00017 · A Walk in the Park
Thank goodness for writers like Kevin Fedarko, so we don’t have to suffer endless days of extreme tramping to explore the hidden horrors and gems of the Grand Canyon.
We don’t have to rappel into claustrophobic slot canyons, full of “pools of brown water concealing a thick layer of sticky orange sludge that reeked of rot, stagnation, and nameless putrescence,” the surface of one “coated, inexplicably, with dead tarantulas.”
Effortlessly, with the turn of a page, we get out of that hellhole to see a place called the Godscape, an incredibly remote and vast plain of sandstone on the west end of the Grand Canyon, “dimpled with shallow craters. Each was roughly the size of a birdbath, filled with snowmelt and coated in a thin sheet of ice that glittered like blue glass. Hundreds of frozen pools were out there, and together they formed a glittering mosaic of sharded light, as if the sky had somehow slid away from its moorings, run aground, and shattered itself to pieces on the red reef of the Esplanade.”
Author Kevin Fedarko and his photographer friend Pete McBride have teamed up for years to explore many areas of the world for their magazine assignments. Their usual strategy is to make an extravagant exploration plan, pitch it to a magazine who loves the story for its audacity, and succeed in the operation through grit and luck. That strategy fails in the Grand Canyon. They hit a brick wall here, literally, in the Redwall Limestone that is the canyon’s most gnarly and vertical layer.
A Walk in the Park is my kinda favorite book: a buddy travelogue in harsh environs that includes initial hubris, spectacular failure in the form of a near-death spanking from the heat and landscape, redeemed by hard work, rallying teamwork, and humility. Along the way we get great personal observations, with the just enough background of flora and fauna and geography. And finally we meet great personalities with expertise and history in the area—personal encounters with living characters as well as written encounters curated by an extremely well-read author. The reader’s guide and chapter notes at the end of the book is worth the purchase alone, and will provide a lifetime of mental exploration.
There is no true trail that runs from one end of the Grand Canyon National Park. For the very few who have traversed the canyon from east to west on foot (we’re excluding river runners on this list), the route is a patchwork of segments that include bushwhacking and canyoneering and crawling in some of the harshest weather on earth. It is rightly called the most difficult hike in the world, and very few people have completed the journey from Lee’s Ferry in the east to the Grand Wash Cliffs in the west.
This is a book that I’m going to be recommending to everyone for years. I read along with my topographical mapping app open, jotting notes on ways I could access some of the places they described. I got incredibly good tips on ultralight travel. The book is an inspiration seed broadcaster.
I greatly appreciate Fedarko’s inclusion of Native voices. I was ashamed at how little I knew of Havasupai and Hualupai history, despite traveling on their lands a dozen times. These two tribes continue to fight to survive after having their land stolen and treated like absolute shit by the Park Service and federal government and white settlers.
The reader is left hopeful for the future of the Grand Canyon. While development continues to encroach its borders, the place holds its own as a place of vast wildness and silence. The sheer inconvenience and impenetrability of the place is an insurance policy. Its most accessible and popular area, the Bright Angel Trail on the south rim, is a full day’s drive from any metropolitan area. Of the millions of people that visit that location, very few go more than a mile into the canyon. At its most remote northwest edge—on the Arizona Strip that’s known as “America’s Tibet”—visitors must pass over unpatrolled access roads lined with limestone rock that legendarily chews up tires. There is no cell service, and no rescue. And that’s just to get to the trailheads of that part of the canyon.
I’m heading there.
