New arrival
A Walk in the Park
The Sports Plus take
Two friends, 750 miles and the Grand Canyon on foot.
Writer Kevin Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride set out to traverse the Grand Canyon end to end on foot, a route with no continuous trail that took them more than a year and nearly killed them both. It's a funny, vivid adventure story that also takes in the canyon's history, its tribes and the pressures it faces today. Winner of a National Outdoor Book Award and the Carnegie Medal, and a great pick for hikers and backpackers.
Shelf
How it reads
Moderate
Best for
- Hikers and backpackers
- Readers of Into Thin Air
- Grand Canyon and desert lovers
About this book
- Author
- Kevin Fedarko
- Publisher
- Scribner
- Published
- May 28, 2024
- Format
- Hardcover
- Pages
- 512
- ISBN-10
- 1501183052
- ISBN-13
- 978-1501183058
Book description
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Air Mail, Smithsonian Magazine, and Financial Times.
This New York Times bestseller from the author of The Emerald Mile is a rollicking and poignant account of an epic 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of the Grand Canyon.
Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. A few years after quitting his job to pursue an ill-advised dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon--a journey that, McBride promised, would be "a walk in the park." Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had actually completed the crossing billed it as "the toughest hike in the world."
The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined--and came within a hair's breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon's truest wilderness, a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril--and where, even today, there is still no trail spanning the length of the country's best-known landmark.
Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets of enchantment, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, that only a handful of humans have ever seen. Members of the canyon's eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider myths at the very center of our national parks--and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko's dying father, who had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape.
A singular portrait of a sublime place, A Walk in the Park is also a plea for the preservation of one of America's greatest natural treasures.
About the author
Kevin Fedarko has spent the past twenty years writing about conservation, exploration, and the Grand Canyon. He has been a staff writer at Time and a senior editor at Outside, where he covered outdoor adventure. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, and Esquire, among other publications. He is the author of The Emerald Mile, which won the Reading the West Book Award. Both of his books were New York Times bestsellers and winners of a National Outdoor Book Award. Fedarko lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
