Yes, I know that y'all were ready to send out a search party for me. My life has been busy to the point of absurdity where work is concerned. (Hello, building season, nice to see ya!) Amongst all the various orders, issues, emergencies and concerns associated with the wholesale flooring biz, there was also a (very rare for me) trip across the country. Then I returned to more than 220 emails to sort through! Even rarer than a trip for me is a trip with my family (the last one was more than 20 years ago!) So where did I go? Well, it was to Las Vegas, Nevada. While there I took in Hoover Dam and part of the legendary Grand Canyon. And, as it turned out, stood on the very gravel where a movie was once filmed! 1959's
Edge of Eternity starred Cornel Wilde as an Arizona deputy embroiled in mayhem around the famous canyon.
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A huge number of Grand Canyon visitors attend the south rim, which is less expensive to tour and has different views to offer than the west rim, which is where I wound up (because it was an hour and a half closer and I didn't want to be in a car for nine hours round trip!) The west rim is operated by the Hualapai on their reservation.
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Plot points of Edge include the tram seen here. This scenario could only have ever been done during an amazingly brief window in time. You see, in 1958, development began on the extraction of guano from a bat cave on the other side of the point. Guano (bat shit, for the unenlightened!) was a highly sought-after fertilizer (which had also been used previously for the manufacturing of gunpowder.)
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The company called U.S. Guano spent $3.5 million to build the tramway, which carried miners to and from the aforementioned cave. Unfortunately, there was far less guano in the cave than estimated and the venture only yielded about $100,000 gross profit, becoming abandoned in 1960! So the sweet spot of this movie, released in 1959, was really the only time this setting could be viable. Bat-shit crazy, right?!
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A climactic fight was filmed on this tram, with real stunt-people floundering about and a helicopter looming nearby. (In the wake of various accidents involving aircraft in the canyon, most of the park no longer allows helicopters and small planes to fly within the space, but today the west section - part of the reservation - is exempt from these statutes and copter tours are prevalent.
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The movie's performers, Wilde, Mickey Shaughnessy and Victoria Shaw, filmed their portion of the goings on in a set with rear projection of the canyon. It's not very convincing, though the footage of the stunt people remains impressive.
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The precipice shown here in the movie...
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...is now the site of the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
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Not for the squeamish, this U-shaped, cantilevered viewing area is a marvel in itself.
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It's a loooonnng way down.
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Another famous spot, seen here in the movie, is Eagle Point.
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Somehow through the course of erosion, the rock took on the resemblance of an eagle with its wings spread.
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I know some people have trouble spotting things like this easily, so I've done an outline of the section here to clarify.
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This was my own personal snap of the area in question. No guardrail here, folks! It felt a little daunting.
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Here are two ol' buzzards for the price of one!
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Edge kicks off with this scene of a man overlooking the Colorado River.
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The plan was for this pic of me with my aunt to show the river next to us. But you know how it is when you ask someone else to click a photo..... In any case, it's basically the same spot in which the man above was standing. There is now a small deli and covered dining area on the premises.
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The same area through my own lens.
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Longtime readers of this blog might recall Edge of Eternity because of one of its costars, the impishly handsome (but little-known) Rian Garrick.
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Garrick burst into the movie biz in 1959 with Edge and three other films: Up Periscope, Battle of the Coral Sea and The Flying Fontaines.
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He popped up in a prior bulge post thanks to his drunken emergence from a swimming pool while fully clothed in a summer suit.
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Moments like this often make movies a little easier to sit through, Grand Canyon or not! Ha ha!
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| He was cute as a bug, and not untalented, but he mostly wound up on TV or in small roles in movies like Two Rode Together (1961) and Mirage (1965.) By 1966, he was out of the industry completely. |
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Reference guides list him as still alive at 89, but a recent FB post from a relative described him as being 92 and still in terrific shape (and much beloved) today! Maybe his age was adjusted down as he began his career (just as his name was altered from William Kaye.) It was hell to capture shots of him with his head up. I always swore that if he'd played to the camera a little more and not looked down so much during filming, he'd have made it further in the cut-throat world of Tinseltown.
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One last thing. My trip ended horribly when I came to the Atlanta airport for what was meant to be a one-hour layover, but a horrendous hailstorm diverted me to Dallas-Ft Worth for a while, then finally to ATL. I lived there for nearly one whole day and went 41 hours on just two one-hour catnaps until finally getting on a flight back to Cincinnati. Disaster movie fanatic that I have always been, I just pretended I was in the bowels of the Wilson Plaza from 1974's Earthquake, where Ava Gardner and Genevieve Bujold sipped coffee out of paper cups and waited to be rescued. Only there was no dancing Walter Matuschanskayasky to keep me entertained!
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It's all back to the normal grind now, so I will endeavor to get more posts up, more frequently. Thanks, till next time!
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