★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
As many as five million people visit the Grand Canyon each year, but few venture beyond its rim, and only a handful of people have trekked the full length of it. Novice hikers Kevin Fedarko and his longtime friend and photographer Pete McBride decide to tackle this challenge. What ensues is a humorous and often harrowing story of just how difficult and rewarding an adventure this turns out to be.
It’s not unusual for men on the threshold of middle age to find themselves flirting with fantasies of turning the road map of their lives upside down. But most men are smart enough to abandon those visions after giving the matter some thought.
They plan their hike in stages, beginning with an almost ridiculous level of unpreparedness. Fedarko writes with a beginner’s eye, making the writing and their ordeals all the more accessible to an inexperienced reader. Through experience, persistence, and often sheer grit, they eventually become competent hikers and come to see the sublimity of the experience.
To truly know this world, it is necessary to move through it not by plane or raft or on the back of a mule, but on foot, hauling your gear and provisions on your back while moving through the space between the river and the rims. Step by step from one hidden pocket of water to the next, day by day, until eventually the canyon is persuaded to reveal the things it keeps hidden. Only on foot, the slowest and hardest way to move, can you hope to make contact with the finest parts of this landscape.
Along the journey, we learn of the mythic explorers who paved the way for later generations of hikers through their heroism and dedication to the region; of the plight of native Americans who were displaced from their home inside the Canyon by the government; and of the author’s personal history of leaving his home in polluted Pittsburgh to seek a different life in the wilderness of the Arizona desert. The ending had a surprising emotional impact on me.
I’m glad I read the print version of this book. The color photos and illustrations helped me visualize the scope of this adventure and a hint of the vistas these hikers encountered on their journey. I also ordered The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim by Fedarko’s fellow hiker Pete McBride. Pete’s photography in this oversized volume is breathtaking.
Favorite Passages
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Eliot
The light spilling down the limestone turned the face of each cliff into forked rivers of fire. There were pink pools and riffles, eddies where the rose-tinted currents coiled and spun, and whirlpools the color of a freshly opened cantaloupe. This was light made liquid, as if someone had melted down the stained-glass windows of every cathedral in France and poured the emulsion over the stone.
Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached-and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves-only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.
We talked, both directly and indirectly, of what we had gained in fleeing our native ground, what we had lost by refusing to remain, and what we now knew we could never escape, no matter how far away we might wander, because all trails that appear to lead away from the place you’re from will eventually circle back and drop you where you began in a manner that might, if you are attentive and very lucky, enable you to see it clearly for the first time.