Flagstaff author Kevin Fedarko spent the better part of six years as an apprentice river guide along the Colorado River in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He studied the culture of people who are transfixed by the bottom of the canyon and the art of rowing down it — and wrote a book about it called "The Emerald Mile."
But, his newest book, “A Walk in the Park,” presented him with an entirely different view of the canyon. The Show spoke with him more about it.
Full conversation
KEVIN FEDARKO: In the summer of 2015, my friend and collaborator, Peter McBride — National Geographic photographer and filmmaker — came to me with a rather harebrained idea. And he said, “Look, I know that you know the world of the river at the bottom of the canyon, but what we're going to do, as an assignment for National Geographic magazine, is we're going to strap 55 pound packs on our backs, and we're going to walk through the canyon on foot.
“We're going to walk along the length of the canyon — starting at Lees Ferry, ending at the Grand Wash cliffs — and we're going to do that together despite the fact that there is no trail that you can follow through Grand Canyon National Park.”
So that's how the whole thing started. And the misery and the brutality and the suffering that ensued from it was really the dominant theme, at least for the beginning part of the journey that followed.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, this has been called the toughest hike in the world, is that right? Like, I mean, “no trail” is like an understatement.
FEDARKO: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that it is one of, if not the, toughest hikes in the world. I mean, this is — it's the second most visited national park in America. It's got 6 million people that come to it each and every year. The only park that receives more visitation is Great Smoky Mountains National Park back east.
And most people who go into the canyon, and through the canyon, they use the only highway that's really available is the Colorado River. It's the instrument that carved and created and polished the canyon in the first place. And a river trip is a wonderful way to experience Grand Canyon. Colorado River travels about 277 miles as it moves through the bottom of Grand Canyon.
But if you are moving through this landscape on foot, you have to keep in mind this is probably the most shattered, broken, fragmented landscape feature on the face of the North American continent. And you will spend so much time bushwhacking through the backcountry, moving up and down the walls of the canyon to piece together a route along the very thin ledges and terraces that you move across, taking these enormous detours into side canyons, more than 600 of them that you have to thread into and then back out of that.
On foot, you're not going to cover 277 miles. You're going to cover about 750 miles. So, that is just an incredibly difficult thing to do from a physical standpoint.
GILGER: Yeah. So you enlisted like a group of more experienced hikers, it sounds like, to let you tag along — at least on the first part of this journey. Talk about how you began, your expectations, the things that you even tried to bring.
FEDARKO: I mean, I'm embarrassed to say, but there's just no way of getting around it. Pete and I did not prepare adequately for this trip. We assumed that we knew the Grand Canyon by virtue of our familiarity with the river. We figured, how hard could it really be? And so we were not in the kind of physical shape that we needed to be in to be able to carry these enormous packs up and down the walls of the canyon for 8 or 10 hours a day.
We didn't know what to bring in terms of the discipline and the hard choices that you have to make between what you think you want inside of the canyon and what you really need in order to survive. The only thing that we did that was a good decision was we convinced a group of very, very experienced long-distance hikers, who were embarked on their own continuous through hike, to let us tag along for the first part of our first segment.
And I have to tell you that it took the canyon just five days to break Pete and I in half. By that point, the bottoms of my feet were covered in so many blisters it looked as if I'd been given a pedicure with a belt sander. Pete had succumbed to a brutal heat condition known as hyponatremia, which arises from a severe deficiency in electrolytes, and which — if untreated — can kill you.
And we had to claw our way out of the canyon, abandon this group of hikers that had taken us under their wing, come back to Flagstaff with our tails between our legs and acknowledge that we had failed and that if we wanted to complete this journey through the canyon, we were going to have to really restart the whole process and prepare adequately for the venture.
GILGER: Right. And you write about this pretty brutally in the book, but there's an excerpt I would love for you to read from when you first arrived there — before you realized how terrible this was going to be — and what you saw. It was at night. Can you read that for us?
FEDARKO: Absolutely.
“We pulled off the pavement and followed a set of tire tracks leading through clumps of salt brush and rabbit brush, interspersed with the occasional yucca. It was pitch dark when we finally reached the end of the road, killed the headlights and gasped in awe as we stepped from the truck. The Milky Way shimmered across the heavens from one horizon to the other, and the rest of the sky was speckled with so many constellations that I felt dizzy and was forced to look away, which is when my eye caught the flicker of a small campfire about 20 yards in front of us. Amid the orange glow, I could see the silhouettes of Rich and his crew of hikers set against the star-dappled immensity of the night.”
GILGER: So there's this immense beauty at the same time that you also really capture. And obviously you love the Grand Canyon, you spent a lot of time there — maybe not in this way but on the river. Talk a little bit about the balance of those two things. Were you surprised that this place that you love so much could tear you apart like this?
FEDARKO: I was, and you've put your finger on a really salient truth, which is that to move through this landscape on foot is to experience a kind of unending river of suffering and hardship, but punctuated with moments of extraordinary beauty, revelation, epiphany, insight, wonder and magic. I mean, there are wonders tucked inside the folds of the canyon that are invisible from the rims, where most people go to look into the abyss, and also invisible from the river.
And those places are places that very, very few people get to set foot in or lay eyes on. There are places where you find tiny springs bubbling from the rock that are capable of supporting up to 500 times the density of flora and fauna that flourishes in the surrounding desert landscapes. And then, of course, there is the pageantry of light that unfolds each and every day as the sunlight plays along the walls of the canyon.
There's 26 separate layers of rock arrayed in horizontal strata — each a different color and texture. And the walls can take on the appearance of a painting by, say, Monet or Van Gogh, depending on what hour of the day and what type of weather you're gazing them on. It's just a wondrous, magical, extraordinary place that has no analog anywhere on Earth.
GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, Kevin, about finishing it — like about 750 miles, this took you more than a year. When you were done, what was your reaction? Did you expect to ever make it?
FEDARKO: When we were finished, I was immensely relieved and I felt as if nothing possibly — nothing could be more difficult or arduous or painful than the physical act of hiking from one end of the canyon to the other.
And then, I sat down to try and write the book that would tell the story — not just of what happened to us — but the history of the landscape, the history of the native tribes who were part of this park before it became a park, the issues that loom over this landscape and the importance of protecting it as one of the great wonders of this country.
And that process — the process of putting all of that down on the page — that took seven years, and it was far more difficult and painful than the hike itself.
GILGER: I guess that makes sense, but it's out and it's lovely. Congratulations on that. And Kevin Fedarko, author of “A Walk in the Park,” joining us. Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate you coming on.
FEDARKO: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
