Grand Canyon Adventure: The 750-Mile Hike That Nearly Killed Us (Part 2) | Nat Geo Live

By now it's late October, it's heading towards November, and we've actually done something remarkable. We have completed what was originally planned as the first section of our thru-hike. And we've got to a point in the river where we're actually climbing out of the canyon, it's about a 3,500-foot climb along a very obscure and very difficult route known as the Walter Powell Trail, named after the brother of John Wesley Powell who was on that expedition in the summer of 1869. And when we got to the rim of the canyon, we met this lady.

So this is Renea Yellowhorse. She's a Navajo woman who has spent her life out on the horizontal world of the Grand Canyon. She lives up on, basically, the rim up here, her family has grazed sheep here for hundreds of years. She's standing in a place where there's one of the most impactful development projects that is about to happen. And she's basically become a voice and a leader for this group called Save the Confluence. And they're fighting to save this land and this area of Grand Canyon. And it's become a very controversial issue; it has divided the Navajo community. And we figure that instead of us talking about it, we let you hear what they say and their voices.

The gondola would bring people all the way down to the confluence, and there at the river level, they would have an elevated walkway, a snack bar, a restroom facility. Enough services to take care of 10,000 people a day.

You're gonna employ an awful lot of people in an impoverished area and help them save their culture. What's better than that?

Any idea of disrupting this area with your jackhammers, with your machinery or whatever dynamite or explosive you want to bring in here, you're basically destroying a shrine.

The confluence, little Colorado River meets the Colorado River. Where they meet, this is where life begins, this is what our grandmothers tell us. It is a sacred space, and we don't want to see the Disneyland on the edge of the canyon.

I think the view from the bottom gives one a perspective of one's place in the universe. If I were to hike down to the bottom of the canyon, I'd have to be airvac'd out because of my knees and ankles. And so we're trying to offer the average person that below-the-rim experience.

It's like a lot of experiences throughout the world. You know you're never gonna be on the top of Everest. We provide an incredible visitor experience for millions of people every year. But we can't provide every experience for every person based on their own individual abilities.

When I come here, I wish to commune with the ones that have gone before me, like my great-grandmother and my father. And know that they are that special place. That if the Escalade Development comes in, that it would dig into the heart of our mothers, Mother Earth, and I would never be able to come here to feel that way again. (dramatic piano music)

So we left the politics, the stormy politics of the Grand Escalade behind us, 'cause we had to move downstream. We had 500 miles to go. We actually walked back down through the area that it would be built if it were to be built, and we moved down through the kaleidoscope of colors, which is so famous at the Grand Canyon. But the reality is, once again, we were in the situation where you can't follow the river. You come into sections like the Inner Gorge where you're constantly getting pinned and locked up on these different benches of rock. So we've left food roughly every five to ten days in plastic buckets. Not a lot of food, but so we're on a timed schedule to get there; but more importantly, we have to get to water every day, we can't carry more than one day's worth of water. And so we're constantly trying to find ways to move down canyon, sometimes on these benches way above the river, but we have to get back to the river.

And when we get to the river a whole new set of problems present themselves. It seemed like impenetrable thickets of thorns created by these dense groves of acacia trees, mesquite. And that's to say nothing of the cactus that you encounter and the attentiveness that you have to apply to avoid stepping on these things. And so the challenges and the rigors are still taking a toll on our bodies. We're still feeling the impact of this environment. The difference, however, is that unlike in September, we're holding up. And, in fact, we're not only holding up, but we're starting to see evidence of our personalities reemerge. Every now and then I'd look over, and I'd see the kind of Pete McBride that I know and recognize. And Pete would look over at me, and he would see the kind of Kevin Fedarko that he's used to being around. (audience laughing) So basically what's happening is that we're feeling comfortable enough in this environment that we are reverting to what passes for normalcy between the two of us. (audience laughing) (chuckling)

Alright, so it's now January. We've moved all the way down to the South Rim. And I want you to look at the lights on the top of this frame. This is where you'd enter the South Rim, this where 5 1/2 million visitors come to Grand Canyon National Park. They do a remarkable job there. But the lights in the distance is where the second, basically it's the southern threat that's coming in. So the gateway community called Tusayan, they've proposed 2,800 homes, two million square feet of commercial space, a water ski park. And what we started realizing and what we continued to want to explore is what happens up here on the rim, how is it gonna affect life down here below, how is it gonna affect the water table, the complex water table that runs though it, how is it gonna affect the wildlife. So as we move downstream, we actually start depending on the wildlife in an unusual way, mostly the sheep but also we start following lion tracks. For four days we followed lion tracks along the Esplanade layer. But just as you think you're starting to get kinda Grand Canyon savvy and get the kind of vibe of the place, it kicks you in the gut again.

So winter in the Grand Canyon announces its arrival in the form of a bunch of massive storms that have rolled across, they've rolled through the Pacific, they've rolled across the West Coast of the United States and they start hitting the Southwest, the Desert Southwest, and when they do so, the first thing that happens is they hammer the temperatures way down below zero. And so you're huddled in your tents at night, you're trying to protect your water bottles and keep them from freezing, and then, the storms, they start unloading the precipitation that they carry in them. And the snow begins to fall late at night when it's dark. You don't really know what's happening except you hear these ice crystals landing in the wall of your tent. And you wake up in the morning and you realize that this world that you are inside of and suspended in has been coated and glazed in a layer of ice 10 to 11 inches thick, which has rendered the business, the imperative business of moving downstream toward those food caches terrifying and absolutely dangerous.

[Woman] One right there.

I don't know how to get my feet into these.

[Kevin] So frozen I can't even straighten the toe.

This is acts of desperation in an unexpectedly gigantic snowstorm. (mumbles) You can't get your insole out, can you?

I can't. It's frozen in there.

So we made it through that area called Owl Eyes Bay. It was probably one of the most physically challenging, most grueling sections of the trip for us on a number of levels. I think on some points it was a bit of a milestone for us to get through it, but it didn't let up. We got through the snow on some of them, but the temperatures persisted. Compared to the fall where it was over a hundred, it's not below zero. We saw temperatures of minus seven, for a week after it hovered around five degrees. And I'm just gonna give you a little backup on the challenges I was faced with trying to capture this place and our story with one camera, with one lens, with one tiny solar panel and four batteries. There is no socket to go pop your camera to charge in. And cameras and batteries, they hate cold temperature, so I basically would crawl in when I would finally go to bed, when I'm not trying to capture the magnificent starlight, I would go and I would sleep the entire night stashing my batteries in my armpit or anywhere that I could find any shade of warmth, which I really couldn't because I took some stupid sleeping bag; I wasn't really warm enough. But it's part of the deal on some level. What'd you think?

What did I think? (audience laughing) Here's what I think. I think that what I hate the most about working with a National Geographic photographer is something like this. When you take undiluted suffering and misery and you weave it into an image of beauty, you are creating an act of fraudulence. (audience laughing) This is what it's like to be me. Huddled inside of a tent with every stitch of clothing I own on me, wanting not to go outside, and this guy is flitting around like some photo firefly early in the morning and late at night. When I think back now, it was really bad, the hundred-degree heat wave in September, but it didn't compare to this, it was just so miserable and so awful that I don't even like to look at this photograph 'cause--

C'mon! C'mon!

It triggers a level of visual PTSD--

Wait, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa now. (laughs) He gets going. Alright, let's be fair, there's one, you enjoyed sections, right?

Alright, I will admit, yes, there were some things that I did enjoy. It's difficult for me to recall them, but as it turns out, here's one of them, and it occurred, actually, I have to admit, each and every day. So the thing is that like, there is this moment that comes after you've completed your journey through the canyon at the end of the day and you've finally stopped moving and you've set up camp. And you heat up some food, and you get something hot into your belly. And you're feeling this delicious sense of relaxation, and then what happens is that you lean back and you stare up and you realize that something extraordinary is happening. You are reminded that the Grand Canyon is graced by something exceptional each and every night. You are inside of an abyss that is a mile deep, one of the greatest environments on earth, a place that has been polished and carved out by the greatest river in the Southwest that is still running through its bottom thousands of feet below you, and you realize that that river is reflected in a second river that is arched over your head, a celestial river of starlight, and you are caught between these two rivers, and you are held in a beauty that hinges on the juxtaposition between harshness and aestheticism. It is an extraordinary thing, it is a privilege and is a gift. And I do have to admit that encountering that each and every night is one of the closest things that I've ever experienced to true religion.

I would say he may hate my fraudulent photos, but there are times that I definitely wanted to stop, and his passion kept me going. And we had to keep going. The reality is we couldn't soak up the starlight like we wanted to, we had to crawl out of our bags. We descended into Olo Canyon, this is how you enter Olo Canyon, it's one of the most magnificent slot canyons in all of Grand Canyon. It's a 200-foot repel, free repel. You're cold and miserable, but you have to come in here and start your day and find your way through this remarkable maze. I could've spent weeks in here as a photographer; it is total magic. But the reality is, like I said before, we cached food every distances apart, we were on a 10-day food line at this point, and we have basically run out; we have about a day's worth, we're running down to jelly beans, and so we're in a race for food. Here's a little snippet on that. Got one day left of food. Even though we're two days away from our food cache.

[Woman] Got it!

What'd ya get?

We're gonna eat again! (screaming) These are loaded baked potatoes.

[Woman] Shut the front door. Like chipotle?

Yes! So as it happens when you camp or hike, food becomes kind of important, but we're now, once again, happy and we've found the Yellow Brick Road, so to speak, this is the Muav limestone layer that we took for a short distance, about three river miles. Kenton Grua, actually, that Kevin featured in his book, was the first person to ever realize you could connect these benches, we're basically following the black pellets of gold we call them, the bighorn sheep poop, and we weaved our way through here up to Mat Cat, we climbed our way back up from the river back up onto the layer and then weaved and ducked and dived our way all the way around up into Havasu, because we wanted to really investigate; you see these black lines here, these black circles, the uranium mines, we want to try to understand that issue.

And the destination, the endpoint of this segment, the place that we were headed was the kingdom of the people of the blue-green water. This is a very special part of the Grand Canyon. And it is home to the tiniest tribe of Native Americans who live either around or inside the canyon, the Havasupai people who live inside of what looks to be an idyllic home, but they're incredibly vulnerable because one of the things about the canyon is that everything is connected and so they are aware, perhaps at a deeper level than almost anyone else just how vulnerable they are to the sorts of things that are happening right now in the rim of the Grand Canyon.

So this is the Havasupai coming out to do a protest in front of the canyon mine; the canyon mine sits on the south side of Grand Canyon, it's out of the border of the park itself, but the Havasupai fear that it's well within the watershed of Grand Canyon and if there were to be a breach or anything would happen, that it would flow down right into their water source, their life. I spent time with the uranium miners, all guys trying to hang on and do their job best, they're doing everything legally; it's a contentious area, a lot of people are against uranium mining. The challenge here is nobody has the money to drill a 3,000-foot well to monitor these mines and if they're acting appropriately or not. They're dealing with systems, environmental regulations that are not meant for the Grand Canyon; there's only one Grand Canyon. And if you get above this and start to see the proximity, this is on the north side, this is Arizona 1 mine. This is outside of the park boundary, but as you can see from the air, everything is connected, it's well within the watershed. So if anything were to go wrong in a uranium situation, it would go right down into the lifeline of the Southwest.