A Walk in the Park: The True Story of an Epic Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

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From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the epic adventure tale The Emerald Mile comes the most dramatic and deeply moving account ever 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. Now, in A Walk in the Park, author 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 along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one 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 stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. 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 parks remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of Americas 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.

Author Bio

Kevin Fedarkohas spent the past twenty years writing about conservation, exploration, and the Grand Canyon.He studied Russian history at Oxford before joining the staff atTime, where he worked primarily on the foreign affairs desk, then later moved toOutside, where he was a senior editor.His writing has appeared inNational Geographic,TheNew York Times,andEsquire,among other publications, and atrio of his adventure stories from the Himalayas, the Horn of Africa, and the Colorado River are anthologized inThe Best American Travel Writing. Fedarko is the author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of theFastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, a NewYork Timesbestseller that won the National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West Award. He lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona.