A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

by Kevin Fedarko

The pelicans were simply besotted with whitewater—drawn to its beauty, captivated by its thrills, unable to break free of its joyous pull. Like us, they just couldn’t get enough of it. And like me, they apparently had no desire to fly back to wherever they had come from.

Even when nothing seemed to be going our way, he held fast to the belief that something absolutely marvelous lay hidden within the folds of each disaster, and that if we kept our wits and maintained our senses of humor, we would sooner or later be permitted to partake in the magic.

The hour preceding dawn signals the start of a race to break camp and be on the move by 5:30 to make the most of the evanescent portion of the day when the canyon’s interior is wrapped in cool blue shadows, and the place doesn’t feel like a total inferno.

Silence is the tribute we pay to holiness. —Pico Iyer

truly know this world, it is necessary to move through it not by plane or raft or on the back of a mule, but on foot, hauling your gear and provisions on your back while moving through the space between the river and the rims.

They were pilgrims because they had come to a holy place—a cathedral in the desert—in the hope of standing in the presence of something greater than themselves, something that would enable them to feel profoundly diminished and radically expanded in the same breath. They were pilgrims because there is something sacred in the belief that despite its ugliness and its many depravities, there are still places in our fallen and shattered world where wonder abides.

We come and go, but the land is always there. —Willa Cather

she grasped something important that I did not fully understand at the time, which is that although this park, like all our nation’s parks, may initially look and feel like a place where the cares and the complexities of the larger world are held at bay, it is very much the opposite. She was suggesting, I think, that the true purpose of places such as this is to lay the groundwork for—and at times demand—a heightened confrontation that is more challenging, more unsettling, and infinitely more rewarding than a simple vacation.

Not all rugs have a spirit line, and in those that do, they can sometimes be hard to discern. But if you look carefully, you will see the defect in the line along the edge, a reminder—for those who choose to see it in this manner—that humility, like all desert flowers, needs a bit of watering from time to time.

That mission, it’s important to emphasize, does not entail providing unfettered access to every location inside the park for all people at any time. Instead, it hinges on balancing the myriad and often competing demands of recreationists with the overarching and far more vital mandate to preserve the country’s most precious natural spaces so that these treasures can be handed off, intact, to future generations of Americans.