Welcome to Litsy!

From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile comes a rollicking and poignant account of the epic misadventure of two friends, zero preparation, and one dream: a 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America�s most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth. 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, the 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 to the scheme, 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 the all but impenetrable reaches of its truest wilderness, 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 impinging 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 Walk in the Park is a singular portrait of a sublime place, and a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America�s greatest natural treasure.