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Title details for A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko - Wait list

A Walk in the Park

The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

by Kevin Fedarko
ebook
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Wait time: About 17 weeks
A New York Times Bestseller * 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 Mail, Smithsonian Magazine, and 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

From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile, a rollicking and poignant account of an epic 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America's most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth.
Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be "a walk in the park." Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as "the toughest hike in the world."

The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and 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 a 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 where, even today, there is still no trail along the length of the country's best-known and most iconic park.

Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, where only a handful of humans have ever laid eyes. 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 center of our national parks—and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko's dying father, who had first pointed him toward the canyon more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape.

And always, there was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgiving but suffused with magic, drenched in wonder, and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty. A singular portrait of a sublime place, A Walk in the Park is a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America's greatest natural treasure.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 28, 2024

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781501183072

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781501183072
      • File size: 27105 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      April 1, 2024
      An immersive account of the challenges of a grueling 750-mile hike through the Grand Canyon. In the autumn of 2015, Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile, and his frequent associate, photojournalist Pete McBride, headed out, with very little preparation, on the first leg of their journey on foot through the canyon--"a thing that fewer than two dozen people had ever done." Fedarko, who had served as an unpaid apprentice on boat trips through the canyon for several seasons, knew the place from that point of view, but experiencing the dry and dangerous landscape and traveling without marked trails, on foot, was a different matter entirely, and the adventurous duo began the trip with "a conflation of willful ignorance, shoddy discipline, and outrageous hubris"--as well as about twice as much weight as they should have been carrying in their backpacks. Luckily, a series of expert local hikers volunteered to accompany them on several of the legs of their expedition, but even so, they went through more than a few near-death experiences from illness, dehydration, infection, slides on ice, falling rocks, lack of food, and other calamities. Fedarko expansively describes the journey--"a misguided odyssey through the heart of perhaps the harshest and least forgiving, but also the most breathtakingly gorgeous, landscape feature on earth"--with a combination of dry humor and horror, and he pays tribute to the spare beauty, grandeur, and silence of a place that few have seen, resulting in a memorable reading experience. Integrated into the memoir are maps, photos, accounts of earlier and contemporary hikers, explorations of the geology and biology of the region, interviews with Native Americans whose lands are adjacent to the canyon, and examinations of the many pressures from tourism and economic development faced by the park. Vivid armchair travel through a haunting and forbidding landscape.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      April 1, 2024
      In his first book (2013's The Emerald Mile), journalist Fedarko chronicled the fastest recorded boat ride through the Grand Canyon. Here, in his second book, he moves the action from boats to boots, centering Fedarko's own lifelong relationship with the canyon, from reading about it as a child through his time as a clumsy canoe guide. The thrust of the narrative follows the proposed canyon-spanning hike of Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride, his partner in many previous, mostly failed journalistic endeavors, along with a supporting cast of more seasoned canyon hikers. Readers will appreciate the buddy-comedy element throughout as Fedarko shares his and McBride's steps, missteps, and arguments along the way, all supplemented nicely by McBride's photographs. A Walk in the Park, though, particularly inspires when Fedarko shifts away from the tourist aspect of the canyon, detailing the ancestral history of the land and some of the Indigenous voices who continue to fight against overdevelopment today amid ever-booming visitor numbers.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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