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

by Kevin Fedarko

Although the Colorado River spent roughly 6 million years carving out the canyon itself, the rock into which the river has cut is far older. The mile-deep walls on both sides of the gorge reveal no fewer than twenty-seven formations whose lineages straddle eight geological periods, during which nearly 40 percent of the planet’s chronology was etched directly into the stone. By some measures, those walls showcase perhaps the finest cross-section of terrestrial time visible anywhere on the globe, a vertical concatenation of history stacked in horizontal strata, much like the pages of an immense book—the most venerable manuscript of its kind.

Alas, although I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t have the faintest clue how truly unfit Pete and I both were, in every possible way, for a journey that would pull us into parts of the canyon where, for good reasons, few travelers have ever been.

The journey took six months, yet the marriage that was consummated upon his return lasted only a few weeks.

And so it went, one screwup following another as we assembled a string of failures, like a tawdry necklace of fake pearls.

Each botched assignment afforded yet another opportunity to test the validity of Pete’s conviction that regardless of how much trouble we might bumble into thanks to poor preparation, sketchy research, and generalized negligence, if we simply refused to give up, one way or another things would work out just fine.

I also recognized that he was far better than me when it came to not only getting us out of trouble, but also how to look at trouble in the first place. 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.

During the previous century and a half, more than eight hundred people have perished inside the canyon, making it one of the deadliest national parks in the country. With so many fatalities, an entire book has been devoted to the subject. Entitled Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, it is packed with gruesome details about not only the 43 boaters who drowned in the river, the 88 victims of suicide, and the 138 pilots and passengers killed in air-tour accidents involving helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, but also the 202 visitors who have met their deaths on foot while hiking—often in exceptionally unpleasant ways.

“Oh, no worries,” he replied airily. “I’ve got a guy who’s totally gonna help us figure all this out.”

When I joined the group, we did our best to refrain from inhaling all the food at once and begging for seconds, focusing instead on politely answering the river runners’ questions about how far we were going, how heavy our packs were, and why, instead of traveling by boat, we were floundering through the rocks like a band of deranged lunatics.

Good Lord, I thought to myself as I was sitting on the front porch one night, staring up at the moon. We’re actually doing this again.

Are we really ready to go back in by ourselves? I wondered. Is this truly something that the two of us can handle?

“You guys are way too unqualified for us to let you try to do this on your own,” he assured me. “So then what’s the plan?” I asked, half expecting him to suggest that we pull the plug and cancel everything. “Kelly and I are going with you.”

“Almost everywhere you look, with every step you take, the canyon seems intent on pulling you further into the past,” Mathieu said one afternoon in reference to the relics in those limestone caverns, all of which belonged to prehistoric creatures that had inhabited the abyss prior to the end of the last ice age, between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago. “Everybody focuses on the ages of the rock layers, which are calibrated in tens of millions of years, but there are lots of other things that can add depth and richness to your understanding of how time works in this landscape.”

Although all of these migrants left some type of imprint, the marks of those who are believed to have arrived first are breathtakingly faint. Aside from what Western scholars can glean from a single pair of spearpoints—a partial Folsom projectile point found near the river and a fragment of a Clovis point located by a bird-watcher on the South Rim—we know almost nothing about the roving bands of Paleo-Indians who may, according to one perspective, have been among the earliest humans to move across this region during the twilight of the Pleistocene, some eleven thousand to thirteen thousand years ago.

the Ancestral Puebloans.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached—and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves—only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

As their ambitions expanded, so, too, did their respect for the paramount truth about slot-canyon exploration: the number of ways you could die far exceeded the number of tools and gadgets you could stuff inside your pack—and, therefore, one’s life depended on getting that balance exactly right.