The Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass-based U-shaped overhang from which visitors can look down about 4,000 feet to the canyon floor, was carefully rolled into place last week at Grand Canyon West's Eagle Point.

Members of the tribe, based in Peach Springs, Ariz., hope the attraction draws 600,000 visitors to the remote destination in its first year of operation. About 130,000 people, many of them on air tours from Las Vegas, visited the area last year to get glimpses of the Grand Canyon, Native American life and to go on one-day whitewater raft trips.

The Skywalk, which opens to the public on March 28, is less than 100 miles east of Las Vegas, but about 120 miles by car from the city.

Construction is nearly complete on the $30 million Skywalk, which has been in the planning stages for more than a decade. On March 7, contractors inched the nearly 2 million pounds of glass and steel like a tongue-shaped diving platform over the edge of red sandstone walls of the canyon.

It took more than an hour for a team of about 30 hard-hatted workers to roll the platform the last 70 feet on four wheeled "shoes" that positioned the structure over pylons that are a spider web of steel rebar and concrete anchored 30 feet deep. Between now and March 20 - the date of a ceremonial first walk by retired astronaut Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin - workers will weld the structure to the anchors.

Tourists, who will be issued numbered keepsake booties to avoid scratching the 2.8-inch glass floor, will pay $25 apiece to go on the Skywalk in addition to the $28 admission fee to the tribal park. Although the Skywalk has been designed to hold the weight of 71 fully loaded Boeing 747s and withstand earthquakes, the tribe will limit the number of people on the Skywalk at one time to 120.

While the tribe expects an economic windfall from the attraction, the Skywalk's development was steeped in controversy. Many tribal elders viewed the project as a desecration of a place considered sacred to traditional tribal members, while several younger members of the tribe looked at it as an extension of the Hualapais' growing tourism industry.

More than 30 air tour and ground-based transportation companies offer packages to the area, a 1 million-acre reservation that is home to 2,000 tribe members. The single-day raft trips provided by the Hualapais are the only one-day whitewater packages offered on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

To gear for additional traffic, the tribe is building a new runway capable of handling corporate jets and larger aircraft at its Grand Canyon West Air Terminal. A visitors center to be built at the Skywalk later this year will include a museum, theater, VIP lounge, gift shop and restaurants with patios and rooms overlooking the canyon.

Unlike overlooks at Grand Canyon National Park where millions of tourists travel each year, the canyon area on the Hualapai reservation has no guard rails or fences and visitors can walk right to the edge of cliffs.

Tribal leaders blessed the site during the final rollout of the Skywalk and tribal members in traditional headdress posed for pictures for the nearly 100 print and broadcast journalists that came to the event from all over the world.

The crowd is expected to be just as big March 20 when Aldrin, the second person to set foot on the moon, and retired astronaut John Herrington, who logged nearly two weeks in space and went on three spacewalks, participate in the first walk event.

Herrington has a Native American heritage and is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Tribe. He carried a Chickasaw Nation flag into space when he was aboard the shuttle Endeavour in 2002.