A Walk in the Park

A Walk in the Park

by Kevin Fedarko

Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. A few years after quitting his job to pursue an ill-advised dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, 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 that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had actually completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon’s truest 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, even today, there is still no trail spanning the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic landmark.

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 myths at the very center of our national parks—and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. 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 singular portrait of a sublime place, A Walk in the Park is a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America’s greatest natural treasure.

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