A Walk in the Park Quotes

“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.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“back when humans must have lived in almost continuous humility and awe, transfixed by the inescapable sense of just how small and unimportant they were—little more than Tadpole Shrimp or Spadefoot Toads, creatures unburdened by delusions that the world could be sculpted to suit their ambitions and needs.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“If you watch a man spend fifty years of his life on his knees in the darkness digging coal, my father could have told me, then you calibrate your blessings by a different set of metrics than most people.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“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.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“In the end, we were forced to concede that only one explanation made sense. The pelicans were simply besotted with whitewater—drawn to its beauty, captivated by its thrills, unable to break free of its joyous pull. Like us, they just couldn’t get enough of it. And like me, they apparently had no desire to fly back to wherever they had come from.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“In all, the ancestral lands of at least eleven prehistoric tribes either abutted or lay directly inside the canyon,”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“we had finally stumbled into a landscape that had stripped away the illusions we’d been peddling of ourselves as a pair of badasses to reveal who we truly were, which was nothing more than a couple of jackasses.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“This was a sky belonging to a time that no longer exists—a sky that has never been seen, or even imagined, by most people living in such places as Boston or Dallas or Los Angeles. A sky whose wildness can call forth and amplify”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“How would it feel, I wondered, to be part of an unbroken human lineage that anchored you to this ground as deeply as a field of century plants—and by virtue of those roots, to know that the land belonged to you, and you belonged to the land, in a way that white visitors such as us could only dimly perceive?”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“When you know there’s a good chance you’re going into the red room, you have to reach down and find a different place mentally,” he’d tell his squad.I “The thing that distinguishes successful athletes from everybody else is a realization that your limits are not necessarily where you think they are—and that your body is capable of doing more, often far more, than you expect it can.” Although Pete never really tried to make the downhill team, he absorbed many of these ideas, in particular the conviction that any challenge could successfully be met with the right combination of drive, grit, and sunny optimism—and if this proved insufficient, well, it was okay to just wing it.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“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.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“We’ve been friends for so long, I can’t remember which one of us is the bad influence.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“weight on the feet—say, boots—requires between four and six times more energy to move than the same weight on one’s back.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“hiker schlepping a fifty-eight-pound pack will expend roughly the same energy over ten miles as a hiker carrying a ten-pound pack will expend in thirty miles.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Phase III of the makeover. For this we broke out the topo maps, then sat down with the entire team to thoroughly reevaluate the route we’d be taking, based on their knowledge of the ground we’d have to cover.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“So we repackaged all our meals, turbocharging them with dried vegetables, powdered cheese, powdered butter, and packages of ramen noodles to pump up the nutritional value as well as the caloric payload. We also paid special attention to adding items such as peanut butter and olive oil that were especially dense in fat”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Meanwhile, Mathieu and Kelly decided that it was time to move on to Phase II of our makeover: nutrition and food.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“nothing has a greater impact on the ease or difficulty with which one travels than weight. In essence, the less you carry, the farther and faster you will go.I”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“An attitude that helps shape your mindset as you move across the landscape.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“hiking in the canyon isn’t just an exercise in reducing the weight of your pack to some arbitrary number.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“involves making better choices about what you bring and what you leave behind.” “Basically, it’s about differentiating your wants from your needs,”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“So the first lesson it teaches is the importance of being humble.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“a change had come over him, and instead of progressively weakening, he’d been getting stronger.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Given how many packages were still on the way, I decided it was best to wait for everything to arrive before getting to work.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“By now we had ventured far beyond where even the faintest glimmer of artificial illumination crept into the sky from the hotels and gas stations on the South Rim, while the lights of Las Vegas were still too far to the west to register on the horizon. This left us enveloped in something singular, because aside from the deserts of eastern Oregon, the badlands of southern Utah, and a few isolated pockets in places such as Death Valley, no other part of the country can match the darkness that looms over this section of the canyon on a calm, moonless night just before the stars emerge.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“The light is so warm and comforting you want to scoop it up and bottle it so you can preserve the way it makes you feel—and then you realize that not only can’t you capture it, you can’t even name it.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“It dawned on me then, for the very first time, that perhaps it may not be necessary to hump a fifty-pound backpack across almost eight hundred miles of the park’s most remote and inaccessible reaches to touch the magic of this place—and that although such an approach can yield some exquisitely sublime moments of wonder, it may well be possible to have a briefer but equally authentic encounter with that magic. To take even a few steps without anything coming between you and the canyon may be all that most people who are drawn to this landscape, or any landscape, really need.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“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.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Over the Edge:”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“But the white researchers all seem to agree”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon