Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

It’s always interesting — okay, frightening — to peruse those little left-hand columns on newspaper websites that tally the most-read stories on the site. We learn, from these, what people really are interested in. And guess what? It’s usually not global warming, presidential politics or Iraq. Most often it’s sex, celebrities who are in drug rehab or who are going through separations or, best of all, celebrities having sex in drug rehab while suffering relationship troubles and adopting foreign children. Even the high-minded readers of the New York Times or the BBC News tend towards the sex-related or gross, like the story today about a portion of a human leg washing up on a beach.

But this week, it was a sexless, drug-free, American West topic that topped the most popular lists, especially in Europe: The opening of the Grand Canyon skywalk. Read about it here, there, and, well, just about everywhere (HCN covered it a year ago). It was the most popular story on the BBC News website all day Tuesday, and the video of it remained near the top on Wednesday, putting it on par with Britney shaving her head. It just confirms something we’ve known all along: Europeans LOVE the American West, especially anything that involves redrock canyons and Native Americans. Indeed, there were some 300 journalists at the skywalk’s opening, many of them from foreign lands.
And that should make the Hualapai tribe, which built the skywalk, pretty darned happy. With the Euro so strong, and the dollar so weak, Europeans will fork out the $25 entrance fee for the skywalk without hesitation. Hell, that’s about what they pay for a gallon of petrol over there. The Hualapai better hope the hype holds up. It’s going to take a lot of people paying that entry fee to cover the $40 million price tag of the skywalk.