A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“A misguided odyssey through the heart of perhaps the harshest and least forgiving, but also the most breathtakingly gorgeous, landscape feature on earth. A place filled with so much wonder, replete with so many layers of complexity, that there is nothing else like it, anywhere.”

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“The North Rim, the loftiest section of the park, is a world unto itself, stocked with its own special repository of plants and animals, where the fir and spruce trees can be buried in twelve feet of snow during the winter, and the only road in is closed from November to May.”

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“In all the time that had passed since the place was discovered by white explorers, nobody had figured out how to walk through the damn thing from one end to the other, because the canyon simply isn’t built to accommodate that.”

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“But the more they hiked, the better they understood that the canyon’s trail system barely scratched the surface of what was out there. So much more was waiting to be discovered for anyone willing to move beyond those pathways into the true backcountry.”

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“Without exception, each tribe regards the canyon as a place of reverence, a kind of open-air cathedral whose interior is consecrated by memory and stories and the weight of time. For all of these societies, the chasm is hallowed ground, an aboriginal holy land.”

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“In the eyes of park administrators, if those tribes had a place in the canyon, it was part of a colorful and exotic past.”

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“Whatever had unfolded here—a rockfall, an attempt to outrun a flash flood, a desperate bid to escape an ambush by a Mountain Lion—we were unable to unravel the story. But the broken bodies of these animals offered a sobering reminder that this place was neither a playground nor an amusement park.”

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“To truly know this world, it is necessary to move through it not by plane or raft or on the back of a mule, but on foot, hauling your gear and provisions on your back while moving through the space between the river and the rims.”

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“Haunted—that’s how we walked. Haunted by what we saw and heard, and by the knowledge that the future that was bearing down on the canyon was, in ways both marvelous and terrible, already transforming the place.”

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“I think, that the true purpose of places such as this is to lay the groundwork for—and at times demand—a heightened confrontation that is more challenging, more unsettling, and infinitely more rewarding than a simple vacation.”

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