A Walk in the Park

The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

Kevin Fedarko

The Grand Canyon is one of the most visited national parks in the United States. Every year, millions of people snap their selfies on the rim, marvel at the view, and maybe hike a short bit of the trail. They enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime adventure on the back of a mule or raft down the mighty Colorado River.

But fewer than two dozen people have ever walked the trail end to end. There’s no marked path. There are no reliable water sources. No trail angels offering granola bars or words of encouragement or first aid kits. It’s just miles and miles — hundreds of miles — of jagged rock, sheer cliffs, flash flood zones, and desert wilderness.

Among that small handful of people who’ve done it? Author Kevin Fedarko and his buddy, photographer Pete McBride. It’s not as though they didn’t have some skills: Fedarko was a river guide for a while. McBride specializes in outdoor journalism. But long-distance desert hiking? Not so much.

But the two managed to convince National Geographic to support their taking on a challenge that requires a honed set of specific skills. As a ranger quoted in the book says, ‘It is not possible to hike the length of the canyon off the couch.’

The professional pitch for this story is one of conservation — a clear-eyed look at the threats facing the Grand Canyon from tourism, mining, and development. But it’s much more personal than that. It’s a tale of friendship, finding humility, failing spectacularly, and getting back up. It’s about falling in love with a place so hard that you’re willing to sacrifice over and over and over again.

Fedarko writes about the Grand Canyon not just as a landscape but as an almost mythic supernatural titan — vast, living, breathing, capricious, and so indifferent to human suffering — and also gorgeous and spiritual, transcendent and sublime.

The book also touches on the complicated history of the canyon: the sacred role it plays for Indigenous communities like the Havasupai, the Hopi, and the Navajo; the environmental threats from uranium mining and massive tourist developments. And the tragedy that the Colorado River — once wild and free — has been dammed and tamed almost out of existence. Fedarko and McBride’s journey becomes a kind of protest and a testimony.

Yet somehow, under all that weight, this book is funny. These two guys bicker. They make terrible decisions. They pack way too much gear. They forget their sunscreen. They crawl through bushes and fall down cliffs and get chased by wild cattle. And through it all, you’re right there with them.

In the interest of accuracy, balance, and maintaining my friendship with Pete, I’m compelled to disclose that he takes exception to the manner in which we have been depicted up to now.

He points out that during the months and weeks prior to the start of our hike, we went to great lengths to plan for this project, efforts that included researching our route, courting sponsors, purchasing gear, planning menus, packing food caches, and arranging for our permits with the National Park Service, pouring in so much energy and care that it is unfair to suggest, as I do in these pages, that we were behaving frivolously and irresponsibly, because it will invite readers to mistakenly conclude that we were a pair of incompetent ding-dongs who deserved to be treated like piñatas.

Some of this may be true.

My own view, however, is that despite these measures, he and I were unforgivably derelict in the area that mattered most, which was our duty to cultivate the experience and judgment that are prerequisites for responsibly traversing the length of the canyon.

Those fundamentals can only be acquired slowly and patiently over a period not of weeks or months, but years—and by investing the resource we were least willing to expend, which was our time.

Because of that, we were guilty of both hubris and negligence, and thus deserve — at least at this stage of our journey — a certain amount of mockery and disdain. Especially me.

And in addition to all of that, I just like the story better when it’s told this way. — Kevin Fedarko

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