Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005 | 7:48 a.m.
MOHAVE COUNTY, Ariz. -- On the west rim of the Grand Canyon, the side closest to Las Vegas, an Old West-style range war has American Indians pitted against a self-styled cowboy from England.
The showdown is over whether a road will be paved to allow more visitors to get to the largely remote portion of the United States' greatest natural wonder.
The west rim is part of the Hualapai Nation, and the tribe is trying to develop it into a major tourist attraction. The Hualapai are even building a glass skywalk out over that end of the canyon.
For the tribe, the paved road would be a road to riches. The European dude ranch owner standing in their way is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars, tribal leaders say.
The Briton says if the Hualapai don't want to parley a treaty on his terms, he's perfectly content to leave the road, which goes through his land, in its wagon-wheel jolting condition.
For a decade, visitors who have made the trip down that road to the west rim have been shuttled to two viewpoints overlooking the void, one with a view of the lower reaches of the canyon and another overlooking the Colorado River swirling into Lake Mead.
That latter view, from Guano Point, seems endless. To the west, the Las Vegas Range and Gass Peak are faintly visible. To the north and east, the second of the four steps of the Grand Staircase strikes up from the ground, its reddish cliffs dotted with ponderosa.
And to the south, a makeshift airport serves as a base camp for the hundreds of airplane and helicopter flights each day.
The helicopters are omnipresent on the rim. They bring the bulk of the 150,000 annual visitors that come to the west rim. Visitors coming by air pay upward of $200 to fly in. The Hualapai figure if the cost to get there wasn't as high, more people would visit the west rim.
After all, 3.1 million people visited the south rim in 2004; another 280,000 visited the north rim, which is snowed in and closed from October to at least May and sometimes June.
As it is, the drive to the west rim is about 2 1/2 hours from Las Vegas, clogged at Hoover Dam and slowed by a trek through Dolan Springs, Ariz. Tribal officials estimate completion of the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge in 2008 will take a half hour off the drive. A rumored proposal for a highway linking White Hills and Meadview might slice another half-hour off.
Housing developments planned for the White Hills area could literally put the outskirts of Las Vegas on the Grand Canyon's back door.
The Hualapai figure that thousands of new residents nearby should result in thousands of new visitors to the west rim, which would translate into hundreds of new jobs for a tribe that has a 70 percent unemployment rate.
But there's a roadblock to the Hualapai's plans to get rich from a tourist-friendly, car-happy typical American West resort -- a 14-mile stretch of road that's a scene right out of the Old West.
Diamond Bar Road starts out as a dusty but well-maintained track, cutting through a thick forest of Joshua trees. But it quickly descends into a winding, grinding path that can be traversed -- slowly -- by sedans. It has been known to claim tires and scare visitors away.
The road slices through desert scrub as it climbs the Grand Wash Cliffs. The roadside scenery of Joshuas gives way to juniper, which gives way to yucca -- all coated with dust from the road.
Shortly after the tribe's Grand Canyon West Resort first opened to visitors in 1988, about 60 vehicles traveled down Diamond Bar Road a day.
Today, around 140 vehicles are on the road daily, including tour buses ferrying visitors between Hualapai land and the nearby resort centers in Nevada.
Over the years Congress gave a total of $15 million to the Hualapai, in conjunction with the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs and Mohave County, to pave Diamond Bar Road.
The final environmental study was finished in 2001, and a decision on an alignment was officially made in 2003.
But a lot changed in that time.
Nigel Turner's 10-gallon hat shades an unweathered face and million-dollar smile as he sits in the old cabin at his Grand Canyon West Ranch, having an afternoon break on a warm October afternoon with his fiancee and ranch entertainment director, Lesley Gargan, and longtime resident Taco, a bouncy, mixed-breed dog.
A native of Stockport, a suburb of Manchester, England, Turner was a helicopter pilot in the British army's air corps when he got the idea for a helicopter sightseeing business.
When he left the military in 1986, he moved to Los Angeles and flew night tours of the area. By 1997 he had enough capital to found HeliUSA in Las Vegas, flying visitors to the Grand Canyon. In 1999 more than 80,000 visitors annually flew on his fleet to the canyon, including flights to Grand Canyon West Resort.
The Hualapai don't like the fact that Turner's ranch has the same name as their resort, but that's just part of a long-running dispute.
In 2000, for reasons neither the tribe nor Turner will discuss, the Hualapai revoked his landing rights. Within a year, Turner purchased the then-Diamond Bar Ranch from Hall of Fame cowboy Dale Smith for $2.8 million, using the 106,000 acre ranch -- much of which is on BLM-owned land -- as his own base of operations for flights into the Grand Canyon.
Beyond that, Turner's Grand Canyon West Ranch is a make-believe land right out of "City Slickers." Visitors sleep in teepees and cabins and can brand cattle, pan for gold or go horseback riding.
When tourists -- many of whom come from Europe -- step out from one of the 35 or so daily helicopter landings, they're carried by wagon down to the ranch. Cowboys sing and play the banjo. A stone building at the ranch's main center is purported to be the oldest building in Mohave County.
The main portion of the ranch is adjacent to Diamond Bar Road, on a mile-square parcel of private property. Smith gave an easement for the road to Mohave County in the 1970s.
It's also an area that is steeped in beauty and solitude -- especially at night, when the helicopters stop buzzing by and the buses and cars stop dusting up and down Diamond Bar Road. The Grand Canyon West Resort closes at dusk.
"If we had a highway through here, we'd get all our cabins right here, can you imagine what it'd be like?" Gargan said.
"We'd get tons of unwanted visitors, too. It'd be a risk of security, pollution. They come to stay out here -- it's so quiet, it's so beautiful at night here."
When BLM officials conducted an environmental assessment as a prelude to paving Diamond Bar Road, they studied several alternatives for a new roadway in the area of Diamond Bar Ranch. The favored alternative took the road just south of the current facility.
"They'd never done an EIS (environmental impact statement) on using the current easement. They hadn't negotiated with the landowner to buy a new easement. There was no deal with the Smith family," Turner said. "It's impossible to build a federal road up to standards" on Diamond Bar.
But when the BLM made its decision about Diamond Bar in November 2003, the final alignment for the new Diamond Bar Road went on the current roadway through Turner's private property.
BLM specialist Don McClure, who was involved with the environmental process, said, "As long as we've analyzed the impacts, we can select portions of alternatives and come to a valid decision as long as we make a rationale. The private landowner was not willing to grant any sort of easement across his property in the location of the preferred alternative."
Turner has a lawsuit pending against the bureaus and Mohave County in federal court. He's also appealing the environmental impact statement through the Interior Department.
The top of the canyon sometimes sounds like a war zone. Helicopters zoom in and out, planes take off and land, buses load visitors for the tour of the attractions around Grand Canyon West Resort, a 10-mile stretch of the rim.
The Hualapai are in a construction boom. What was originally a viewpoint at Quartermaster Point and open-air buffet at Guano now includes a small Western village and replicas of various Indian dwellings. The trailers that make up the airport terminal are slated to be replaced with a new facility, along with a second runway and more helipads.
But perhaps the biggest plan is the much ballyhooed skywalk, a $30 million glass-bottomed, U-shaped walkway that will stretch 70 feet out from Eagle Point.
The skywalk idea came from Las Vegas businessman David Jin, a tour bus operator who first came onto the Hualapai scene in the mid-1990s.
Currently, the only construction at Eagle Point is on the foundation for the skywalk, which is slated to open in February. What Grand Canyon West Operations Director Robert Bravo Jr. described as the largest rebar in the world has been dug 40 feet into the sandstone near the canyon's edge, with giant steel pillars sitting nearby, waiting to be put into pits in the ground.
Eagle Point is on a high cliff off a side canyon from the Grand Canyon itself. Across the canyon, a mountain takes on the appearance of an eagle, its wings spread, soaring toward the sky. The chasm's floor is 2,600 feet below, nearly straight down.
Despite the constant noise of the terminal area, Eagle Point is remarkably quiet. The area is sacred to the Hualapai, and the skywalk faced some opposition from some tribal members who thought the sacrifice of the serenity of the west rim in exchange for money and jobs wasn't a fair trade.
The opposition was a definite minority, and even those opposed tended to accept the economic benefits.
And there's more to come. The tribe plans a 300-room hotel as well as a campground.
Where Turner sees serenity in the area below the Grand Wash Cliffs, the Hualapai see the future. Housing developers are snatching up land in northern Mohave County as quickly as it becomes available, betting that people will be willing to commute 50 or so miles to Las Vegas once the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge is finished and the Hoover Dam delays are replaced by a four-lane freeway.
But the Hualapai know full well that without a paved Diamond Bar Road, their hopes of shifting the balance of tourist traffic away from the South Rim will remain a dream.
Not having the paved road "probably puts us back three years of growth," said Sheri Yellowhawk, chief executive of the Hualapai's Grand Canyon Resort Corp. "That's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars."
UNLV history professor and Sun columnist Hal Rothman, who has studied tourism in the West, said there is a model for success for resorts hardly accessible by car -- and the tribe's Grand Canyon West Resort doesn't fit the mold.
"It has to be a tremendously high-end property," Rothman said. "It'd have to be a select destination, the kind of place people would see the value in going to the end of the Earth to be there and be isolated. That's the only way you could develop anything."
That's exactly the model Turner's Grand Canyon West Ranch has built for itself.
"The last thing people want is to be in one of these cabins and to have thousands of people from Vegas coming down that road and spoiling the environment," Turner said. "The people that drive into our place on the road actually like it. It's fun. They come from Europe and Japan and come out on a dirt road and it's an experience."
Of course, Mohave County has an interest in the road being completed, too.
Dolan Springs is a smattering of trailers and homes on the north end of the Cerbat Mountains. Around 3,000 people call it home, including Chamber of Commerce President Norty Turchen.
A retired delivery driver from Las Vegas, Turchen moved to Dolan Springs three years ago and operates Taky Stuf 4 Horses, just north of the business cluster that passes for a downtown along Pierce Ferry Road.
Right now, tour buses usually whiz past his shop, occasionally stopping as tourists search for stirrups as a souvenir.
But even in his short time there, Turchen has noticed an increase of car traffic heading toward the Hualapai reservation.
"Our traffic on Pierce Ferry Road has increased. I can't even imagine the numbers they're going to be this year," he said. "With or without the road being paved, the traffic is going to be really big."
In fact, the BLM study on paving Diamond Bar Road estimated that the tourists to Grand Canyon West would spend around $600,000 annually in Dolan Springs by 2015, up from $75,000 in 2001.
The BLM's analysis was that the Hualapai's revenue would increase to $16.8 million in 2010, up from $2.8 million in 2000.
The tribe currently charges each visitor who drives to the terminal $28 to get on the bus that goes to the various canyon viewpoints. Other tours are more expensive.
A stroll on the skywalk is expected to cost $25 per person.
The resort estimates that 220 jobs would be created by the projected increase in visitors, a figure that would represent more than 10 percent of the tribe's population.
As Turner sees it, the plans to pave Diamond Bar Road helps everyone but him.
"We've got no fight with the Hualapai, we wish them all the best in their business," Turner said. "We've got a business. We've invested a lot of money with this, bringing people from around the world into this destination.
"We're not going to have this spoiled just to benefit them. We don't need the road."
Turner said he's made an offer to the tribe to sell them a new easement for a paved road, and the Grand Canyon Resort Corp. agreed with the terms. But, Turner said, the Hualapai tribal council voted down his compromise. He would not discuss the terms of the agreement.
Yellowhawk, who is a member of the tribal council, also refused to say what the proposed terms were. She said negotiations have slowed but the tribal council hadn't yet rejected the proposal.
Tribal Chairman Charles Vaughn, a rancher on the southern end of the reservation near Peach Springs, said he can't understand why Turner is opposing construction.
"I feel he's cutting off his nose to spite his face," Vaughn said. "The development of the roadway benefits our tourism venture, it benefits his enterprise, the dude ranch, and it also benefits the county. The people that visit Grand Canyon West do come through Dolan Springs, and they spend money all along the way."
Some in the tribe, including Vaughn and Yellowhawk, believe Turner just wants his landing rights back.
But Turner said he's making plenty of money using his own ranch as the base of operations. Flights to the canyon from Las Vegas start at $329, with a stop at Grand Canyon West Ranch. Overnight stays for those driving to the ranch start at $149, with packages that include flights to the canyon running near $300.
"You get to the top of this road and you're going to charge a massive trespass permit to get onto the reservation. You build a road, which is going to impact what we're doing here, but none of our business benefits from it. To me that doesn't seem fair," Turner said.
"If it was fairness, this road could start being built the first of January next year -- if they worked with us and how we want everything done environmentally."
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