A WALK IN THE PARK

From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Emerald Mile, the best, most dramatic, and deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 800-mile trek.

A WALK IN THE PARK chronicles a year-long effort to carve an 800-mile transect along the length of the Grand Canyon through a vertical wilderness that is suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which tumbles along its bottom. Thanks to countless cliffs and drops, as well as immense stretches with almost no access to water, plus the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, the traverse had been completed by only tiny group of people when Fedarko started.

Fedarko was accompanied through this sublime and often dangerous terrain by the award-winning photographer Peter McBride. During the course of their journey, they discovered that the canyon's future as a symbol of pristine wilderness is jeopardized by commercial development, uranium mining, and overcrowding - a litany of threats poised not only to inflict damage along the edges of the canyon but also to strike directly at its core.

The book opens a window into the defining features of the crown jewel of America's National Parks: an iconic landscape framed by unimaginably ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most wondrous terrain in the world.

Kevin Fedarko has spent the past twenty years writing about conservation, exploration, and the Grand Canyon. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West Award. Fedarko studied Russian history at Oxford before joining the staff at Time Magazine, where he worked primarily on the foreign affairs desk, then later moved to Outside Magazine, where he was a senior editor. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, and Esquire, among other publications, and a trio of his adventure stories from the Himalayas, the Horn of Africa, and the Colorado River are anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing. Fedarko lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona.