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

by Kevin Fedarko

And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot

The mosaic is so rich and varied that a hiker who descends

from the highest point on the North Rim to the lowest point inside the canyon will pass through a spectrum of life equivalent to moving from the cool boreal forests of subarctic Canada to the sunstruck deserts of Mexico that lie just above the Tropic of Cancer—thereby compressing a distribution of plants and animals that typically stretch over more than two thousand horizontal miles into a single vertical mile.

An undertaking that extends well beyond what Theodore Roosevelt called for when he referred to the canyon, in a speech he delivered on the South Rim in the spring of 1903, as “one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.” Aside from simply looking at it, you must lace up your boots and actually step inside the place.

He sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth. —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

What’s more, thanks to the giant dam anchored at the head of the canyon, plus eighteen other dams up and down the rest of the river, every cubic foot of the Colorado’s flow was metered and rationed by a vast network of infrastructure for water storage, hydropower, and flood control upon which the entire Southwest depended. No other river in America was more rigorously controlled or more stringently regulated—and none had been exploited so ruthlessly that, according to one set of calculations, every drop of its water was used and reused up to seventeen times before the Colorado dried up and died in the Sonoran Desert south of the border.

And was it possible, perhaps, that the purest, truest wilderness in the canyon might no longer reside along the Colorado, but instead be found amid the austere and all but untrammeled world of cliffs and ledges above?

“When you know there’s a good chance you’re going into the red room, you have to reach down and find a different place mentally,” he’d tell his squad.I “The thing that distinguishes successful athletes from everybody else is a realization that your limits are not necessarily where you think they are—and that your body is capable of doing more, often far more, than you expect it can.”

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.

Journeys such as this aren’t things that you complete, he told me. Instead, it’s the journey that completes you—which

In other words, how you looked at a snake said a lot about how you were moving across the land: your alertness, your concentration, the vigilance and the care that you brought to the task of being present and attentive to everything that surrounded you. And by the same token, while the details you could later recall might well convey something important about the snake, they revealed far more about you.

But to really see the canyon—to touch and feel and hear everything about this place—you will have to pay attention.”

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.

“They are natives of the Grand Canyon,” he declared, “and surely any bill relating to the ecology of the canyon should include protection of the human beings who live there.”

In the first place, you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.

“This is the time of day when, if you really listen, you don’t hear anything at all. It’s the silence—that’s the most important thing.”

To 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.

Step by step from one hidden pocket of water to the next, day by day, until eventually the canyon is persuaded to reveal the things it keeps hidden. Only on foot, the slowest and hardest way to move, can you hope to make contact with the finest parts of this landscape.

They were pilgrims, each and every one of them, and what made them so was neither the difficulty of the path they had chosen nor the distance they intended to travel.

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.

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.

that humility, like all desert flowers, needs a bit of watering from time to time.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire