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

In the desert, efficiency, discipline, and wiliness almost invariably win out over brute force.

By opting to take a shortcut, we had deliberately shirked the work and the preparation that were necessary not only for us to begin moving through the wild spaces of the canyon, but perhaps more important for the canyon’s wildness to begin moving through us.

I might return not only with a cleaner understanding of a landscape that had been a fixation since my boyhood, but with a better grasp of who I was, and perhaps a renewed sense of whom I might yet become, before it was too late to grow and change.

At the start of this quest, I had no way of imagining that long after it was over I would still be struggling to formulate a coherent response to the miseries the canyon inflicted on us, the satisfactions that would later overtake the memories of that misery, or the yearning and splendor that transcended them all.

This was like nothing I’d ever seen before, a spectacle whose freakishness was intensified by its mystery, and the only thing surpassing my bafflement was an ardent sense of relief that whatever kind of rabidly deranged parasite this might be, it had seen fit to drill its way into Pete instead of me. Relief, I hasten to add, that was swiftly expung

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon’s rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath.

and it unfolded during a time of day that I had come to despise more than any other, which was the hottest part of the afternoon when the fleeting freshness of early morning was nothing but a distant memory, and evening’s reprieve lay too far off in the future to even start dreaming about.