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

by Kevin Fedarko

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.