Down to Bedrock with Kevin Fedarko
Description
---
TRANSCRIPT:
---
Kevin Fedarko: The Canyon is, can be incredibly harsh and cruel and it's very difficult place to move through and it will strip away all of your, all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are and what you think you have and how much you think you know. And it will leave you staring at what's left, which in my case was not a lot.
Jo Baird: Hi, I'm Jo. And today we have the honor of speaking with Kevin Fedarko. A renowned writer and adventurer whose work has captivated audiences with its vivid descriptions and immersive storytelling. Kevin is perhaps best known for his critically acclaimed book “The Emerald Mile,” which chronicles the daring journey of a small group of river runners through the Grand Canyon during a historic flood. Drawing on his background as a journalist and his deep connection to the region, Kevin's latest endeavor promises to take readers on another unforgettable journey. Set to be released in May, 2024. Kevin's new book, “A Walk in the Park” promises to be a captivating exploration of the natural world and human experience. Well, thank you so much for being here today, Kevin. Can you just briefly introduce yourself for us? Kevin: Sure. My name is Kevin Fedarko, and I make my living writing books, mostly about the Grand Canyon. Jo: OK. Thank you. And just to start off here, can you provide us with an overview of a walk in the park, your newest book and what inspired you to write it? Kevin: So this book chronicles a journey that I undertook. Back in 2015, so almost 10 years ago, with one of my best friends and also a kind of professional collaborator, a National Geographic photographer by the name of Pete McBride. And I latched onto this project when Pete came to me with an idea. The year before we launched, the idea was that it might be fun to set out, to walk the length of Grand Canyon National Park from Lee's Ferry in the East to the Grand Wash cliffs in the West. A journey that the Colorado River, it takes the Colorado River about 277 miles to travel, but the catch on this particular journey is that there is no trail in Grand Canyon National Park that will take you along the length of the park. And that in order to cover that distance, you need to wind into and back out of so many tributary canyons, and you need to climb up and down vertically between so many different layers of rock that that 277 mile journey that the river takes gets stretched to something between 600 and 750 miles, depending on the route that you are traveling. So Pete came to me with this idea, and Pete and I have a history of kind of collaborating on magazine projects that have taken us to some rather exotic parts of the world over the years. And what all of these stories have in common is that they're incredibly bad ideas concocted by Pete, which get us into an enormous amount of trouble. And you know, despite the trouble that we got into in a whole variety of places, from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Caucasus Mountains over the years. And even Everest Base Camp, nothing compared to the amount of, the difficulties that we encountered, the suffering that we endured and the embarrassment that was inflicted on us by the Grand Canyon over the course of this journey. So this book is a chronicle of that experience, the good, the bad and the ugly, all wrapped between two different covers. Jo: Yeah, and you've collaborated obviously with Pete McBride on a host of past projects. Can you share a little bit more about your dynamic and how your relationship evolved over the course of this traverse through the canyon? Kevin: As I alluded to a moment ago, it's a pretty dysfunctional relationship. If any of your listeners out there, happen to have a friendship that forms a part of their lives, and at the center of that friendship is the knowledge harbored by at least one of those people that maybe the friendship itself is not very good for them. That that characterizes what Pete and I have shared over the last 20 years. We have, I think it's probably, it's fair to say that all of the trouble that we've gotten into over the years in the course of doing these magazine assignments and then later the Grand Canyon really boils down to a kind of a hubris and an arrogance that we both, well, particularly Pete suffers from, to a lesser extent myself, in thinking that we have more ability and prowess and physical strength than we actually have. And that we can do these things and that that we set out to do, and not encounter too much in the way of problems. And so that level of confidence and hubris. I think is part and parcel of and lies at the core of everything that we have done. I would say that Pete brings more of this to the table than I do. I'm a -- in some ways we're not – we look similar, but we have a lot of differences in terms of our personalities. I'm a writer, I'm accustomed to working alone, I kind of embrace solitude. I'm somewhat socially dysfunctional and rather shy, and Pete is the opposite of all of those qualities. You know, Pete works in the medium of light as a photographer, and that's kind of a metaphor for who he is as a person. He's incredibly social. He loves to sort of flit around like a butterfly, just meeting new people and encountering new things. He embraces challenges and people and experiences in a way that I do not because he's an extrovert. And so it's the interplay and the dynamic and the tension between those two personalities, that kind of drives much of the interaction between us as we embark on these adventures. Jo: And I can fully appreciate the humbling aspects of the canyon that you touch on. I think everyone who has hiked and ventured into the canyon experiences that in some way, shape, or form. Can you tell me about what that process was like for you and how you came to that humbling sense? What point in your journey, or if it was a continuous progression throughout the traverse for you? Kevin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it probably starts with mentioning something briefly that we can go into in greater detail if you want later on in this conversation, but you know, I started this hike thinking that I knew more than I actually did about the canyon and the reason for that is that I many years ago wrote a book about the canyon. A book called “The Emerald Mile,” which chronicled a very different story. It was the story of three river guides who in the in the spring of 1983, put a little wooden Dory into the Colorado River at Lee's ferry with the intention of using a historic flood, an epic spring runoff to propel themselves through the canyon, to catapult themselves through the canyon so fast that they would hopefully break the standing speed record for the fastest boat ever to traverse the length of Grand Canyon. And the name of that boat was the Emerald Mile and the name of the book was taken from that boat. That book was researched over the course of a decade in which I kind of apprenticed myself as a river guide at the bottom of the canyon on the Colorado River, in order to kind of learn about the culture of river guiding, in order to absorb everything I could about that environment. For people who come to the canyon for the first time, what they typically do is they move to the rim of the canyon and they spend minutes, or hours, or sometimes days staring down into this abyss. Very few people actually venture down to the bottom of it. And so I wanted to tell the story of those people and I spent years learning about them and learning about the environment itself, the rock, the light, the hydrodynamics of the river itself. And I came out of that having written this like 416 page book, or whatever it was, convinced that I was kind of like an expert on Grand Canyon, you know? And I had sort of covered all the things that needed to be covered. I kind of thought of myself as a bit of a bad***. To be totally and bluntly honest about it all. And so when I agreed to do this hike with Pete, I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal. I had done, you know, couple dozen river trips. I'd been through the canyon. I was familiar, I thought I was familiar with the basic frame and structure of the chasm itself. And I didn't think that it had all that much to teach me that was going to be new. And so that's really the sort of baseline fact that governed the start of this story. And to answer your question like I think within the first 48 hours, I was brought up face to face with the depth and density, and scope of my own ignorance. One of the things that Grand Canyon does to any, to all of us who are who are familiar with it, connected to it, and spent time in it, is it -- the place itself does what time has done to the rock. It abrades and strips away everything down to bedrock, and it leaves the canyon with this, it's a revelation of what lies at the base of, underneath all of the dirt and foliage and the tapestry of life that that covers you know the landscape in most other places. Well transfer that to a person. The canyon can be incredibly harsh and cruel and it's a very difficult place to move through and it will strip away all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are, and what you think you have. And how much you think you know and it will leave you staring at what's left, which in my case was not a lot because I had so much to learn, not so much about the world
United States
