A Walk in the Park

A deeply moving account of walking the Grand Canyon—a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek.

The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. In A Walk in the Park, Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock of the rims and the Colorado River at its bottom.

The canyon consists of countless cliffs and steep drops, immense stretches with almost no access to water, and not a single trail linking its eastern doorway to its western terminus. It is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in a single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the landscape in striking photographs. Together they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors’ camps, present-day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, an action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s national parks—an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.