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

by Kevin Fedarko

There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. —Edward Abbey

It was the kind of heat that would slap you dead if you lingered in its glare for too long,

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.

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

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.

We’ve been friends for so long, I can’t remember which one of us is the bad influence. —T-shirt, gift shop, South Rim of the canyon

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.