A Walk in the Park
By Kevin Fedarko
☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎
Before my son was born, I hiked differently. I'd pick a place, throw a pack together, and go, usually alone, usually with nobody knowing much beyond which trailhead I'd parked at. I'm not going to pretend I don't miss that version of myself, and of the outdoors.
What I didn't expect is how much of it I got to keep. Everyone warns you the outdoors is over once you have a kid, and it just isn't true. It's slower, and shorter, and involves an unreasonable volume of snacks, but it's still there. Kids are so much more resilient than we give them credit for, more than we're comfortable admitting, I think, because if they're that capable then the thing holding us back was never them. Some of my favorite days on trail have been with my toddler in Moab, him hauling rocks he absolutely did not need and calling out after the birds.
All of those moments led are probably why this book landed the way it did. Kevin Fedarko and his best friend Pete McBride set out to walk the Grand Canyon end to end, 750 miles. The canyon has no continuous trail spanning it, a route the tiny handful of people who've done it call the hardest hike in the world.
On its face it's a book about two men with no business out there, and Fedarko says so himself, constantly, with real embarrassment. But what's underneath is how badly we all misjudge what a body can take. They started unfit for it in every measurable way and finished anyway, and the canyon kept revealing that it was harder and stranger and more alive than they'd budgeted for.
The part that took me apart is his father. There's a way of parenting where you hand your kid the map and stay home, and a way where you go too, and reading that chapter made me certain which one I want to be.
There's also a thread I wasn't expecting. Eleven Native tribes hold ties to that canyon, and Fedarko spends real time with people from them, and it dismantles the story we tell about pristine, untouched national parks. Those places aren't empty. They were emptied. Living where I live, hiking where I hike, that isn't an abstraction, and I've walked differently since.
