I was only a tourist at the Grand Canyon, arguably the world’s mightiest natural wonder. When my son was 10, we rode mules down the well-worn Bright Angel Trail. Near the banks of the Colorado River at the bottom, we stayed at the rustic Phantom Ranch lodge.
How my thighs ached from straddling a mule during that nearly 8-mile trip. How my behind suffered from hundreds of bone-jarring, clunky, yet sure-footed mule steps in and out of ruts. Trail dust caked my face. The sun baked my neck. Long before we got to the Colorado, I was more than ready to dismount. Believe me, I slept well.
But if I was a tourist, I would call Grand Canyon explorer Kevin Fedarko a pilgrim, a traveler like the barefoot, medieval wayfarers who wore hair shirts and suffered all the way to Jerusalem. Unlike me, Fedarko went on a canyon hike that became a journey of spiritual discovery. He transected that “holy place — a cathedral in the desert,” as he describes the canyon in his new book, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.
“Transect” means “cut across.” Fedarko, a former Time magazine correspondent, and photographer Pete McBride, on assignment for National Geographic, walked and sometimes “crawled like insects” through the 6,000-foot-deep stone wilderness. Their 750-mile journey took 75 days, demanding eight expeditions over a 14-month period that started in 2015.
To get a sense of how mind-boggling and dangerous Fedarko’s bushwhacking was, consider this: Fewer people are known to have done what he and McBride did than have walked on the moon.
Prior to the trek, Fedarko had been a guide for a whitewater outfitter and rowed sharp-bowed, hard-hulled dories through the canyon. His first book, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, won a National Outdoor Book Award. He calls it a “430-page love letter from me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”
Yet his mastery of the canyon’s waterways had made him overconfident. A “clueless chowderhead” is how he describes his beginning hiker’s mind. The first blazing-hot leg of his land trek began, he writes, was “a conflation of willful ignorance, shoddy discipline, and outrageous hubris.” Just a few days in, he had to give up, defeated by his vanity and failure to bring the right hiking equipment — and the correct attitude.
“This landscape would pare you down, too, peeling away the layers until it had stripped you into something that, not unlike the land itself, lay very close to the bone,” writes Fedarko, who was 50 when he set out. He had hoped he “might return . . . with a better grasp of who I was, and perhaps a renewed sense of whom I might become, before it was too late to grow and change.”
He didn’t give up. Hiking an average of 15 miles a day often in more than 100-degree heat, he trudged through a world of suffering. “The bottoms of my feet looked like someone had fired a shotgun into them,” Fedarko confesses. “It [was] like the sun [was] tapping on the top of my head with a ball-peen hammer.”
A Walk in the Park is more than a reexamination of each day’s burns, blisters and burdens. Suffering taught Fedarko lessons about Native American rights, overtourism and pollution that he shares in the book. He became more humble and grateful. “Powerful landscapes strengthen the connective tissue, the bonds that bind people together,” he writes.
The book was another struggle. Writing it took seven years. His first deadline-wrecking woe came when he realized he wanted to write about the canyon’s 1.7-billion-year geologic history and share its 9,000 years of human habitation. (The canyon hosts an astonishing 4,300 archeological sites.) And when Havasupai activist Dianna Sue White Dove Uqualla wept as she recounted injustices her tribe has suffered, Fedarko had to learn that story and tell it, too.
Most of all, Fedarko’s book is spiritual. The canyon pushes him to understand his place in the universe. Looking up from its deepest reaches, he sees “a sky whose wildness can call forth and amplify the wildness of the land — and perhaps, too, the wildness within oneself — by offering up a glimpse of the darkness that our earlier ancestors once knew, back when humans must have lived in almost continuous humility and awe. . . .”
During my little jaunt with my son, we wound down switchback after switchback nearly 4,500 feet, the canyon revealing more of its vastness, its colors shifting as the sun rose. It was pretty. It was stunning. But I experienced nothing like Fedarko’s spiritual immersion. Here is how he paints the canyon with words:
The light spilling down the limestone turned the face of each cliff into forked rivers of fire. There were pink pools and riffles, eddies where the rose-tinted currents coiled and spun, and whirlpools the color of a freshly opened cantaloupe. This was light made liquid, as if someone had melted down the stained-glass windows of every cathedral in France and poured the emulsion over the stone.
Near the end of his saga, Fedarko realized that words could not capture the canyon. Silence, he learned, was its “least appreciated treasure,” one with the most lasting impact on the soul.
“Dense, crystalline silence blankets the landscape,” he reflects. “The stillness that accompanies that silence opens a space inside you for things we don’t get to do in the world beyond the walls of the canyon — contemplation, introspection, reflection.”
Mercifully, Fedarko has compassion for lightweight travelers like me, those who only dip their spiritual finger into the canyon. Of those who stroll but few yards on its paved rim, he observes:
[Tourists] 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.
George Spencer is a freelance writer living in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Editor’s note: McBride’s coffee-table photo book, The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim, makes a good companion to Fedarko’s narrative. His documentary, Into the Canyon, includes commentary by Fedarko and is available on streaming services.