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

by Kevin Fedarko

With every thousand feet of drop, the temperature increases by roughly 5°F, giving rise to a ladder of meteorological zones and niches so discrete that the flora and fauna at the top bear little if any relation to the forms of life on the bottom.

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.

Each layer is older than the one above it until finally, all the way at the bottom, you arrive at rock whose bloodlines extend further back in time than the human mind can even imagine: almost a full 2 billion years, a third of the age of the planet, and roughly one-seventh the life span of the universe itself.

In getting from one end of the canyon to the other, a hiker will almost triple the 277-mile distance covered by the river.

The Man Who Walked Through Time. “I was hopelessly insignificant and helpless, a mere insect.”

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.

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.

This is what astronomers call celestial vaulting, the revelatory effect produced by the rushing awareness of two opposing impressions: the sudden apprehension of the vastness and the depth of the heavens, combined with the arrival of a moment of understanding that transmits, in a single burst, the tininess and the insignificance of earth as well as everything that moves or breathes upon its surface.

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.