A Walk in the Park

In August of 2024 I stopped in my local book shop (shoutout to The Raven Bookstore) as I often do to browse the shelves and see if there was anything I couldn't live without. A very colorful book jacket caught my eye. It was Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.

Fedarko's book tells the story of him and long time collaborator, friend, and National Geographic photographer Peter McBride hiking through the Grand Canyon. McBride approached Fedarko with the idea as a way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park.

But Fedarko and McBride don't experience the Canyon the way most people do. According to the National Park Service, fewer than 1% of  visitors to the Grand Canyon hike below the rim at all and the majority of those who do are day hikers, who may venture down one of the main trails from the South Rim, most commonly the Bright Angel Trail. They may walk down to one of the first few rest houses, or perhaps Havasupai Gardens, Plateau Point, or maybe as far as the Colorado River.

More ambitious hikers in the Grand Canyon will do a rim-to-rim hike, meaning they'll start at the South Rim or North Rim and hike to the opposite rim. Many fit hikers will do this in one day and some crazy people will even do rim-to-rim-to-rim in one go. 

Aside from looking for a challenge, many choose rim-to-rim because it doesn't require a backcountry permit. If you're not camping overnight in the Canyon, you don't need a permit. Getting a permit isn't easy. You have to enter the lottery four months in advance, if you want to camp and 15 months in advance if you want to stay in a cabin at Phantom Ranch.

Fedarko and McBride didn't opt for rim-to-rim. They opted for a through hike east-to-west. An east-to-west through hike of the Grand Canyon is very challenging. After all the elevation changes and navigating around the Canyon's various side-canyons, a through hike of this type adds up to more than 750 miles / 1207 km.

The Grand Canyon is a desert and it's hot much of the time and in the winter it can be cold, snowy and icy. Logistically, a through hike means you have to set up caches for water and food along the route. The route that Fedarko and McBride took required some canyoneering skills, rappelling and navigating slot canyons. 

Fortunately for them, they had some help from some of the Grand Canyon's most experienced hikers. Rich Rudow and a community of other experienced Grand Canyon backcountry hikers took on the task of helping Fedarko and McBride go from inexperienced hikers to finishing their section hike over the course of a year.

Fedarko's book was my favorite non-fiction book of 2024. It's frustrating in parts, emotional in parts, and triumphant in the end. Fedarko uses his experience through hiking the Canyon to highlight some challenges the Canyon is facing, mostly from developers who want to put in a tram system to ferry 10K people a day to the Confluence, perhaps the most sacred place in the Canyon for many of the indigenous peoples who called the Canyon home before the U.S. Government forced them out.

McBride also published a book of beautiful photographs taken during their year long section hike. The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim is a stunning book and also worth checking out.

Fedarko and McBride's books inspired me to visit the Grand Canyon. I hadn't been on a real camping and backpacking trip in more than 30 years. Obviously an east-to-west through hike was out of the question. A rim-to-rim hike sounded doable, but not in a day.

I decided I'd do a rim-to-rim hike over four days and three nights, from the North Rim Campground, to Cottonwood Campground, to Phantom Ranch and the Bright Angel Campground all via the North Kaibab Trail, then continue on the Bright Angel Trail along the Colorado River to Havasupai Gardens and finally, up the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim.

The Grand Canyon had other ideas. Over the next few blog posts, I'll share some details of my adventure.

Grand Canyon: Rim-to-Rim 1 of n

I hadn't intended to drive for 16 hours. It's around midnight and my friend and I are about two hours away from Bright Angel Lodge at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I pull over for gas, to stretch my legs, and wake myself up. 

"Can you drive for a couple hours?" I ask.

"Oh yeah." He replies.

I finish filling the tank. He sprints back and forth across the parking lot.

We get back on the road.

Nine months earlier we'd been catching up in the kitchen at a friend's birthday party. I'd been inspired to hike the Grand Canyon by reading Kevin Fedarko's book, A Walk in the Park. 

I hadn't been on an overnight backpacking trip in more than 30 years. I'd never been to the Grand Canyon. I'd only seen it from the window of a plane at 30 thousand feet en route to and from work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Somewhat spur of the moment during our kitchen conversation I said, "I'm going to go hike the Grand Canyon next summer." Other than telling my wife I wanted to do it, I hadn't said a word about it to anyone. Verbalizing this to my friend was a way of making myself accountable for it, a way for me to commit to something I really wanted to do.

My friend enthusiastically asked if he could join. He's one of my oldest and best friends, I knew he was serious. "Of course," I replied. And that was it. 

The next day I sent him a text:

We both spent time watching Grand Canyon hikers on YouTube. We started training, researching gear, nutrition, and hydration. We hadn't won the lottery yet, but we decided if we didn't pull a permit for the Grand Canyon, we'd find something else to do during the same time frame.

December came around and I entered the backcountry permit lottery. We didn't win. We entered into the secondary, which might give us a chance if any of the primary winners backed out. Apparently they didn't. We talked about June. The temperatures would be hot, but we thought we could handle it. We'd have time to get heat acclimated during our late stage training.

I entered the June lottery in January. And we won. Not only did we pull a backcountry permit, we were able to pull permits for each of the campgrounds we wanted -- Mather, North Rim, Cottonwood, Bright Angel, and Havasupai Gardens. We even managed to get dinner and breakfast reservations at Phantom Ranch. We would find out later why we were so lucky.

I won't say the logistics of hiking rim-to-rim at the Grand Canyon are difficult, but they are involved. There's travel to the Canyon, an 18 hour drive in our case. Finding a place to stay when you get there. We opted for Mather Campground at the South Rim where an elk walked through our campground. Due to our arrival in the middle of the night, we also "slept" in the car for a few hours.

Then you have to arrange for a shuttle, either before or after your hike through the Canyon. We opted to leave our car at the South Rim and used the Trans Canyon Shuttle to get to the North Rim. The shuttle takes about four hours from the South Rim to the North Rim. It drops off hikers between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m., which was too late in the day to start hiking in the June heat. So you may need a place to stay once you get to the North Rim. We camped at the North Rim campground and started our hike at 4 a.m. the next morning.

More on that in a future post.