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The author in the Marble Canyon section of the Grand Canyon, during the first leg of his through-hike with Pete McBride
(Photo: Pete McBride)
The author in the Marble Canyon section of the Grand Canyon, during the first leg of his through-hike with Pete McBride
The author in the Marble Canyon section of the Grand Canyon, during the first leg of his through-hike with Pete McBride (Photo: Pete McBride)

My 750-mile Hike Through the Grand Canyon Started with an Epic Fail

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In ‘A Walk in the Park,’ Kevin Fedarko’s new book about his quest to hike the big ditch from end to end, inadequate fitness and bad gear choices nearly led to disaster right from the start

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A few years after quitting his job to pursue a longtime dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, former ϳԹ senior editor Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the adventure photographer Pete McBride, with a bold and unlikely vision. Together they would embark on a 750-mile expedition, by foot, through the Grand Canyon, moving from east to west—a journey McBride promised would be “a walk in the park.” Fedarko agreed, unaware that the tiny cluster of experts who were familiar with this particular trek billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

In keeping with the two men’s time-tested habit of cutting corners and flying by the seats of their pants, Fedarko and McBride proceeded to fast-talk a group of long-distance desert hikers into permitting them to tag along for the first part of their own through-hike, which began on September 25, 2016. In an excerpt from Fedarko’s forthcoming book, , he shares the grisly details of what happened on the eve of their departure.

One afternoon toward the end of July, I heard a knock at the front door of my home in Flagstaff, Arizona, and opened it to discover that half a dozen large cardboard boxes had been dumped on my porch. The labels indicated that shipments of gear were arriving from every point of the compass. Boots from Scarpa in Italy. Headlamps and trekking poles from Black Diamond in Salt Lake City. Sleeping bags from Feathered Friends in Seattle. Backpacks and a tent from a company in Maine called Hyperlite, which manufactured exceptionally spare desert and mountain gear for backcountry athletes.

“There’s a lot more coming,” Pete warned when he called me that night to explain that my house would serve as the staging area for all of the equipment, clothing, and food that he was ordering. “Your job is to wrangle everything together and get it squared away. Can you handle that?”

“Absolutely. Consider it done.”

Kevin Fedarko Live at the ϳԹ Festival

Fedarko will be sharing images and stories from his adventure in Denver, June 1-2, at the ϳԹ Festival, a celebration of the outdoors featuring amazing music, inspiring speakers, and immersive experiences.

Given how many packages were still on the way, I decided it was best to wait a bit before getting to work. When most of the boxes had been delivered, I’d unpack them and start testing important items such as the camp stove, the tent, and the DeLorme InReach, a handheld communicator that enabled two-way text messaging via satellite, but could also be paired with topographic maps on a cell phone—and would, if necessary, transmit an emergency SOS. But for the moment, I simply plucked each new package off the porch, carried it down the driveway, and tossed it into the garage.

I knew that the organizing and testing business was important, and I had every aim of flinging myself into the mission when the moment was right. But, alas, a hundred other urgent and pressing tasks intervened—laundry, napping, mowing the lawn—and despite my best intentions, the pile in the garage continued to grow. Then, almost without warning it seemed, September 24 arrived, and it was time to leave for the canyon.

Bruised but unbowed: McBride (left) and the author take a break on a brutally hot day.
Bruised but unbowed: McBride (left) and the author take a break on a brutally hot day. (Photo: Pete McBride)

Around 5:30 P.M., Pete and I clambered into a friend’s truck and headed north on Highway 89, driving for more than a hundred miles along the edge of northern Arizona’s Painted Desert, a stretch of colorful badlands on the western end of the Navajo Nation. The sun had set long before we crossed a two-lane bridge over the Colorado River, and twilight was already fading when we arrived at a spot on the road marked by a steel gate clasped to a fence post with a rusting piece of chain.

We pulled off the pavement and followed a set of tire tracks leading through clumps of saltbush and rabbitbrush interspersed with the occasional yucca. It was pitch-dark when we finally reached the end of the road, killed the headlights, and gasped in awe as we stepped from the truck.

The team of desert rats had inexplicably agreed to let us accompany them on the first stage of their Grand Canyon through-hike. Pete assured me that the canyon would transform us into tanned, hardcore hiking studs.

The Milky Way shimmered across the heavens from one horizon to the other, and the rest of the sky was speckled with so many constellations that I felt dizzy and was forced to look away—which is when my eye caught the flicker of a small campfire, about twenty yards in front of us. Amid the orange glow, I could see, set against the star-dappled immensity of the night, the silhouettes of the crew who had inexplicably agreed to let us accompany them on the first stage of their through-hike, a “warm-up cruise” in which, Pete had assured me, the canyon would transform us into a pair of tanned, hardcore hiking studs.

The scene looked inviting, but we had work to do before joining the team. So we shuffled around to the rear of the truck, flung open the tailgate, and jumped back as a small avalanche of boxes tumbled into the dirt around our feet.

After several minutes of fumbling around blindly, we located the batteries for our brand-new headlamps, then needed even longer to figure out how to turn them on. When we finally had some light, Pete removed the camp stove from its container and, after hastily scanning the instructions, attempted to screw on each of our brand-new gas canisters to confirm that everything worked. Meanwhile, I was busy opening a carton of Patagonia underwear, made from a high-tech fabric that, according to the tags, was “odor-free.”

Within minutes, the ground was littered with torn cardboard, pieces of plastic wrapping, and sundry articles of clothing. As we were wondering where to start, we caught the sound of footsteps.

Left to right: No-nonsense canyon hikers Mike St. Pierre, Rich Rudow, Chris Atwood, and Dave Nally
Left to right: No-nonsense canyon hikers Mike St. Pierre, Rich Rudow, Chris Atwood, and Dave Nally (Photo: Pete McBride)

“Hey guys, how’s it going over here?” a voice called out cheerfully. “Need any help?”

“Nope,” we replied in unison. “Everything’s under control!” By now the entire group was approaching, and when everyone turned on his headlamp at the same time, the area around the tailgate was lit up like a crime scene, affording us our first glimpse of the team.

, the leader, was stocky and balding, with little to indicate that he had spent the better part of a decade exploring some of the harshest and most isolated reaches of the canyon, penetrating places that few people had ever seen. Chris Atwood, who had hiked extensively throughout the Painted Desert, was tall and lanky, with a bushy blond beard, while Dave Nally, who had spent years exploring the rugged highlands around Utah’s Zion National Park, had blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Mike St. Pierre, the CEO and founder of , who had logged hundreds of miles on foot in remote stretches of northern Maine and eastern Canada, was short and wiry, with black hair.

All four were clad in the unofficial uniform of high-desert walkers: lightweight pants and loose-fitting shirts with long sleeves and hoods to protect them from the sun, along with tattered baseball caps whose edges were stained white from the salt of their sweat. Although most of their clothing consisted of the same high-end brands that Pete and I had purchased, almost every item of theirs had tears or holes, a number of which were patched with duct tape.

The glare of the headlamps let them get a good look at us, and what grabbed their attention immediately was Pete’s photography equipment, which was mixed up with everything else. He was militant about carrying a backup for every piece of gear he used, so he had brought double the amount he needed: two high-tech digital cameras capable of shooting video as well as still shots, each worth $8,000; eight battery packs to run the cameras, plus four sets of solar panels to charge the batteries, four lenses, a pair of tripods, and an assortment of cables and tools. The entire kit weighed at least 28 pounds, and by long-standing agreement, we would pretend that we were splitting it evenly between the two of us, but with Pete carrying almost all the heavy stuff.

“Ridiculous,” Mike muttered, “but maybe this is how these guys like to roll.”

Rich, Chris, and Dave were so stunned by what they were witnessing that they decided it was best to return to the fire and leave us be. Mike was no less shocked, but held back to see if he could help.

“Hey, did you guys bring the Footprints?” he asked, referring to a compact ground cloth made by Hyperlite that weighed 3.77 ounces, lighter than a handful of paper clips, and retailed for $175 apiece. Everybody in Rich’s group was carrying one.

“Nope,” said Pete. “But Kev found something that’ll work for both of us.”

This was true. Two days earlier, I’d dashed over to Home Depot and purchased a tarp whose label indicated that it was large enough to protect an RV or a medium-size boat. It was acid blue, the color of Windex, and I was rather proud of the thing. Coated with heavy-duty polyethylene, it cost $14 and weighed approximately five pounds, thanks to the round metal grommets embedded in the fabric every foot or so as anchor points in case we were struck by a weather event such as, say, an F5 tornado.

When I unfolded the tarp for Mike to admire, he assumed I was joking. “Yeah, right. So where’s your actual ground cloth?”

“No, really,” I replied, sounding wounded, “this is it.”

For Mike, the notion that someone might intentionally drag a monstrosity like this into the backcountry was too much to process. Incredulous, he turned his attention to something else.

“OK, do you guys really need this?”

He held up a gallon-size Ziploc filled with what appeared to be cocaine.

“Oh, definitely,” declared Pete, not realizing that he had brought enough powdered Gatorade to supply 15 people for an entire week.

“If you say so, but… what the hell?!”

Mike was pointing to my toilet kit—two king-size tubes of toothpaste, a 32-ounce bottle of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint-scented shampoo, and a box of Pampers hypoallergenic baby wipes. Total weight: 3.5 pounds.

Mike slashed the tarp in half, then sliced off the grommets one by one, eliminating four pounds while leaving us with a pair of narrow ground cloths that looked as if they’d been run through a wood chipper.

Mike now stopped with the questions and started seizing anything he found offensive—a glass jar of instant coffee, a foldable camp chair, a plastic shovel that one of us had brought along for God knows what reason—and then tossing it onto a rapidly growing reject pile. This must have felt like progress, until he realized that Pete and I were surreptitiously snatching back items that we couldn’t bear to part with, so Mike simply began hurling things off into the night.

First to go was the Gatorade, which he flung into the brush by the side of the truck. Next, Mike yanked out his knife and went after the tarp, slashing it in half, then slicing off the grommets one by one, eliminating more than four pounds while leaving us with a pair of narrow ground cloths that looked as if they’d been run through a wood chipper.

On it went—taking away this, putting back that, tossing something else into the bushes—until Mike finally glanced at his watch, saw that it was past 9 P.M., and gave up.

“Who the fuck are these clowns,” he wondered aloud as he stalked back toward the campfire, “and how the hell did they talk their way onto this trip?”

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Mike arrived at the fire to find each of his companions sitting cross-legged on a gossamer strip of ground cloth—the aforementioned Footprint, which wasn’t much longer or wider than a sleeping bag. The corners of everyone’s cloths were neatly anchored with small pebbles, and on the surface, the things that each man intended to take with him had been laid out like the components of a clock.

Some of those items, like a hyperefficient propane stove that could bring a half-liter of water to a boil in 120 seconds, were high-tech and quite expensive. But many items—such as the plastic cups, duct-taped with insulating foam, that would serve as their dinnerware—were homemade and cost next to nothing. Several pieces of gear were intended to fulfill more than one purpose, such as the trekking poles that would double as support rods for their ultra-minimalist emergency shelter, a pyramid-shaped piece of fabric called a mid, whose walls didn’t even come all the way to the ground.

During the final week leading up to this night, each of these items had survived an intense and finicky process of elimination as the team members sifted and sorted and pondered before grudgingly retaining only those items they couldn’t do without. Thanks to that vetting, the aim of which was to maximize the amount of food and water each man could carry on any given day, the things that had failed to survive the culling—the things they would not be carrying with them—now told a story about how disciplined they were, and what it might be like to travel in their company.

None of them, for example, had a magazine or book, and all three would have scoffed at bringing a razor, an extra pair of sunglasses, or a stick of deodorant. Nobody was carrying a single bar of soap or a stitch of spare clothing, which meant that they would forgo bathing and would walk a week or more in the same pair of underwear. At least one of them wasn’t even bringing toilet paper, for which he would substitute smooth pebbles or soft leaves.

It wasn’t that they didn’t covet those things. But they had cast away everything except what mattered for their survival, attesting to how well they understood the difference between what they merely wanted and what they’d actually need—a distinction that demanded a measure of ruthlessness. And those choices said something about the canyon, too: how, in forcing you to pare down your dunnage, this landscape would pare you down, too, peeling away the layers until it had stripped you into something that, not unlike the land itself, lay very close to the bone.

The extent of that remaking now made itself evident through a ritual that Mike joined as he took a seat by the fire, spread out his things, and conducted a final inventory in the hope that perhaps he might find some tiny article—the plastic cap of a toothbrush, an extra set of tweezers, the label on a tea bag—that he could discard, thereby shaving off another nanogram or two of unneeded weight.

When they had finished sorting, each man began placing his items into a white ultralight backpack, carefully stacking everything according to the order in which it would be needed the following day, so they could avoid dumping out their entire packs each time they had to retrieve a water bottle or a pair of sunglasses. This was more than just a system for keeping things organized; it was an exercise in knowing precisely where things were at all times, and it was important enough that it actually had a name: pack discipline.

An outsider might dismiss these rituals as obsessive and silly. But anyone familiar with extreme desert hiking would recognize the rites as a vital part of the liturgy of departure—a praxis whose purpose had less to do with saving weight or mapping out one’s gear, and more to do with quickening each man’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of what they were about to attempt, and the trials they would endure in the days and weeks to come if they were to have any hope of reaching their goal.

The author after taking a muddy spill on day four
The author after taking a muddy spill on day four (Photo: Pete McBride)

Back at the rear of the truck, now that Pete and I had finally finished unwrapping and sorting our gear, it dawned on us that we somehow had to stuff all of this junk into our packs. We spent the next 45 minutes haphazardly cramming things into every last available pocket, then lashing whatever didn’t fit to the outsides.

The work was sweaty and frantic, but when it was done, Pete reached into the front of the truck and pulled out a small digital scale. The moment of truth had arrived.

My pack tipped the scale at just over 53 pounds. His was 55. When we shouldered the loads and stood up, which wasn’t easy, mine felt as if it were loaded with pig iron.

“Not as bad as I thought,” Pete grunted as he staggered to his feet. “How about you?”

“I think I’m OK,” I lied, ignoring that my hands and elbows were already turning numb. “How much heavier are these packs than what those other guys are carrying?”

“I think I heard Mike say they’re each at around 33 pounds.”

“OK, so we’re carrying—what, like 40 percent more than they are?”

“We’re only about 20 pounds heavier, so relax. It’s not that big of a deal.”

By now the moon had come up, casting a milky-white glow that revealed a number of loose items still scattered on the ground around the truck. As Pete and I paced the area trying to account for everything, Rich and his crew sat glumly around their campfire, watching the beams of our headlamps slash jaggedly through the darkness, and listening as we continued to bicker, unaware that everything we said carried directly to their ears.

“Hey, I don’t think we unwrapped the gaiters yet,” I said.

“Yo,” I repeated, “do you know where the gaiters are?”

“Dude, chill. Gaiters make you look stupid. Forget about them.”

“But they were on the list. Did you not bother to read the list?”

“I can’t believe I’m getting lectured about reading by some guy who couldn’t be bothered to open his fricking mail!”

Good lord, we haven’t even started and these nitwits are already squabbling, thought Rich while trying to gauge the mood of his team.

The team camping under the stars
The team camping under the stars (Photo: Pete McBride)

For Mike, the incompetency he had witnessed defied belief. But for Chris and Dave, a more complicated response was unfolding as they realized that Rich may not have been entirely honest with them about how inexperienced Pete and I were—and that perhaps Rich had purposely withheld this information until it was too late to do anything about it.

The canyon was no place to bring a pair of greenhorns, a move that neither of them would have agreed to had Rich bothered to consult them. How could he justify doing such a thing?

Chris was too diplomatic to say anything at first. But Dave wasn’t about to sit in silence.

“Rich?” he protested in a hushed voice. “This is not gonna go well.”

“He’s right,” added Chris, looking out to where Pete and I were still messing with our packs and arguing. “This is pretty bad.”

Rich took a deep breath. Thanks to Pete’s flair for fast talk, he hadn’t fully understood how ignorant we were until just now.

The hike’s first leg would strip both of us down to bedrock, scouring away layers of arrogance and delusion to expose what lay beneath: not the pair of badasses we conceived ourselves to be, but the jackasses we truly were.

“Look, guys, I apologize,” he finally told them. “I am really, really sorry about this.”

Chris, Dave, and Mike stared glumly into the dying embers of the fire.

“We may have some rough moments with these guys over the next few days, but we’ll get them sorted out,” Rich assured his team. “So trust me—it’ll be OK, and everything will work out just fine.”

Many months later, Dave would find himself unable to recall exactly what he said next. But he knew, emphatically, what he wished he’d said:

“No, Rich, it isn’t gonna work out fine, because nothing about this is OK.”

Instead, Dave nodded politely, shuffled over to his bag, and tucked himself in, hoping things might look better in the morning.

Unbeknownst to Pete or me, in much the same manner that the Colorado had abraded the stone ramparts of the canyon, the hardships that we were about to endure when the hike began—a series of torments that would break our bodies and shatter our confidence while pulling us to the brink of despair—would strip both of us down to bedrock, scouring away layers of arrogance and delusion to expose what lay beneath: not the pair of badasses we conceived ourselves to be, but the jackasses we truly were.

Also unbeknownst to us, Rich, on his own volition, would eventually complete his odyssey and loop back to help us pick ourselves off the ground, beginning the work that we should have done in the first place. And when the time was right, we would restart our venture with a mindset rooted in the discipline and the humility that the canyon demands from everyone who enters its space.

On that first night, all of this lay ahead. In the moment, the only thing Pete and I could discern, dimly, was a growing awareness that the farce unfolding around the tailgate of my pickup truck marked the moment when our great journey truly began.

(Photo: Courtesy Scribner Book Company)

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Lead Photo: Pete McBride