charlie Vaughn suggested: "The Grand Canyon has name appeal, and since part of the reservation lies in that, it only seems natural that we use the attraction to the benefit of the tribe."

Not all Hualapai tribal members are happy with the Skywalk, however.

Its construction is in an area sprinkled with burial sites, and, some cultural traditionalists suggest, quite logically, that economic development has been given more importance than respect for the dead.

Tribal leaders are gambling, however, that nobody from Vegas will see it that way.

We'd say that's a safe bet.