Progress on Red Hawk Casino includes a pretty porte-cochere, a pandemonium of hammered steel and aluminum and plans for the stretch drive.

The casino will open in December near Shingle Springs. It was open Thursday to a media tour exclusive to The Telegraph.

To stand near the porte-cochere, or place where visitors will leave cars for valet parking, already hints at a feeling of glamour that will greet those who arrive at night.

“There’ll be several waterfalls, with fire behind – propane fire,” said Tribal Chairman Nicholas Fonseca of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

At about that spot, too, sunset or daytime arrivals will view a big-time panorama of countless ridges stretching away to the north and east.

An intricate fan of wooden arches sweeps from north to northwest at the establishment’s front entrance. It’s near there, too, that bottomed-out victims of the cards, the dice or the slots will confront the lip of an all-too-conveniently located 100-foot sheer precipice.

“Loser’s Leap,” Fonseca said. “It will be barriered off.”

Out at U.S. Highway 50, a long-awaited overpass is 70-percent complete, which will free tribe members from a years-long illegal landlocking of the reservation from the highway.

“It’s going to open about a month early, in September,” Fonseca said.

Inside now resembles a James Bond movie set, or maybe Austin Powers, with every surface of silvery steel or aluminum. Hundreds of workers, including Creamon Alston of KHS&S Contractors, are knitting together a skeleton eventually to be fleshed in what Fonseca calls a posh but not glitzy casino interior. Alston spent much of Thursday slicing sections of aluminum for undersides of structural components.

“These are for soffits -- this one’s a pop-out of a wall,” Alston said.

Tyler Bila of Cumming Corporation was on hand to troubleshoot problems early, making sure structural undersides were being cut to fit eventual fleshing out.

“We’ll make changes early before it costs a lot of money to fix,” Bila said.

“The interior will be all earth tones -- nothing clownish,” Fonseca said. “No pinks or bright yellows.”

The dissing of Las Vegas doesn’t extend to the definitely Vegas-style parking arrangements -- now fully sketched in massive multi-story concrete pilings that poke the sky.

“Not like Thunder Valley or Cache Creek, where they have miles of one-level parking, where people complain it’s too far to walk,” Fonseca said.

Elevators and escalators will be carrying clients most of the way from transportation to destination. That’s unless, they have to drop off kids at the casino’s care center, where the tribe will take pride, Fonseca said, in hiring plentiful adult supervisory staff, seeking to have an adult on duty for every four children.

Red Hawk’s view from indoors will span around 260 degrees, but Fonseca is mulling an observation deck atop a hilltop water tank some 100 yards above the casino’s top floor. That view would be 360 degrees.

“Maybe a tramway?” he said.

The tank is “a big red eyesore” now, but will be repainted, he said.

“Options are to look like a basket, or a suggestion is to look like a poker chip,” Fonseca said.

Energy was high on the reservation Thursday. Fonseca noted matter-of-factly, but also proudly that “there’s no recession up here -- I have to spend $330 million by the end of the year.”

Red Hawk Casino will hire some 1,750 people.

Of the hilltop tank, Fonseca was probably clowning when he said, “Maybe I’ll paint it pink.”

The Telegraph’s Roger Phelps can be reached at rogerp@goldcountrymedia.com, or post a comment at folsomtelegraph.com