A Walk in the Park

* Winner of the 2024 National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature * Winner of the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times,Air MailSmithsonian Magazineand Financial Times “A triumph. Fedarko doesn’t describe awe; he induces it.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Passionate…memorable…life-affirming.” —The Wall Street Journal This New York Times bestseller from the author of The Emerald Mile is a rollicking and poignant account of an epic 750-mile odysseyon footthrough the heart of the Grand Canyon. Two friendszero preparationone dream. A few years after quitting his job to pursue an ill-advised dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado RiverKevin Fedarko was approached by his best friendNational Geographic photographer Pete McBridewith a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Togetherthey would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon—a journey thatMcBride promisedwould be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgmentFedarko agreedunaware that the small cluster of experts who had actually completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.” The ensuing ordealwhich lasted more than a yearrevealed a place that was deeperricherand far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon’s truest wildernessa vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril—and whereeven todaythere is still no trail spanning the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic landmark. Along the wayveteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets of enchantmentinvisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rimthat only a handful of humans have ever seen. Members of the canyon’s eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider myths at the very center of our national parks—and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko’s dying fatherwho had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himselfopened him to a new way of seeing the landscape. And alwaysthere was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgivingyet suffused with magicdrenched in wonderand redeemed by its own transcendent beauty. A singular portrait of a sublime placeA Walk in the Park is a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America’s greatest natural treasure.