Indeed — and outdoor literature is the better for it, because “A Walk in the Park” is a triumph. Fedarko doesn’t describe awe; he induces it, with page-turning action, startling insights and the kind of verbal grace that makes multipage descriptions of, say, a flock of pelicans feel riveting and new. The canyon has no established through route. It is a living oven, full of scorpions, cactuses, venomous snakes, flash floods and various other incarnations of hell on earth.
Indeed, Grand Canyon is one of the deadliest national parks, and Fedarko relates in unflinching details the list of fatalities: Various tourists plummet off viewpoints and a guy drowns while crossing rapids on an air mattress. By the time he explains how the canyon’s extreme heat can cause the proteins in human cells to “denature and congeal as if one were boiling an egg,” I wished he were a little less gifted in his descriptive powers.
Fedarko’s hiking companion is his longtime creative partner, the photographer Pete McBride. Each man “often found the other to be madly annoying,” writes Fedarko — but some of his warmest and funniest writing is about his friendship with McBride, whether they’re discovering ancient petroglyphs or wrenching pieces of cholla cactus off each other. McBride is made up of equal parts idealism and “pigheadedness.” He theorizes that they don’t need to train because “the hike itself is the thing that’s gonna get us in shape for the hike” — though Fedarko acknowledges, in a lengthy and diplomatic footnote, that his depiction of the duo’s incompetence, while not technically inaccurate, may be played up for drama. That it annoys McBride, it seems, is only a side benefit.
The canyon, unlike the reader, is unamused. The prospect of death very real, these men have to get their act together or quit. Though at times they come close to their demise, a team of magnanimous experts helps them to trek on. They encounter radioactive mine sites, wild horses, pools of dead tarantulas and countless other shocks and wonders, such as a cactus that retracts into the dirt and a carnivorous mouse that howls at the moon. Along the way they, and we, meet many of the park’s stakeholders, from Indigenous activists to a professor of Euclidean numbers theory. Fedarko interweaves their stories with wry, precise distillations of natural history and incisive profiles of the investment interests that aim to squeeze wild nature into cash.
