The Grand Canyon Skywalk opens to the public at 10 a.m. local time tomorrow, reports KVBC-TV in Las Vegas. The story also has plenty of other details if you want to go there. Reservations are recommended.

Chris Kahn of the Associated Press took a tentative but ultimately rewarding stroll on the Skywalk during a media preview:

Finally, at the farthest point on the Skywalk, I stopped and peered through the transparent floor.

And there it was.

The cliff descended several hundred feet before it hit a narrow boulder-strewn shelf. Then it was straight down again, past a rainbow of strata, a few more chiseled ledges and into a dark crevice at the bottom.

This must be what Wile E. Coyote sees, I thought, just before gravity takes hold and he plummets into a little cartoon poof.

Far to the left, I could see ripples in the Colorado River. To the right was the triangular dip in the canyon wall that looks like the outstretched wings of a bird and gives this place its name: Eagle Point.

It was gorgeous.

Joe Loesch of Readio Theatre teaches eight students in an advanced voice-over class. He used those students in about a four-minute “Voices from Route 66″ podcast. You can listen to it here:

(Hat tip to Readio Theatre blog.) 

This Associated Press article touts a bunch of Web sites for people who want to take a virtual road trip down Route 66 and other historic highways if they can’t do the real thing.

Many of these sites have already been linked here, but a few interesting finds turned up:

• StateEnds.com has a group of people in 11 states that has documented and photographed where each highway in their respective state ends. No Route 66 states are listed — yet.
• Roadside Online, which specializes in diners.
• The AP story didn’t cite this, but today I found a site dedicated to Gus Wilson of the Model Garage, who wrote stories about his life as an auto mechanic for Popular Science Monthly. The site has 91 percent of Wilson’s writings archived from 1925 to 1970.
• A Web site that specializes in the National Road, especially in Pennsylvania.
• The big find is American Mile Markers, in which the extraordinarily dedicated Matt Frondorf shot one photograph for every mile along a 3,304-mile trip from New York City to San Francisco. Even though the journey didn’t follow Route 66, the visual travelogue produces the same sort of awe of our country’s diversity and vastness that the Mother Road does. Frondorf also wisely avoided the interstates during his quest.

Debra Hodkin, who runs the Barstow Route 66 Mother Road Museum in Barstow, Calif., gave the Route 66 yahoogroup some bad news yesterday:

Greystone Cafe at 31317 E. Main in Barstow, CA, is being torn down. This is a section of Route 66 where the road runs parallel with the freeway near the Marine Base. Unique in that the structures were built with river rock. Those from the sixties, seventies remember the place as a bar. The cabins appear gone, and the main structure will soon be.

Here’s a good overall photo of the restaurant from Ray Smith. 

And I found this intriguing history about the Glenstone:

When roads were still dirt even before Route 66 was named National Trails Highway, the Greystone Cafe was built in 1918.

World War I was over in Europe and expansion was on the rise in the United States. Motor vehicles were common, while horses still provided much of the transportation in the West.

In 1918, the Greystone was a way station catering to the growing numbers of Mormons settling in the lower valleys. The standing cobblestone buildings had a store, overnight rooms, and garage.

Now the Greystone has returned to the sand.

(Photos by Debra Hodkin.)

The long-closed El Garces Hotel in Needles, Calif., built in 1908 and one of the last surviving railroad Harvey Houses, recently held a groundbreaking ceremony for its rehabilitation, reported the Mohave Daily News.

According to the article:

Plans call for El Garces to include a state of California Needles Visitor Center, an inter-modal transit center, first-class hotel and fine-dining restaurant.

Allan Affeldt, who beautifully restored La Posada in Winslow, Ariz., is the project manager on El Garces’ restoration. Anyone who’s ever stayed in La Posada knows that this is very good news indeed.

Needles also could use a top-flight tourism destination. Except for a few snowbirds and hardcore Route 66ers, it doesn’t attract many travelers except those who need to gas up before heading across the Mojave Desert.

The site, which features Route 66 prominently, is here.

According to the Springfield News-Leader:

The alliance is a marketing organization that aims to create positive economic growth in the region through cooperative tourism promotion and development. Its members include convention and visitors bureaus in Springfield, Carthage and Joplin as well as several chambers of commerce in the region.

When Michael Wallis informed us that he was writing a book about Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid, we hoped that Wallis would separate the reality from the myth in Billy the Kid’s story.

It wouldn’t be an easy task. Since his death at age 21 to a bullet from Pat Garrett’s gun in 1881, Billy the Kid’s image has been distorted by yellow journalists, hack writers, half-baked Hollywood films and old-fashioned gossip. Some claim that Billy the Kid was a psychopath who killed dozens of men. Others — especially Hispanics — say he was a Robin Hood of the Southwest.

Many Billy the Kid storytellers seemed all too happy to follow the famed line from the film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Fortunately, Wallis labored earnestly to sift fact from fiction in “Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride” (W.W. Norton, 328 pages, $25.95). Wallis drew on his many years in journalism to flesh out the Kid’s background. The book contains more than 50 pages of footnotes and references. Unless an unexpected cache of Billy the Kid documents is unearthed, this book will likely be the definitive work on the outlaw.

Wallis leavens the book’s scholarly tone with fascinating nuggets of information. (One example: An old windmill in the future Route 66 town of Las Vegas, N.M., was used for hangings so much that boys started hanging their dogs in imitation.) Wallis’ meaty prose — which helped make “Route 66: The Mother Road” a bestseller — also turns what could have been a clinical book into a more entertaining read.

The first 40 or so pages occasionally are slow reading, mostly because little is known of Henry McCarty (aka Kid Antrim, aka William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid) until he was nearly a teenager. Wallis and other experts strongly believe McCarty was born to an Irish woman in New York City. The family kept moving west — hastened by his mother’s bout with tuberculosis — until they ended up in Silver City, N.M.

Henry McCarty’s behavior during his early teens was little more than that of a mischievous kid’s and certainly not a killer’s. But his life went off the rails when his mother died of the TB and his stepfather, William Antrim, abandoned him. With little or no supervision, McCarty roamed the streets of Silver City and became a thief. McCarty’s future as an outlaw was sealed when the skinny kid, detained for larceny, escaped the local jail by shinnying up the chimney. That’s one accurate element of the future legend — Billy the Kid was an escape artist.

McCarty became a saddle tramp, roaming the territories of New Mexico, Arizona and the Texas Panhandle. He took legitimate ranch work when he could, but also stole livestock and gambled.

Billy the Kid is held in high esteem by Hispanics is because he spoke Spanish fluently and respected the culture. He was a good dancer and a ladies’ man with the senoritas. He was a symbol of resistance against white power brokers who derided the Spanish-speaking natives. “He was their El Chivato, their little Billy, a champion of the poor and oppressed,” Wallis writes. Billy the Kid’s deep connection with Hispanic culture has been long overlooked, and Wallis gives it its due.

McCarty changed his name to Billy Bonney and was caught up in the Lincoln County War. The story of a violent New Mexico turf battle between competing business interests and corrupt power brokers is too complicated to recount here. It led to a homicide rate in Lincoln County that was more than 40 times the national average. But of 50 people indicted in the conflict, Billy the Kid was the only one convicted.

Billy the Kid has only four confirmed killings to his name. Two were arguably in self-defense, and two occurred during his famed escape from the Lincoln County Jail shortly before his death. It’s hardly the stuff of a hardened murderer.

But Wallis is reluctant to call a criminal like Billy the Kid a scapegoat. “The young man may have been used and abused by the many duplicitous people that he encountered in the final years of his life, but he himself also established a critical role in establishing his own identity,” Wallis wrote.

Still, when Sheriff Garrett’s bullet finds its mark at the end of the book, it feels like a tragedy. Billy the Kid had been kicked around by bad luck and bullies all his life. He did his best with pluck and optimism, but the forces against him were too big to overcome.

“First Snow,” the thriller starring Guy Pearce that was filmed almost entirely in the Route 66 town of Albuquerque, opened to limited release on Friday.

According to some stories I read, the film will gain wider release later.

Here’s the premise:

Stranded after an accident outside a desolate town, Jimmy Munson (Guy Pearce) visits a fortune teller to pass the time, but soon learns that he is running out of time. At first skeptical, Jimmy’s world begins to unravel as the psychic’s visions come true. Now, with his fate looming nearer, Jimmy becomes obsessed with revisiting his past in hopes of changing his destiny.

The Rotten Tomatoes site has given “First Snow” a somewhat tepid reception, with just 55 percent of critics giving it favorable reviews so far. Still, that’s miles better than “Wild Hogs,” also shot in Albuquerque, and its sub-20s rating.

Here’s the trailer:

“First Snow” director Mark Fergus told ComingSoon.net about his experience in filming in the Duke City:

CS: Can you talk about that landscape and location, because Albuquerque, New Mexico really adds a lot to the vibe of the film. Does it really snow there?

Fergus: Yeah, it does. Well, I’m from New York and I moved out there for a couple of years right about the time we were struggling with this script and finally, I really understood what we were trying to do because the landscape there just blew my mind. I had never seen anything like that and yeah, just realizing that in the desert there’s four seasons and that it snows in the desert. Just something about the image of snow in the desert is such a beautiful image, it just didn’t seem possible. We wrote the script very specifically to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the state’s been very aggressive about getting business there so we were able to eventually convince everyone that we should shoot the film exactly where it’s supposed to be. Then we went there and they have tons of great crews there now. One of the cool things about ours was that it took place in their city so we didn’t have to hide anything and everything was real and on location. We wanted to make it like the score, make it a character in the film that’s telling the story in some way. I’m so glad we got to film it there, because that’s where we wrote it to be done, and it was really fun to be able to go back and pull it off there. Here’s the kicker. Most of the film has to have snow or otherwise, the story doesn’t work and then in the last week of the shoot where we needed snow, we had all sorts of plans to do snow blankets and CGI, and one night, it just poured 12 inches of snow, the last week of the schedule, covered everything and we just used it. It doesn’t usually snow in late March, and we just got a gift from the Gods.

The Pontiac (Ill.) Daily Leader reports that state Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, has introduced a bill that would protect the long-closed Illinois State Police District 6 headquarters on Route 66 in Pontiac.

Senate Bill 768 would transfer ownership of the unique gun-shaped building to Livingston County for $10. The building recently had been declared state surplus, although it hasn’t yet been auctioned.

Rutherford envisions a four-phase project, up to 10 years long, to help preserve the building:

In Phase 1, the land surrounding the building will be used as a park and picnic area for travelers on Route 66. Phase 2 would be preserving the exterior of the building, including tuckpointing. That would result in the interior being protected from any significant further deterioration.

Phase 3, which could wait until money is raised, would be remediation of the interior of the building - asbestos abatement or “whatever it needs,” Rutherford told The Leader.

The final phase would be determining “what is the best use of the building,” he said. […]

If it is financially possible, “many would like to refurbish the interior of the building for other purposes which highlight the history of the ‘Mother Road,’” Rutherford said in his news release.

There’s more in the story and the news release from Rutherford.

It sounds like Rutherford “gets it” in terms of the Mother Road’s value, and he seeks to involve the local and Route 66 community with this plan. (Then again, he’s from Chenoa, which also is a Route 66 town.) He’s even talked to former state troopers who worked in the building.

The state police building was constructed in 1941 and was inducted into the Illinois Route 66 Association’s Hall of Fame in 2000.

The bill’s prospects seem good when it’s scheduled to come up to a vote Tuesday. Its co-sponsor is Sen. Emil Jones, D-Chicago, president of the Senate.

That’s what I call bipartisan support. Apparently Route 66 crosses all political lines.

Severe thunderstorms struck the border lands of Texas and New Mexico on Friday, resulting in tornadoes in Logan and Clovis, N.M., and hailstorms in the Route 66 town Tucumcari, N.M., that knocked out many of the famed neon signs in town, according to the Quay County Sun.

Bill Kinder, co-owner of the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, said the three-quarter-inch hail that fell about 2:30 p.m. Friday shattered nearly all of its neon lighting, including the famed blue swallow on its main sign and the architectural neon on the main motel building.

“There’s only two letters that are working right now,” he said.

The hail also broke the east side of the Teepee Curios neon sign across the street, and also many other neon signs in town along Route 66.

“Coming from the east, it was weird” to not see the neon signs lighted as night fell later Friday, Kinder said.

Kinder said that damage to the neon lighting is not covered by insurance in this instance. So damage at the Blue Swallow is likely to be at least a couple thousand dollars. Kinder said there appeared to be no structural damage to the motel itself.

Kinder said that many parts of town still don’t have phone service after the storm. He talked to me on his cell phone.

A fund has been set up to help the Blue Swallow and other Tucumcari businesses whose neon signs sustained severe damage in the storm.

Send a check payable to the nonprofit “Friends of the Mother Road” (with “Tucumcari neon” in the memo line) to:

Friends of the Mother Road
c/o Kip Welborn
3947 Russell
St. Louis, MO 63110 

Donations are tax-deductible.