ST. GEORGE — A “spectacular misadventure” of two friends who hiked with 55-pound backpacks from one end of Grand Canyon National Park to the other despite no trail to follow is available in Kevin Fedarko’s new book “A Walk in the Park, The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.”

“I have some familiarity with the Grand Canyon. I spent the better part of six summers working as an apprentice river guide at the bottom of the canyon on the Colorado River during the early 2000s,“ Fedarko told St. George News. “During those summers, I was able to sit around the campfires at night and listen to river guides tell stories about the canyon.“

During that experience, Fedarko heard a story about the underground world of whitewater at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It’s a story about three river guides and their decision to put a little wooden boat called the Emerald Mile into the river at Lees Ferry at the crest of a giant historic flood in the spring of 1983. Then use that flood as a kind of hydraulic slingshot to hurl them through the canyon faster than anyone in written history had been able to do.

Eventually, Fedarko turned that tale into a book with the same name as the dory. “The Emerald Mile” is a 430-page love letter to the Grand Canyon.

“When that book was published in 2013, I thought I was finished with the canyon, but as it turned out, the canyon wasn’t finished with me,“ Fedarko said.

The inspiration for falling in love with the Grand Canyon came at an early age with a book by Colin Fletcher. When Fedarko was around 10, his father gave him a book called “The Man Who Walked Through Time“ by Fletcher. In 1963, Fletcher traveled on foot across the Grand Canyon National Park. Yet, Fedarko said that in those years, the borders of Grand Canyon National Park were much smaller than the canyon itself. It only comprised over a third of today’s canyon.

“Fletcher wrote about the journey that he made on foot from one end of the park to the other. It was a fascinating story, but what really captured me about that book as a young boy was the image on the cover,“ Fedarko said. “It’s a photograph that he took of himself standing with his back to the camera with a huge pack on his back, clutching a walking stick in his hands, standing at the edge of a cliff and looking out across this ocean of bear naked rock, enormous abyss.”

As a child in Pennsylvania, where steel mills were the norm, the book planted a seed that would take Fedarko more than 30 years to eventually manifest into this project. Fedarko currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

His friend and collaborator Peter McBride, a National Geographic photographer and filmmaker, asked Fedarko to attempt the journey with him. McBride knew Fedarko was familiar with the world of the river at the bottom of the canyon, so he suggested they do it as an assignment for National Geographic magazine and eventually the book.

“So that forms the beginning of what turned out to be a bit of a debacle as Pete and I struggled to make our way through an environment that we were unprepared to handle,“ Fedarko said.

The challenges Fedarko and McBride faced while in the Grand Canyon and both the animals and people they met offer a unique window into the magnificence and brutality of a landscape like no other.

The book not only describes the men bumbling through the national park’s wilderness but also tells the story of the eleven Native American tribes whose ancestral lands either abut or lie directly inside Grand Canyon National Park.

Fedarko reminds readers Native Americans were physically removed from the canyon when the Grand Canyon National Park was originally set up. 

“These Indigenous people have a connection to and knowledge of the landscape that runs deeper and extends further back into the past than the descendants of white Europeans, such as myself, can even begin to imagine,” Fedarko said. “And although the tribes form a vibrant part of the landscape’s past, they are still here: bound to the land in countless ways, with the power to shape the destiny of the park’s future and possessing knowledge and insights that we as Americans need to hear.”

The book’s adventive narrative combines hardship and suffering with the park’s natural beauty. It also welcomes readers to a place filled with mystery: a landscape whose hidden secrets and treasures are known to few.

“These features are invisible from the rims — where most of the 6 million tourists who visit the canyon each year stand — and all but impossible to access,“ Fedarko said. “By its iconic stature, the canyon also stands as a bellwether of all our public lands because whatever happens inside this place tends to set precedent, in ways both good and bad, across not only the rest of America’s parks but all of its public lands.“

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