Taking the long way
Fedarko talks new book, getting out of his comfort zone

Fans of “The Emerald Mile” rejoice! The master of tales of trials, tribulations and near-death experiences on the Grand Canyon, Kevin Fedarko, is back with his latest, “A Walk in the Park.” As the name would suggest, this book does not move at the rollicking, breakneck speed of its predecessor, taking instead a meandering and thoughtful approach to the world beyond the snaking torrent at the canyon’s bottom. Sure, there are plenty of calamities and misadventures to go around. After all Fedarko – who first made a name for himself in Grand Canyon adventure writing as “Groover Boy” – has never shied away from self-deprecating humor.

But “A Walk in the Park” is far more than a follow-up act. Just like the book’s pretense itself – an end-to-end hike of the entirety of Grand Canyon National Park – this book is far more complex, rich and fascinating than meets the casual book browser’s eye.

The 750-mile “walk” took 75 days broken up into eight trips over the course of 14 months in 2015-16. That was the easy part. Exhaustively and meticulously researched, putting the walk into words was 10 years in the making. (To put that in perspective, it reportedly took Tolstoy six years to write “War and Peace” and Mitchell three years to write “Gone with the Wind.” )

“I didn’t think at the time we were doing the walk, there could be anything more miserable than walking the canyon,” Fedarko said in a recent interview from his home in Flagstaff. “And then I discovered, yes indeed there is, because writing about walking the canyon is even worse.”

Fedarko, of course, is using his signature dry humor there – a humor that is interspersed throughout the book. But what really draws the reader in is Fedarko’s writing style – familiar and approachable while at the same time compelling and mesmerizing. Perhaps there is no other writer as capable of capturing in words the beauty of this magnificent chasm than he.  

However, the book doesn’t just skim the surface of this beyond-ancient 1,904-square-mile gash in the Earth’s crust, which, if flattened like a pancake, would be roughly the size of Delaware. Clocking in at a just under 500 pages (including an author’s note and readers guide), the book delves into every nook, cranny, crevice, side canyon and pothole, while at the same time taking a deep dive into the riveting history, native peoples and ecology of this natural wonderland. 

As one might guess, the book’s name is a bit parched-tongue-in-sun-burnt cheek. When Fedarko’s best friend and partner in outdoor sufferfests, photographer Pete McBride, proposes the idea to hike the park end to end in the interest of a magazine story, he poses is as “just a walk.” But as we soon find out with a cliffhanger (quite literally) in the first few pages, it is anything but. 

“I decided from the start that I was going to be as brutally honest as necessary,” Fedarko said. “By virtue of the fact we knew this landscape, we thought we were experts. We were pretty arrogant. That caught us flat-footed in some pretty profound ways.”

For starters, only a few super-human desert rats have ever completed a thru-hike – also known as a transect – of the canyon, which follows no trail and requires complicated, often dangerous route-finding. Fortunately, Fedarko and McBride were taken under the wing by a small group of veteran adventurers who have dedicated their lives to exploring the unknown reaches of the canyon. The gesture was one of kindness and also done under the auspices of Fedarko and McBride calling attention to the need to protect the solitude and wildness of this irreplaceable landscape for generations to come.

Naturally, as Fedarko alludes to, the two get spanked right off the bat. Grossly ill-prepared mentally and physically for the scope of this epic slog, they suffer crippling blisters, sprained ankles, dangerous heat stroke, attacks from jumping cactus and a horrifying encounter with a skin-burrowing wood rat. All this under the ever-present threat of dying a slow, tortuous death from dehydration. As anyone who has ever endured the Grand Canyon park ranger talk at the outset of a river trip knows, there are countless dumb, and not so dumb, ways to die in the canyon. 

We find out just how in over their heads the hapless hikers are in a hilariously cringey scene where they show up to the put-in the night before their first hike with brand-spanking-new gear still in its packaging. (They also had king-sized tubes of toothpaste, a 32-oz. bottle of Dr. Bronner’s and a jumbo pack of Pampers baby wipes.)

“I’ve heard people say I’m exaggerating the level of cluelessness and irresponsibility Pete and I displayed,” Fedarko said. “I’m embarrassed to say, yeah, we actually did that. Literally did that. Pete sort of begged me not to be so harsh in portraying our cluelessness – and we did do a lot of preparation – but the preparation we did was not in any way adequate.”

Needless to say, the two learn the hard way about the inhospitable and harsh environment between the rims. Only a few days into their first outing, they tap out. But after some wound-licking and soul-searching back in civilization, they return, leaner, meaner and much humbler.

Fedarko admitted that much like the actual hike, the whole book was a steep learning curve, taking many unanticipated twists and turns.

“I thought this was going to be an adventure story about two clowns getting in over their heads and then slowly coming to learn how to move through an incredibly harsh but also an incredibly beautiful environment. And by the end of it, kind of getting pretty good at what they were doing,” Fedarko said. (And yes, he and Pete are still good friends despite admittedly and understandably getting on each others’ nerves.) “But the fact is, we never got to be that good at it. Right up until the end, we were still being spanked; still making mistakes; still suffering from a certain form of delusion and hubris. The canyon had never stopped teaching us, and we never stopped being men desperately in need of teaching.”

Perhaps the biggest turn in the book’s trajectory was in shining a much-needed light on the history and plight of the native tribes that call the Grand Canyon home, particularly the Hualapai and Havasupai. Fedarko likened the unraveling of this storyline to the canyon’s maze of side canyons, as well as their side canyons, which must be navigated in the end-to end journey. 

“You can’t hike laterally for more than half a mile before you hit a detour – a tributary canyon – and then you have to hike all the way into that tributary, and trace through all the tributary drainages of that tributary, until you come back out at pretty much the same spot,” he said. “Same thing for writing. I didn’t realize every environmental or development threat hanging over the Grand Canyon had a tribal component to it. Each one of the tribes that was connected – whether supporting the development or fighting against it – had an incredibly complicated backstory and history. You had to really weave around to get your head wrapped around it before you could come out at the end of that history pretty much at the same place you were, but with a better understanding.”

In addition to this transformation, Fedarko also undergoes a personal journey of his own throughout the book: the death of his father, Robert. Born and raised amid the slag piles of industrial Pittsburgh, it was Fedarko’s father who first sparked an interest in the untrammeled lands of the West  in his young son when he gave him a used copy of Colin Fletcher’s 1967 book, “The Man Who Walked Through Time.” The book was about Fletcher’s “first trip afoot” through Grand Canyon National Park, which at the time was much smaller than today, but a feat nonetheless.

Fedarko’s goal was to finish his own book about walking the Grand Canyon in time to hand it to his dying father, thus completing the circle begun some 40 years earlier. However, his dad passed before the book was finished, although Fedarko did manage to fly him out to see the Grand Canyon once before he died.

Compared to “The Emerald Mile,” a story that basically wrote itself, Fedarko said writing “A Walk in the Park” in such a personal style was an at times difficult departure for him.

“At its heart, the narrative is two incompetent, deluded, middle-aged white men suffering from B.O. and exhaustion getting up each and every morning and walking. There’s nothing that’s inherently exciting about that,” Fedarko said. “But it is written first-person, which is super challenging and new for me. It’s a personal story and not something I'm inherently comfortable with, the language of vulnerability.”

Of course, it’s all water under the rim at this point. “That’s one of the disconcerting things about spending a decade on a book – you just have to let go of it, and then the world decides if it sucks or not,” he said.

Well, it most definitely does not suck. And as uncomfortable as he may be putting himself out there, he handles it with aplomb; deftly weaving a tale as expansive, colorful and moving as the canyon itself. 

One thing he does not want people to take away from the book is the idea to go out and replicate his journey. In fact, he said the motivations behind the book are quite the opposite. “This is in no way intended as a guide or blueprint – look, do not go out and do this. And if you insist on not following that advice, do not use myself and Pete McBride as examples,” he said. “Do the opposite of what we did. Invest energy, effort and time into researching and mastering the skills you need.”

In fact, if there’s one thing he could impart, it’s this: “The frame of this narrative is two clowns bumbling through the Grand Canyon, but the heart and soul of the book are the tribes of the Grand Canyon; the people who were connected to that landscape, before the park was created; before people who look like you and me ever showed up in this part of the world,” he said. “They’re still part of the landscape despite the fact we have dubbed them out of it, and they have things to say that are worth listening to.”

In fact, it appears some may already be listening. In the last few years, since he started writing this book, the Park Service renamed “Indian Garden” to “Havasupai Garden;” President Biden designated nearly 1 million acres adjacent to the park as the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – or Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument; a visitor tower on the South Rim was turned into an interpretive and heritage site honoring native tribes; and in 2016, the NPS issued a formal apology to tribes over the unjust treatment they endured in the creation of the park.

“The Park Service is attempting a genuine effort to re-enfranchise the tribes’ stories into the park itself and the experience visitors have,” said Fedarko. “When park superintendent Dave Ugeruaga issued a formal apology, no one who’s been in a position of authority had ever uttered words like that.”

What’s ahead for the park, however, is anyone’s guess. Popular tourist helicopter rides and the Grand Canyon Scenic Overlook continue to be a complicated and thorny issue, and the threat of uranium mining hangs like a cloud on the horizon. However, for now at least, the reviled Grand Canyon at Escalade tramway project, which would have taken 1,000 visitors a day to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado, is dead in the water.

As for Fedarko, this may be the last time he dips his toes into that water. 

“I’m gonna be 60 next year, so this may be my last book, for better or worse,” he said.

Well, for those of us who get to reap the benefits of his arduous labor – without taking a single step except maybe to the bookstore – we will certainly be better off.

Although there are a few photos from Fedarko and McBride’s trek in “A Walk in the Park,” McBride has published a large-format photo book, “The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim,” available at your favorite bookstore or on Amazon.