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

by Kevin Fedarko

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.

We talked about our boyhoods in Pennsylvania, and about how without ever having consciously planned things this way, each of us had fled Pittsburgh—he to a small town on the coast of Maine, and I to the deserts of the Southwest—in the hopes of finding a place where nature and the land hadn’t been treated so poorly. A place where outdoor recreation involved more than shooting cans and bottles that had been dumped into a river, or schlepping through fields that doubled as junkyards and waste pits.

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.