A Walk in the Park
The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
"I love this book. It's an insane premise, an implausible journey through an incomprehensible landscape, undertaken by people who are life-threateningly stubborn to a degree that is, itself, insane. What they accomplished is, by contrast, startlingly real." --S. C. Gwynne, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon
A Walk in the Park
Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets of enchantment, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, that only a handful of humans have ever seen. Members of the canyon’s eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider some profoundly troublesome myths at the very center of our national parks. Even Fedarko’s dying father, who had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape.
And always, there was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgiving, yet suffused with magic, drenched in wonder, and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty.
A Walk in the Park is an immersive account of haunting journey, a singular portrait of a sublime place, and a moving plea for the preservation of America’s greatest natural treasure.
From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile comes a rollicking and poignant account of an epic misadventure between two friends with zero preparation and one shining dream: a 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America’s most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth.
A few years after quitting his job to pursue the ill-advised ambition of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon—a journey McBride promised would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the tiny cluster of experts who were familiar with this particular trek billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”
The ensuing ordeal revealed a place that was harsher, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They spent more than a year struggling to make their way through the all-but-impenetrable reaches of the canyon’s deepest wilderness, a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril—and where there is still no trail spanning the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic landmark.
Photos by Peter McBride