Grand Canyon Adventure: The 750-Mile Hike That Nearly Killed Us (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live

By now it's March. Winter's over, the weather's starting to warm up. Starting to feel vestiges, signs of heat again, and Pete and I are about to pass through a doorway. We're about to step across a threshold into a section of the canyon that is rumored by those who know it, and those who know it are very small in number, to be, perhaps, the most isolated and the most pristine section of the canyon of all. The Western Grand Canyon. A world of its own, and we're gonna begin moving through it. (water gurgling) (grunting)

[Pete] Stay. The last source was dry as a bone. Anything out there?

[Kevin] Bone dry out here.

[Pete] It looks like a swimming pool from here. Ooh.

[Kevin] Not good.

Bone dry. If you don't know if there's water, it makes you a little stressed to say the least. When we started this walk across Grand Canyon some 500 miles to the east of here, a friend told us we'd learn the difference between what we want and what we need. As Kevin and I marched into Western Grand Canyon, we'd felt like we passed through a secret passageway into what some describe as the Gods' Gate, a place very few visit. It's day 45 of walking. No precipitation in sight, even though it's mid-February, and we are back in full desert. (rock clattering)

Did you step on that? Western Grand Canyon is incredibly remote and immense and then some. And water is extremely scarce. That scarcity reminded us daily that the park and all the development projects surrounding its landscape share this major, often overlooked obstacle: limited water. Finding water when you're far from the river, sometimes 3,000 feet above it, isn't easy. So we depended on very thin, very unpredictable potholes of rainwater.

See how deep it is.

[Kevin] It's pretty nice. And we have two syringes with us this time. That's like a swimming pool.

[Pete] Just don't fall in there 'cause there's no bottom in that thing that I can see. That's got four liters in it. They were the key to our survival.

[Kevin] The water challenge is a day-by-day thing. Every morning we start the search anew.

[Pete] Just constantly amazed by the liquid silence that seems to blanket us down here. (dramatic music)

[Pete] Is there any water?

[Kevin] No!

[Pete] You alright?

[Kevin] You have a clean pair of underwear?

[Pete] Now's not the time right now to be joking around.

Did you hear that?

[Pete] Are you okay?

Yeah. Good.

I thought you fell.

[Kevin] No.

[Pete] You scared the hell out of me.

Just the rocks. (mumbles) challenging with this pack. Pack makes it a little harder.

[Pete] After hiking some 12 to 15 miles a day for over a month, and some days hiking over 20 miles to reach water, let's just say it wore us down. What's up with your feet?

They really hurt.

My body's falling apart.

I feel like I'm in a Swedish sauna.

Nice, our 50th day, on the trail of whatever. It may have been the brushiest, scratchiest, longest day, wow. At times--

I feel like woo-woo.

[Pete] Kevin might've even become a tad grouchy.

Sublime, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, jiu jitsu wilderness, hoo-ha, I'm like (bleep) that, (bleep) that. This just blows.

[Pete] Look where we've come from.

[Kevin] Yeah, look where we've come from, (bleep)ing nowhere! (audience laughing)

[Pete] Our encounters with cactus didn't help. I'll get em.

[Kevin] I fell into a barrel cactus, and now I got all these weird lumps on my arm. (grunts) OK, let's put the camera away. (audience groans) Whoo, they hurt.

[Pete] Oh, God.

[Kevin] Grand Canyon bites literally.

Made my calf go numb. Ooh! I got ya, I got ya on the spot.

[Kevin] I really don't like this.

[Pete] Physical challenges aside, careful, we discovered a solitude and stillness that we've experienced nowhere else. As we approached the end of the park and our walk, we discovered and heard a different Grand Canyon. (helicopter whirring)

A tourist boom has followed the success of the recent Skywalk development on the Hualapai reservation on the southwest corner of the park. Over a decade ago, the FAA granted the approval to fly and land helicopters below the rim, what is now called Helicopter Alley, located on the border of the national park. It is now one of the busiest heliports in the world. (helicopter whirring)

This wave of industrialized high volume tourism coming to the national park. The acceleration of this kind of activity has been incredible.

Economic enterprise of these tribal nations is important for them. They basically starved for a hundred years, now they have something. (deep rhythmic music)

The helicopters are a mess. There's just constant air traffic, and it affects the wildlife. We're a hunting tribe.

Propagate forward 15 years, is there anything left here? Have we really done what we set out to do, what Teddy Roosevelt set out to do, in letting mainly the rest of the world come fly over Grand Canyon National Park and negate the laws that we created to protect these places.

So this amazes me, because this is our national park. And I think what amazes me most about this is that 10 years ago this didn't exist. Now this, I want to be clear, this is something I worked very hard on, this is a photographic merge. I went out there, I spent all day, this was July 9th, I took a picture of every single helicopter that flew through my frame. In an eight-hour period, I counted 363 helicopters, and then all those that flew through my frame, some flew above the frame, some flew illegally into the park airspace, but I stitched them together just to show what the impact is of a day's worth of traffic inside Grand Canyon in a place that didn't exist. And they're landing on the Hualapai reservation, and the Hualapai deserve to have viability, of course, but it's raising the question on, we just want to raise the questions on how do we find that balance between what's too much and not enough.

I was curious about how this works, what's the experience like, I actually went to Las Vegas, the proximity to Las Vegas is driving a lot of this, it's a half-hour flight. They'll pick you up in your hotel with a limo, you'll do a 10-minute limo ride to the airport, you do a 22-minute ride out to the Grand Canyon, you come have a small bottle of champagne and a yogurt and by the time, when I was there, it was a crowded day, there were 16 helicopters parked around me. When I was trying to have my yogurt, four helicopters flew over my head and blew me with yogurt. (audience laughing) Then we were raced back into the helicopter, 28-minute flight back, limo back to the hotel, and I was ready to have brunch and check my Grand Canyon box that I had done it by 11:30 in the morning.

Now I understand access, I understand some people don't live near Grand Canyon, and I understand that nobody's gonna be dumb enough to do a walk like Kevin and I did. But it is remarkable to me to think how we look at wilderness, and we're trying to raise the question, how do we appreciate these places, and this may not be the way to appreciate its great asset like silence and humility.

Yeah, and it's hard, really, to sort of express in words. The violence of the contrast between the noise that's generated by these machines and the tranquility of the landscape itself, as you move though this section of the park. And I just want to take a moment to say as a writer, what a privilege it is to work with a photographer who's capable of capturing an image like the one that just preceded this one. I think it's such an amazing thing to somehow be able to layer information so densely that you can communicate it in a single instant what might take me pages upon pages to relay. Now that contrast is really harsh as you move across the westernmost section of the Grand Canyon.

And the thing about the canyon, too, is that you'd think that the further out you get and the closer to the end you get, that it might begin to kinda let you down easily, but that's definitely not the case. I never knew that it was possible for cactuses to grow in the form of forests, but they do. (audience chuckling) It's very difficult and unpleasant to move through this sort of thing. It's also challenging out there in the west to realize how much up and down descending and ascending is demanded of you, tens of thousands of feet each and every day. You need to climb and then descend in order to keep moving laterally downstream, down canyon. Then you need, too, to perform a level of rock climbing that I'm really not capable of, technical moves that lie far beyond my ability and exist outside of my comfort zone, and then for whatever reason, we also found that we're seeing more and more animals on this westernmost section of the Grand Canyon. Unpleasant animals, animals that I was not super into, I have to say. (audience laughing)

Sorry. Yeah, there are some critters that like to bite down there. But we generally leave them alone.

Another interesting thing for me when we got to this part of the western canyon, a lot of people, if you've been down the Grand Canyon by a boat, a lot of the rafting trip ends in this part of the canyon. We're at about mile 250 on the river, most ship you out either on a night rift or you hike out or you can take a helicopter out. But these sections here were daunting, we're climbing 3,000 feet to the river to try to document things, we're coming 3,000 feet up, but it amazed me is that despite the challenges and the rigor of this, is that we're coming up these ancient Anasazi routes. This was a route that I would've never have guessed we could get out and get back up onto the sanup level, 3,000 feet above the river, but when we approached this little tiny break in the rock at the top, which I'm standing on, you come around the corner and you see a tiny pictograph, and then you come a little closer, and you see a cedar log that has been there with no other logs, no other trees anywhere in sight, it's been there for probably 800 years. And you can see where it had been chipped a little bit, where they had notched it into this spot so they could climb up. It's now since fallen and we have to perform a climbing move, but it's remarkable.

And then as we move up these ancient Anasazi routes, we've conditioned ourselves a little bit, where we're moving now at night. We're realizing that we can keep moving, we can make more miles, we have to make more miles here because the water sources are further and further apart. Sometimes when they do show up, of course, they're deeper than we want them. But we also realize it has changed our bodies. We've not only psychologically changed on some level, but physically we've changed. We've gotten more used to carrying weight, we've gotten more nimble, we've gotten a little more balanced. And apparently, I lost my beer belly somewhere. (audience laughing) Part of this is due to the diet we're on, we're carrying roughly 2,000 calories a day and we're probably burning 5,000. I lost 30 pounds on the trip.

Yeah, it's no overstatement to say that the canyon is transforming and reshaping our bodies. It's also transforming and reshaping our minds and our sensibilities. And I think it's fair to say, too, that I'm 51 years old, you're four years younger than me.

Something like that. 14 years younger. (audience laughing) I'm gonna move us up this slide, 'cause I get gross looking at that. (audience laughing)

At this point, we are probably in what we will later look back upon and recognize as the shape of our lives. And we're also seeing signs that the canyon is about to start letting us go. Because it's out here in the West that the Grand Canyon National Park comes to an end. It's a testament to the remoteness and just how pristine this place actually is. That when you get to the far end of this, the crown jewel of American's national park system, the only thing that marks the border are three metal stakes, driven into the sagebrush in what feels like the middle of nowhere.

So that's our final step in Grand Canyon National Park. But of course, boundaries weren't always drawn by geography or watersheds. So we still had 3,500 vertical feet to descend through Pearce Canyon, where the actual canyon itself lets you out through this gentle release out into the desert. And we come down and we blow up our pack rafts, which are these two-pound little items that are like paddling a pool toy with a Q-Tip. (audience laughing) I probably could blow Kevin and knock him over, so it's a little bit tenuous, but to be honest, this was probably the most luxurious three miles left of the trip. This was we're out of the park, the walk is complete.

So just three weeks ago in November, we both emerged on Pearce Ferry and one of us had completed the walk. I say one of us because we decided to do this walk as a team and to do something unusual. One of us is the 34th person to ever walk through Grand Canyon. But we realized that this isn't about walking a park, and it's not about being on a list. So the other one of us floated a hundred yards, only know between us, and left that section undone because the reality is, this place is too big, it's too grand, it's too vast, it's too remarkable to know, to conquer, to understand with one line even by foot through it. It would take more than a lifetime to understand this place.

It does take more than a lifetime to understand this place. It is complex, it is enormous. But that doesn't mean that we can't apply ourselves to the question, what did it mean, what did it teach us. And when Pete and I sat down together and we grappled with that, we realized that there were four things that the canyon did. They're really sort of four gifts that the canyon gave us in the form of insight. And tonight, we're gonna share those four with you.

The first of them has to do with the fact that this place is a national treasure. And its assets are normally framed and described and articulated in terms that are fundamentally visual. Think about it for a moment. If you've been to the canyon or if you've never been to the canyon but you're speaking about or thinking about the canyon, the vocabulary that you reach for has to do with the color of the light, the texture of the rock, the lines of the canyon itself. The odd and unexpected thing that Pete and I discovered that amounted to a kind of epiphany was that we gradually began to realize at some point, some indeterminable point between Lees Ferry and the Grand Wash Cliffs, we realized that the greatest, least appreciated and most vulnerable treasure that Grand Canyon National Park contains is not visual, it's auditory. Because it is out there that you are able to encounter a level of silence that you can find nowhere else. Why is that precious and why does that matter? Among other reasons because it stands in such profound contrast to everything that surrounds us in the world beyond the rims. A world that is governed and defined by noise. A world whose noise prevents us from articulating and framing and contemplating things that we don't have the time or the attention span to appreciate. And so that is one of the greatest things that the park has to offer, and it's one of the things that we feel is most necessary to protect.

The second lesson we learned is that whatever happens on the rim, we often think that's a separate world from the canyon itself. And the reality is, no matter how you see or enjoy the park, if you come to the Skywalk, this is in the western side of the park that now gets a million visitors, if you come to the South Rim or the North Rim or you're two hikers that come and do it, whatever happens on the rim or whatever small impact it may seem on the rim is directly related to what happens inside the park. It is this remarkable rock maze that is all interconnected. This little spring here flows out of the rock 3,000 feet downstream, about 40 miles from the South Rim. And it just suddenly emerges. But it's directly linked to the water table on the South Rim. And biologists say that the ecosystem that survives here, they say the ecosystems in Grand Canyon are some of the greatest in all our national parks. It survives in some places nowhere else. You find endangered species of fish and creatures that they are just learning exist. So it is entirely connected, the rim, to these small secret worlds below.

Incredibly complicated and incredibly delicate, interconnected matrix. The third gift, the third gift is something that you encounter at the moment when you realize that your first impression of this place when you move into it and you're unfamiliar with it, the impression that it is empty, that it is devoid of human beings is fundamentally wrong. Because as you move through this landscape, as you move across the arc of days and weeks and months and entire seasons, as you spend an entire year inside of this place, you begin to realize that it is a space that was once filled with people, people who existed inside of it and called it home for tens of thousands of years, and the evidence of their presence is absolutely everywhere. It exists on the ground, you can see the tools and the artifacts that they left behind, you could see places that they lived, the homes that they dwelt inside, and at very special and very secret locations that you are privileged to encounter only if you are very, very lucky, you may see on the rock itself, imprinted on the rock itself a vision that these people created which suggests something about how they understood their position in the universe itself.

Their art, which you can find in certain areas, I want to give you a little description of how remarkable this piece is. I can't tell you where it is, I was given permission to share it with you, but this a 4,000-year-old painting that's called a polychrome. Basically has four colors on it, there's quite a few of them scattered throughout Grand Canyon, people aren't exactly sure of who did it or how they did it. And then there's the question of where did they go, where did all these people, this vast population that lived inside Grand Canyon. And the truth is, they haven't gone anywhere. They're right here, they're living all around Grand Canyon National Park. There's nine Native American tribes that live around Grand Canyon National Park. And they're active and engaged in all sides of it. They're active on all fronts of the development pressures that are happening. Some are for it and actively involved in the economics of it, some are opposed to it and fighting for their lives and trying to keep what they consider sacred alive. And it is very complex and important to note that what's happening now is driving a lot of it, it's pitting certain tribes against other tribes, this is where the tram would go, this is where you would have 10,000 people a day coming down to a food emporium. And it's as complex as the geology of the canyon itself.

Which brings us to the fourth and final gift. You think about the Grand Canyon, these sorts of things are incredibly important, the politics, the issues that surround this place, the fundamental questions about environmentalism and preservation and conservation. But ultimately, you come up against an idea that's very, very different, which is that, and it's really not an idea as much as a possibility, it's the possibility expressed in the notion that what this place contains that may be the most important resides in an opportunity. It's an opportunity that we have when we move into these landscapes. And the opportunity has to do, not with the land itself, not with the threats that may hang over, the debates about whether those things that are being proposed are right or wrong. It's about the connections that happen between people when they come to our national parks. Ultimately, the story of our parks is the story of people, it's the story of experiences that we have in them, it's the story of friendship. It's also a story about how friendship matures and blossoms into community and how community becomes family. And when you try to wrap your head around all of those things, the connectivity, the idea that silence may be the most important treasure of all, the notion that the connections between human beings may express themselves and come to matter more than the land itself. You find yourself coming up against an idea that the park is greater than the sum of its parts. And I think that's an idea that Pete has really sort of brought to the fore beautifully in the final video that we'd like to share with you tonight.

[Pete] When we started this walk, we had no idea what we'd gotten into nor how hard this undertaking would be. Our 60-day, over 650-mile hiking immersion was not about being on a list. It was about understanding a shared resource, the crown jewel of our national park system. While it was a journey to find a line through one of the seven natural wonders of the world between the river and the rim, it was also a quest to understand what might change or be lost in this rock cathedral. If we don't find a balance between growing development pressures, resource extraction, and the sublime beauty that defines this iconic landscape. And how we decide to use and experience our last wild places will dictate what the future of this place looks like. The story that we've spent the last year of our lives working on comes down to a single question, that question is this, how do we view this space? How do we view it as citizens, how do we view it as Americans. Do we view it as a place that is sacrosanct and holy and inviolable, or do we view it as a theater for our own amusement? A place that titillates us, provides us with recreation and enjoyment. And Pete and I are not proposing that we have an answer to that question to you tonight. We're merely placing the question in front of all of you for your consideration, but we will say one thing. There's a lot of places in the United States that look like this. Wanna know how many of them there are?

There are a lot of amusement parks in this country. And one thing we have learned after sweating, bleeding, crying, whining, and crawling through the Grand Canyon is there's only one place that looks like the seventh natural wonder of the world. So thank you very much for coming out tonight. (audience applauding)

Thank you.