Editor's Letter

The freezing rain was blowing sideways at Yaki Point. It was cold, and things got worse on the South Kaibab, which was covered with a thick layer of black ice and shrouded in soupy fog. Hiking the trail was like tiptoeing down a bobsled track with your eyes closed, knowing that any misstep might send you over the edge. The conditions were rough, but in the outside world, we play by Mother Nature’s rules, and the gauntlet she threw down that day was a powerful reminder that it’s important to be prepared. We were. We had rain gear, MICROspikes and extra socks.

My brother Jeff and his two boys had flown in for the rim-to-river loop. We took it slow through the Chimney, a series of tight switchbacks at the top, and made it to Ooh Aah Point without any slips. By then, the ice was giving way to slush and mud. At Cedar Ridge, we decided to lose the MICROspikes. Like the Donner Party deciding to “take a shortcut,” it was a bad idea. Five minutes later, I heard a pop, like a champagne cork, and dropped to the muddy ground. It would be days before I’d learn that I’d torn my ACL and fractured my tibial plateau. There was some pain, and we still had about 15 miles to go, but I was determined.

“When everything goes wrong,” Yvon Chouinard said, “that’s when adventure starts.”

For Kevin Fedarko, it started almost immediately on his big hike. He and photographer Pete McBride had been commissioned by National Geographic to bushwhack the length of the Grand Canyon. Only a few people had ever done that. For good reason. “The topography of Grand Canyon is probably the most shattered and broken and fragmented piece of landscape that we have anywhere in North America,” Kevin says. “Pete and I — I think it’s fair to say — were not only utterly and completely unprepared for the challenges … we were comically unprepared. We had no knowledge of what this takes.” 

In Episode 31 of the Arizona Highways Podcast, host Steve Goldstein and I talked with Kevin about his journey.
 

“What was the first point of this trip that you thought you might die?” Steve asked with a straight face.

“The first part,” Kevin said. “I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to die, but I wished I was going to die. That probably occurred within the first 72 hours, by which point the bottoms of my feet had so many blisters, it looked as if somebody had taken a belt sander to my feet. I really did wish that I was going to die.”

He didn’t. They didn’t. And after eight separate trips over the course of 14 months, Kevin Fedarko and Pete McBride joined an exclusive club of explorers who have hiked the length of the Grand Canyon. They did it in sections. Even fewer have done it as a thru-hike, meaning nonstop from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Kenton Grua was the first, in 1976. Thirteen years earlier, Colin Fletcher made it through when the park boundary was much smaller. Still, he’s on the list. Jonreed Lauritzen is not. He never tried. Nevertheless, he was an intrepid explorer and one of our best writers. 

“Mr. Lauritzen can tell a story and tell it well,” Wallace Stegner said.

The storyteller made his debut in September 1940 with a piece about Toroweap, an isolated backcountry location on the North Rim. “I stood on that brink alone, the evening of my descent into the gorge, and I tell you it is an experience no one should want,” he wrote in Toroweap: The Night of the Gods. “It does something to you. It pulls the corners of your eyes down tight, it draws your lips into a straight line, it dries your throat and puts a grip of steel on your insides. Straight down you look, thirty-five-hundred feet of sheer red and brown and magenta cliffs.”

There was no trail from the rim to the river back then. But that didn’t stop our storyteller.

“Darkness had nearly settled over the canyon,” he wrote, “and the clouds had blotted out the narrow strip of sky when I reached the bottom ledges. When at last I peered over them, the river seemed still far away. A little panic mixed itself with my trembling fatigue, but I was determined I would not rest until I reached the river’s edge.”
 

Eventually, he did, “like a man in the last stages of drunkenness.”

“This Colorado,” he wrote, “it is a savage, beige-colored puma that glides quietly along the canyons for miles, suddenly to lash out as here at Lava Falls; to lash out suddenly in bounding anger and beat against the bases of its mile-high walls, as if stricken with madness in realization of its capacity.”

It was morning by then. He made a quick breakfast, in the frying pan he’d hauled down, and turned around and headed up. “The whole way you curse yourself for a fool for going into the canyon, yet you know there’s no possible way to avoid trying to get out. This is one thing in life that once started you have to finish, or it will finish you.

“When again you walk on level ground, you find it unbelievable. You had thought that the rest of your life you would be struggling upward against loose stones toward the strip of sky. As the horizons suddenly widen out into a circle your exhausted body shakes with a kind of triumph in its fatigue, for you know you have done something rare in the experience of man.”

Climbing out of the Canyon with my brother, on that cold and rainy day, wasn’t unusual — thousands of people do it — but after hiking 15 miles with a torn ligament and a broken bone, there was some triumph in my fatigue. I was ready for a beer and glad to be done. I’d had enough adventure for one day.