Epic Grand Canyon Hike: A 750-Mile Challenge (Part 1) | National Geographic

I'm going to be honest. I'm not sure I really like hiking that much. With a heavy pack, no trail, and no guarantee of water, it's hard, stressful, and very slow. Sure, hiking can lead to some zen-like moments, but not so much if you're lost, really tired, and dehydrated. Yet there's something about the Grand Canyon and its rocky secret world; it is alluring, magical even.

So, in the fall of 2015, my friend and author Kevin Fedarko and I set out to walk the entirety of the Grand Canyon from east to west. In order to understand the insanity of this venture, you first have to know a little bit about this place. In stretches, it is 18 miles wide and over a mile deep—so deep in fact, you could stack five Empire State Buildings one on top of the other inside. It is 277 miles long if you're floating the Colorado River, but on foot, by the time you've gone up and back down the numerous side canyons, it's more like 700 miles. Oh yeah, and for most of it, there's no trail.

“How far have we gone?”

“I don't think we've gone five miles yet. This is really hard hiking.”

It kind of demoralizes you a little bit. As a result, more people have stood on the surface of the Moon than have completed a continuous through-hike of the Grand Canyon. Unlike those intrepid few, Kevin and I decided to do a sectional version, chipping off 100 to 150-mile chunks at a time. Just 30 hikers have completed sectional lines through the park, and for some, it took them decades to finish. Tragically, others have perished attempting it. Kevin and I would be the first journalists ever to tackle this hiking lunacy.

We planned to complete our mission over a year, watching the seasons change and teaming up with hardened canyon veterans to help us find our way and our legs. But beyond that challenge, something else drew us on this quest. Many claim the Grand Canyon is facing an unprecedented array of pressures from all four points on the compass. Development projects are poised to change the integrity of perhaps the most monumental landscape in America, and we believe walking the park might give us a unique perspective on this secret world and what's at stake to be lost.

But between the river and the rim, thanks so much for our first leg. We joined Rich Rudo, Chris Atwood, and Dave N at the beginning of their through-hike attempt.

“Bye, everybody! Thank you for coming!”

“Bye, Chris!”

“Day one, mile two—I’m already hot!”

“Oh, there's no turning around here. There's no easy way out. Everybody's got to kind of mentally suck it up and you'll make it.”

I was told that yesterday would be the hardest day. I don’t see any difference whatsoever between yesterday, the day before yesterday, the first day, and today. It's all one uninterrupted river of pain.

“You can't make me laugh when I'm trying to do these videos.”

The endless hours of scrambling, with temperatures soaring well over 100, combined with our limited canyon hiking experience, faltered our pace and our health. In just a few days, the canyon beat us down. Kevin suffered two sprained ankles, and I became hyponatremic, a condition involving dangerously low body salts that can result in seizures or worse.

“Everybody is declaring that they're doing well and they're going to get through the day. I'm worried about the next 15 minutes; that's what I'm concentrating on right now. That's where I'm at. This is wild—wondering what the hell we've gotten ourselves into. It's awesome.”

After just seven days and just 80 miles of hiking, we had to leave our through-hike friends early. They were on a mission to keep going to the end without stopping. Kevin and I were not helping; we were walking out already broken. We're going to need to rework our entire plan and step up our entire game if we wouldn't have any hope of completing this.

Three weeks later, our feet still blistered and our legs scarred, we returned, this time with two canyon veterans, Matthew Brown and Kelly McGrath. We're about to go right over the Kaibab Limestone and re-enter the world of the canyon. We explore the silent ghost of an earlier Grand Canyon development that never came to fruition: The Marble Canyon Dam.

“I have the sole to an old work boot. You can see all the nails coming through. It held up fairly well, I’d say. When you come here and you see the infrastructure—everything from the shoe to the tent platforms to the tram cable—it makes one understand how close the dam was to being built.”

Despite the grandeur of the landscape surrounding us, we're quickly reminded that development pressures are not new here.

“My legs got a little scratched up this afternoon from the vegetation on our river walk.”

“Yeah, I got a few mosquito needles in there.”

We exit our second leg at the Walter Pal Route, which shadows a new development project on the east side of the park called the Grand Escalade. This 1.4-mile-long gondola proposal has rallied communities around the park and divided the Navajo tribe, upon whose land it would be constructed.

“We want to understand the project through the eyes of those who are backing it and those opposed to it. 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 going to 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, where the Little Colorado River meets the Colorado River—this is where life begins; this is what our grandmothers tell us. It is a sacred space, and we don't want to see a 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 air-vac'd out because of my knees and ankles. 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 going to 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 at a special place. If the Escalade development comes in, it would dig into the heart of our mother, this Mother Earth, and I would never be able to come here to feel that way again.”

By late fall, we plunged back into the canyon, leaving the stormy politics of the Escalade behind us. It continues to be heavily debated on the rim, but we have to keep hiking—we have 500 miles to go.