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

by Kevin Fedarko

Together, these strata of vegetation enable the canyon to function as a nexus in which some seventy-five ecological communities are spread across four distinct biomes and two geological provinces. 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.

concatenation

quiescence

All of which meant that when a one-armed veteran of the Civil War named John Wesley Powell finally led a survey party of nine men in four wooden boats down the Colorado River in the summer of 1869, the canyon would win the additional distinction of being the very last of the country’s major landscape features to be officially explored—although the tantalizing possibility that other voyagers may well have preceded Powell is suggested by the legend of Tiyo, a Hopi boy who is said to have floated through the canyon in a hollow log, riding the river all the way to the Sea of Cortez before returning to his people.I

there wasn’t a single trail that would get a person from one end of the canyon to the other on foot. In all the time that had passed since the place was discovered by white explorers, nobody had figured out how to walk through the damn thing from one end to the other, because the canyon simply isn’t built to accommodate that.

In essence, the canyon is far more than just one giant cleft, as its name seems to imply. Instead, it is a fiendishly elaborate maze in which so many tributaries fork off the main-stem gorge—some 740 of them, by one count—that for anyone attempting a traverse on foot, every mile of lateral progress along the main-stem canyon has to be paid for with an additional two and a half miles of detouring. In getting from one end of the canyon to the other, a hiker will almost triple the 277-mile distance covered by the river.

From the moment Fletcher began researching his project, it was clear that the goal he’d set suffered from too much ambition and not nearly enough pragmatism. After making inquiries about the basic topography and badgering park officials on the feasibility of feeling one’s way along the cliffs and ledges, he wasn’t sure he even understood where such a route might start, or how it should finish. “No two people,” he later grumbled, “seemed able to agree about where the canyon began and ended.”II

scree

talus

The story of Tiyo, which is recounted in slightly different form among the Navajo, belongs to a larger repertoire of tribal stories whose antiquity and splendor attests to a human history in the canyon that radically predates the arrival of whites, who saw themselves as “discovering” the land for the first time.

This claim is a bit odd. A cursory glance at any decent map would have confirmed for Fletcher that the canyon starts at Lee’s Ferry, a break in the cliffs along the shoreline of the Colorado River less than ten miles south of Arizona’s border with Utah, and concludes just short of the Nevada border at a set of saw-toothed escarpments known as the Grand Wash Cliffs.

Even with the car windows rolled up, the sulfurous air reeked of rotten eggs. If we were driving at night, the sky and the water glowed orange from the flames, evoking Pittsburgh’s most notorious epithet, Hell with the Lid Off.

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

to acknowledge a truth that anyone who has ever succumbed to the witchery of wooden boats finds impossible to deny—which is that dories are drop-dead gorgeous, and that a man who falls under the spell of that much beauty is apt to fling prudence and sanity straight out the window.

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.

praxis

nacreous

Nacreous: pearlescent

If there was a reward to their venture, perhaps a portion of it was being handed to them tonight as something ancient merged with the here and now: a cluster of humans, sitting in a circle, sharing stories beneath the canopy of the night. For a second or two, like glimpsing a shooting star from the corner of one’s eye, I even thought I might have caught a trace of what drew and held them to this place.

amanuensis,

A literary or artistic assistant.

At the bottom of a slot called Climax was a pair of oval-shaped potholes called the Eyes, and the water in those pools glowed with a yellow light reflecting down from the upper walls. Whenever a cloud passed over the narrow strip of sky above the top of the slot, a blue shadow would slide sleepily across the surface of the water, making it seem as if the eyes were blinking, evoking the unnerving possibility that the slot might be a living entity—which, in a very real sense, they all were.

Although a slot might remain untouched for a hundred years, it was equally likely, depending on the alignment of storm cells and cloudbursts, for that same slot to be scoured down to bedrock once every three years. As Rich and Todd took note of these changes, they began to see that the beauty of these transitory worlds was a blade whose edge was sharpened by the awareness of its evanescence—the haunted knowledge that the elements that made these places so lovely were destined to be obliterated, in the blink of an eye.

Yet, that’s what Rich, Todd, and a handful of their friends seemed to have pulled off. In four years, they spent more than 200 nights below the rim dropping into 165 separate slot canyons, more than 100 of which are believed to have been first descents.III

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.

‘Everything down there has remained pure because the land moves,’ ” I recited. “ ‘The land always moves.’ ” “What did she mean by that?” Pete mused. “I’m not sure. But the figures in those paintings seemed to shimmer, like there was a tremor of energy running through them. We both saw it.”

lemon-colored fiddle-necks,

basalt

“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.”

Unlike my brother and me, our dad didn’t need to spend a year walking through the Grand Canyon to learn these things—and he probably knew that those tourists we’d been passing on the trail didn’t, either. 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. But most of all, they were pilgrims because they were seeking their benedictions on foot, the simplest and humblest means of all. Which meant that they were doing the very thing that my father had prepared my brother and me to do, each in his own way, all those years ago. They were going for a walk in the park.

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

If the journey that Pete and I completed was reckless and misguided, a vision conceived in ignorance and executed (at least in the beginning) in the worst style imaginable, it was also the purest thing either of us had ever done. An adventure like no other, in a landscape like no other, that would remain with us for the rest of our lives.

In the summer of 2023, Joe Biden traveled to northern Arizona to sign a presidential proclamation incorporating almost 1 million acres of public lands on both the north and south sides of the canyon into the country’s newest national monument. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, which translates as “Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon,” may be difficult for many non-indigenous people to pronounce; but the name, a linguistic composite of both Havasupai and Hopi, symbolizes an effort to address a number of injustices connected with the forcible removal of Native Americans from land that later became part of the park. The monument, which now protects thousands of cultural and religious sites as well as a host of plants, animals, and springs that lie just beyond the formal borders of the park, stands as a victory for all of the tribes—although the ceremony itself held special significance for those who continue to call themselves “the guardians of the Grand Canyon.”

Among the eleven tribes of the canyon, none surpasses the Navajo in the art of weaving textiles, especially rugs, which are created by the women of the community and considered to be works of art. The layouts of those rugs, by tradition, are conceived by the weaver, carried in her memory, and passed down from mother to daughter. The designs are renowned not only for their beauty and symmetry, but also for a curious hallmark that involves a break in the pattern at the border, which, when viewed from a distance, can easily be mistaken for a loose thread, even though it has been incorporated directly into the fabric. This minor but deliberate flaw is known as a ch’ihónít’i, or “spirit line,” and its purpose has been interpreted in a variety of ways, one of which suggests that it is an expression of restraint. By ensuring that the rug will always remain incomplete—and therefore imperfect—the break stands as an acknowledgment of the need to remain humble, a renunciation of vanity that helps the weaver to maintain a proper sense of balance in the world. 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.

the gap reaffirms my belief that there can be coherence and even beauty in stories, like this one, whose endings fail to tie off perfectly.

As Dad opened the book and held it in his lap while sitting in front of the fireplace, I snapped a picture of him with my cell phone. From the photo, it’s clear that he was studying it intently, paging through the images and drinking everything in. But in that moment, I think he was doing something else, too. He was counting his blessings as he prepared to head off on the grandest walk of all.

BENEDICTO 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

regulations may sometimes seem annoying, but they form a key part of the Park Service’s effort to uphold its core mission. 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. This amounts to a kind a covenant whose purpose is to nurture and sustain the hope that, despite the imperfections and flaws of this park and many others, something wondrous will be passed on to our descendants. It’s one of the best things about this country, and it’s something worth celebrating.

when you enter this space, please consider going with your family and taking your kids—especially if they’re young. You will find that your appreciation of the canyon’s wonders will be expanded, quite radically, by the wonder in your children’s eyes. Their response will leave you not only invigorated and made whole, but touched by a rare kind of fulfillment: the realization that you are instilling memories and values that, with a bit of luck, will help to anchor and inspire your offspring for the remainder of their lives.

As for Hiking Grand Canyon Loops: Adventures in the Backcountry (Hikes I and II), by George Steck, perhaps the most important thing to note is that in addition to the fact that the first fifty pages include one of the finest introductions that has ever been written to hiking in the canyon, one of the book’s sections begins with a useful cautionary warning from Long John Silver, which all prospective canyon hikers should bear in mind: “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

Brady’s Pincushion Cactus

For a delightful book of poems and photographs that evoke the landscape along the western end of the Navajo Reservation, including Tuba City and the Painted Desert, search out a copy of Secrets from the Center of the World, by the U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and the photographer Stephen Strom.

Finally, for an exceptionally cogent articulation of the ties that bind the native peoples of the Southwest to a particular landscape, see the “Proclamation” that was issued for Bears Ears National Monument upon its establishment by the Obama administration in December 2016, prior to its shameful evisceration by the Trump administration, and its subsequent restoration by the Biden administration.

For additional treatments, also see “Ethnic Cleansing and America’s Creation of National Parks,” by Isaac Kantor, and “The Tribes vs. Donald Trump,” by Abe Streep.

Tomomi Hanamure,

The Willa Cather quote is from the final chapter of her novel O Pioneers!

Last but not least, my mother asked me to include a few additional details about my father that she feels need to be mentioned. He was a devoted reader who cultivated a love of books for his entire life—a passion that he never lost, even during his final weeks when his eyesight failed him. And his jovial manner of speaking, which was one of his trademarks, was an expression of his kindness and decency—aspects of his character that he retained, with great courage and determination, right up to the very end.