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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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A WALK IN THE PARK

Kevin Fedarko

A Perilous Journey through the Grand Canyon

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.
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Book

Published 2024-05-28 by Scribner

Book

Published 2024-05-28 by Scribner

Comments

While fighting for survival on a blistering journey through one of the world's most formidable and spectacular landscapes, not only does Fedarko carry us deep into the Grand Canyon, he pulls us back in time to dwell with the region's native peoples whose legacy and ancestors he refuses to ignore, wrestling with the right and just stewardship of the place. You will laugh, cry, and shake your head in marvel as he and his best buddy, adventure photographer and filmmaker Pete McBride, struggle mightily, and you will be moved by this deeply personal journey and triumph of will.

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Part memoir, part travelogue, part extended essay on the profound meanings of wilderness, A Walk in the Park is a paean to one of earth's most spectacular places, and a testament to the irresistible pull this mighty landscape exerts over human beings. Fans of Bill Bryson, Cheryl Strayed, and Ed Abbey will love this rich, funny, and spirited work from the Grand Canyon's most eloquent bard. Fedarko's bushwhacking, boulder-hopping, scree-slipping odyssey makes for delightful reading, and underscores the essential truth that mystics and penitents down through the ages have always known: Put one foot in front of the other, and magical things will follow.

Passionate, detailed... [Fedarko] offers readers memorable writing. Read more...

A Walk in the Park is a triumph. Fedarko doesn't describe awe; he induces it, with page-turning action, startling insights and the kind of verbal grace that makes multipage descriptions of, say, a flock of pelicans feel riveting and new. Read more...

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I love this book. It's an insane premise, an implausible journey through an incomprehensible landscape, undertaken by people who are life-threateningly stubborn to a degree that is, itself, insane. What they accomplished is, by contrast, startlingly real.

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