Transcript: Episode 157: Cauldron of Light

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 157. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/157. 

[00:00:13] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast right up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Even though I can generously be called indoorsy, I have surprisingly read a lot of outdoor adventure books, especially the ones about hiking. I think it's because hiking is walking sort of, that it seems more accessible to me. Like when I finish any of the many books that I've read about hiking the Appalachian Trail, I always think I can definitely do it, or at least a portion of it. Which, my friends, could not be further from the truth. Fortunately, I have now read Kevin Fedarko's book, which the New York Times called a “triumph” and cured myself of this foolish notion. Kevin is a magazine writer and adventurer who completed the 750 plus mile through-hike of the Grand Canyon he chronicles in A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. The prologue of this book is so gross that had I not talked to Kevin beforehand and experienced his mesmerizing turns of phrase, I might have called reading the whole thing off. Instead, today, Kevin and I are going to talk about why he should never have embarked on this journey and why everyone needs to read about it. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.

Call button rings 

[00:02:07] Susan Barry: The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals and randoms off the street who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Mark, and here is what Mark has to say. When I overpack for a trip, I regret it, but when I under pack or pack light, I feel anxious. How do I hit the perfect amount? I know that you're not necessarily a packing for a trip expert, but I thought that your ultra light packing method that you had to learn for hiking might be able to shed some insight here for Mark. So Kevin, what do you think?

[00:02:55] Kevin Fedarko: I have two thoughts to share. One is that a cardinal rule among long distance extreme backpackers is that in making the distinction between what you're going to carry and we're going to leave behind, you focus on the difference between what you want and what you truly need. And when you focus on that distinction, you enable yourself to begin to make selections, in the case of long distance backpacking through extreme environments, based on survival. I realized that Mark's criteria may not necessarily be survival, but making a distinction between what Mark truly needs to get through the day on each day of his trip, and those items that might be extraneous and might make him feel better putting them into the suitcase, but not necessarily address his needs in the midst of the trip. That might not be a bad way to approach some of this.

The other thing is that I'll say that, um. We long distance backpackers do one other thing, um, after we've selected based on survival and removed everything that will not be contributing to an important part of that we allow ourselves one little luxury item. In my case, you know, it might be something like, a book or a snack that I particularly like. But if he allows himself just one luxury thing that can make it easier to leave the other unnecessary items behind. So that would be my thought and advice based on my very limited understanding of the kind of travel that Mark does.

[00:04:38] Susan Barry: I will tell you that reading the parts in your book about things like cutting the tags out of clothing or removing the caps from toothpaste and stuff like that to reduce weight was kind of transformative for me because it made me realize that there is so much nonsense in my, like I have suitcases that stay or travel stuff that stays packed all the time so that I can just go and I'm now going to take every single bit out. I probably won't weigh it down to the 10th of an ounce, but see what I can get out of there to make it a little bit lighter on myself. So even an absolute indoorsy, non-long distance hiker, packer can learn something for sure. Before we talk about a walk in the park, will you hit the highlights of your career as a writer and journalist?

[00:05:34] Kevin Fedarko: Um, I kind of got into journalism backwards. I studied Russian history and literature in graduate school and wound up getting a job as a fact checker at a news magazine, Time Magazine. And I spent about seven years in New York city, mostly on the foreign affairs desk, writing stories about political events all over the world. And eventually realized that that was something that that wasn't something that I wanted to be spending my life doing. And so at the age of, I think it was 35, I bought my first vehicle and packed up my life and headed west to take a job with a magazine called Outside, which at the time was based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And I kind of rebooted my life. Um, I restarted everything, working at a monthly magazine that was really all about covering the outdoors, the world of nature and outdoor recreation and publishing stories that I had read as a, as a young boy growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that had inspired me to want to become a writer. And I spent the next several years as an editor at Outside until I made the mistake of. Driving to Flagstaff, Arizona, and having an experience that we can talk about a little bit more if you want, uh, later on in this interview, but I, I encountered a type of boat that's used in the Grand Canyon. It was utterly and completely seduced and formulated the idea in my mind that I had to find a way of following those boats into this magnificent and Iconic landscape and see what it had to show me. And so that was the beginning of my connection to a place that has become an obsession for me for the better part of the last quarter century, a place that I've now written two books on, spent more weeks and months of my life inside of camping than I had ever imagined possible, particularly when I was working in New York city. And that has transformed my relationship with the outdoors and nature and changed me in some fundamental ways. I'm talking about the Grand Canyon. 

[00:07:50] Susan Barry: So let's go to the Grand Canyon. Your book describes what I think was ultimately an eight segment hike that you and your friend, photographer Pete McBride, made across the Grand Canyon. Across is a misuse of a preposition, but we'll get to that. What in the absolute world made you think that you should do this? Why did you think you should walk? I mean, it's, I guess it's 800 miles across, but that linear distance doesn't account for things like climbing up a wall of rock or going back and forth and back and forth because there's no trail. So it has to have been a lot more than 800 miles ultimately. Anyway, what were you thinking? 

[00:08:38] Kevin Fedarko: Well, I wasn't thinking or I was thinking in a way that was particularly flawed. But really the beginning of your, the answer to your question has to start with what I mentioned a moment ago, this fixation that I developed on a particular type of boat, a Grand Canyon Dory, and my decision to follow those boats into the Grand Canyon. I spent the better part of six river seasons chasing what was a failed dream. I wanted to become a Grand Canyon Dory guide. These are very beautiful, hard haul boats. They're basically row boats. They're painted in very bright colors. They have lovely lines and they're kind of like sports cars on the water. They're high performance. They do things that big rubber rafts can't do, but they require a very refined skillset to be able to handle the white water at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And I demonstrated very early on in my non-career as a whitewater guide that I was terrible at the two most important things: the twin arts of reading and rowing whitewater.

So, um, I spent six years down there pursuing this dream, never became a Dory guide, but was handed something almost as good, if not better. It was the opportunity to sit around the campfire at night, listen to the river guides tell stories about that place. I heard one story in particular about a legendary season, 1983, huge flood that descended on the Grand Canyon that year and a river guide by the name of Kenton Grua, who convinced two of his friends to put a boat into the river at the height of that flood and use it as a hydraulic slingshot to propel them and this little boat from one end to the other of Grand Canyon, 277 miles of river rowing night and day, they did it so fast that they set the standing speed record for the fastest boat in history ever to go through the Grand Canyon. I wrote a book about that. The name of the book is the name of the boat. It's called The Emerald Mile, and it's really in many ways. It's kind of like a 430 page love letter from me to the hidden world of whitewater and wooden boats at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

And when I finished that book in the summer of 2013, I figured that I was finished with the Grand Canyon. I poured everything that I knew into the pages of that book. I was prepared to do the thing that writers do, which is move on to the next project, whatever that might be. And I considered myself an expert on the place, and it was in that moment that a deeply troubling individual came back into my life. A friend of mine by the name of Peter McBride, a National Geographic photographer and filmmaker. And I don't know if any of your listeners have a relationship with someone, a friendship that really hinges on, one of those two people convincing the other to do things that neither of them should ever be doing. But that is the essence of my connection to Pete.

We've spent the better part of the past 20 years doing freelance magazine assignments all over the world. All those assignments have been characterized by poor preparation and inadequate homework on both of our parts, and they've all turned into absolute disasters. And the stories that we created out of those were really stories of us getting into these self made messes and then figuring out how to extricate ourselves from them. And when Pete came to me, he said, you know, I know that you know the world of whitewater at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, uh, but we're going to take a journey to the canyon that's very different. We're not going to go by boat. Instead, we're going to put 55 pound packs on our backs, and we're going to start walking. And we're going to walk from one end of Grand Canyon National Park to the other, despite the fact that there is no trail. That will take you from the eastern end of Grand Canyon at a place called Lee's Ferry, which is where all river trips start as well, through to the Grand Wash Cliffs, which is the western terminus of the canyon, just a few miles from the Nevada border.

And Pete knew that I was going to find it impossible to say no, because the character of the book that I had written about, Canton Grua, the year before, a couple of years before, he said the speed run through the Grand Canyon, he did something even more spectacular. He became the first person in modern recorded history to figure out how to walk from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other. How to bushwhack and land navigate through this incredibly complex matrix of cliffs and ledges that extends from either side of the Colorado River and soars more than a mile toward the sky. It's a place that really is kind of it's the most shattered and fragmented and broken piece of topography that we have on the face of the North American continent, which is why there is no trail. It presents an almost impossible set of challenges in terms of moving across that topography of finding water as you do so, making your way across incredibly thin ledges that often are six or eight inches wide with a 200 or 300 foot drop off to one side and doing that day after day and week after week and month after month.

It's something that very few people have done at the time they were. Less than half a dozen people who had done it continuously and about the same number who had done it in, what is what we call a sectional through hike, where you break up that great journey into sections. You come into the Canyon for two or three weeks, you hike a portion of it, you come out to rest and reprovision, you go back in at the place that you left and you string those together like beads on a necklace. So I said yes to Pete and what ensued from that was the biggest and awfulest debacle of all the disasters that we had ever encountered. 

[00:14:47] Susan Barry: As you were talking about the topography, I'm remembering the part, I think it's toward the beginning of the hike, where you are basically hopscotching from one loose rock to the next, like they're just continuing to move. Just the thought of that, the anxiety that I feel physically in my body right now, remembering it, I can only imagine what it was like to do that. How did you not cry?  

[00:15:21] Kevin Fedarko: Well, I probably did quite a few places, or at least on the inside, I was crying almost the entire time. You know, the, I mean, this, this experience was characterized almost from the get go by a level of suffering and pain that I had never really imagined. And there was a lot of hot scotching that happened. I mean, you mentioned, you know, moving across what we call fields of talus or scree. These are, these are fields of rocks that are the size of manhole covers and they shift when you step onto them. And so you have to hop from one to the next knowing that if you place a foot wrong, you will plunge your leg into a hole and then snap your femur or your lower leg like a breadstick. And you're doing this with a very heavy pack on your back and you're doing it not just for a couple of minutes, but for hours upon hour, um, all day long.

There's another kind of hopscotching that happens. Uh, when you're on those cliffs and ledges, often you're 1,500, 2,000 feet above the river itself. You can see the Colorado River, the greatest waterway in the American Southwest, but you cannot get to it. And you are dependent upon what we call potholes, very thin puddles of moisture that collect after storms. And they're so thin that you cannot tilt a water bottle, uh, into them to collect the water. You need to extract the water using a large plastic medical syringe and they're ephemeral. They evaporate after a day or two or sometimes three. And so you move from one to the next, knowing that if you've moved so far beyond the last that you can't get back to it without having found the next one, you will die within about 48 hours. So those are just two of the challenges that you kind of, you kind of find yourself confronting with confronting and wrestling with each and every day. 

[00:17:19] Susan Barry: It just makes my stomach hurt is really all there is to say about it. So the hike started, I think, as an article for National Geographic. When did you know that you would write a book about this? Did you know or was that something that came later? 

[00:17:37] Kevin Fedarko: You know, it came later. I think I couldn't tell you exactly when it occurred to me, but you're right this started as an assignment. National Geographic wanted to find a way of commemorating and writing about the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. The Park Service was planning to celebrate its centenary in 2016. And one of the projects that they decided to commission was, you know, they thought, well, let's have two journalists, let's have a writer and a photographer make their way on foot, um, across the most iconic park in the whole system. A park that doesn't necessarily stand at the top of everybody's list of distinctions, if you're using conventional metrics. Like, it's worth mentioning for a moment here, you know, think about Grand Canyon National Park, not the first park in America. That was Yellowstone. It's not the largest park in America. That's actually Wrangell St. Elias in Alaska. And it's definitely not the most visited because Great Smoky Mountains back east in Tennessee, which has a highway running through the middle of it draws more than twice as many visitors as the second most visited park in the system, which is Grand Canyon. But Grand Canyon National Park is the most iconic. It's the place that each and every American can instantly recognize if you show them a photograph or a drawing, because we've all been bombarded with images of this place.

And so the magazine thought, let's have two journalists move through it on foot and conduct an informal inventory of some of the secret treasures and wonders that are tucked inside of the landscape that are invisible from the top, which is where most people experience it. 6 million visitors a year or from the bottom where about 26,000 people float the river each and every year and in the process let's also have them explore some threats that loom over the landscape. Projects, industrial projects or tourism projects that threatened to impair the integrity of this park and by virtue of that could set precedent for other parks in the system. So it was a big project, and the idea was to convey something, to create a story that would convey something important about this place and all of our public lands in this country. But it was a magazine story. And I don't think, I don't think it occurred to me until, until deep into the project, many months into the project, that I began to realize that what we are experiencing, what we were undergoing, but also the terrain that we were traversing its complexities, its wonder, its beauties, its brutality, its austerity, its challenges, all of those things - putting them down and weaving them together in a story would require so much more real estate than you have in a magazine story. And I think it was there that the idea of a book was born. 

[00:20:39] Susan Barry: I wondered so much about that because as I was reading the book, I'm like, how did this, how did this run in a magazine? Like, how would you even compress it to a very long magazine story? I have to ask because, you know, I don't think we need to touch on every horrible thing that happened, but we have touched on several. And I do wanna make sure that people understand this book is really fun to read, really interesting and funny and engaging and beautiful and all of the things. So don't just think you're reading like a Stephen King novel, but do you think that an experience that is painful and difficult is more meaningful than one that unfolds easily?

[00:21:35] Kevin Fedarko: You know, that's a great question. And I think the answer in some ways is maybe? You know, I would hate to say anything that takes away from the, just the pleasure and the ecstasy of an experience of the sort that we've all had. You stumble into something. Maybe it's a trip, you know, somewhere in the world, and it just unfolds so much better than you had envisioned it to. And every moment is a discovery in some ways. And, and those are just really, really wonderful. This is not one of those. This is a place where this is, this is a story that really began with my expectations and my assumptions about a place that I thought I knew at a pretty deep level and consider myself an expert on and that place administered a set of lessons.

And the very first of those lessons was you don't know anything. And I'm going to communicate that back to you by putting you through a level of pain that you've not experienced before. And also demonstrating what a fool you are. And so, you know, the first part of our journey was really a series of what felt like unending failures, culminating in a decision Pete and I made to have to abandon the first of our eight expeditions and claw our way out of the canyon and come back to Flagstaff with our tails between our legs. Convinced that we were not going to be able to follow this project and be confronted with the challenge of whether the question of whether we wanted to regroup, learn some of the lessons we should have taken the time to learn before embarking on this, on this, on this mess. And then going back into this place that had, that had spanked us so badly and approaching it with a different mindset and a different skill set and seeing if we might be able to make better progress.

And what I'm saying in a long winded way is that when you have an experience that involves suffering and frustration and failure, you have an opportunity that does not exist with an experience that's just filled with and characterized by pleasure and is really a vacation. What you have in the in the latter in the other instance is an opportunity for discovery and growth and change. And there is an arc to your journey. There's a physical arc to every journey. But in the case of a journey that is characterized and punctuated by suffering and frustration, you have an arc, a kind of a, an abstract arc of learning and transformation. And these are the journeys that change us. They don't just simply at odd moments, make us feel good. They change us. And we are different when we emerge than the people that we were when we went in. And they placed their mark upon us, and they prepare us in some ways for other challenges involving other sets of frustrations and failures that lie ahead in the future. And so, for those reasons, I would say that the stories that are marked by frustration and suffering, they make the experiences, they make for better stories because we can all relate to the idea of of learning and growing. 

[00:25:00] Susan Barry: When I have spent extended time outdoors, which we I have admitted is not often that's like camping or you know, beach vacation something like that, returning to real life feels a little bit funny for the first couple of days, like something's off. Did you did you experience the same thing? And if so, what were the kind of like reverse culture shock moments that you had in between the legs of the hike or the sections of the hike? 

[00:25:33] Kevin Fedarko: You know, the hike changed me in a number of important ways, but one of them - and this is something that I kind of found myself taking out of the canyon with me and back to the, what we think of, what we call actually, canyon people call “the world beyond the rims.” And this is an experience that didn't start to really unfurl, or at least our awareness of it didn't begin to unfurl until we were deep into the hike, but at a certain point, and I couldn't tell you exactly when, uh, Pete and I both began to realize that, um, the, the terrain that we were covering was was characterized by just an incredible amount of stillness and silence. It's not completely silent out there. It's filled with natural sounds. The sound of the wind rustling through the trees, sound of bird calls in the morning, the trickle of water when you encounter ephemeral springs, or seeps in the, in the rock.

But, you know, I think when we, when we began to move beyond the point where we were just focused on our own pain and began to get more comfortable with the canyon, we took in and begin to began to drink this silence, a level of silence that is, has a kind of a crystalline clarity to it that sets up an incredible contrast between itself and the noise that, that we make in the world beyond the rims. And each time I came out of the canyon and returned to that world I was just struck by the cacophony that surrounds us each and every day. And I began to crave to miss and to crave and to value silence.

And you know when I wrote my first book about Grand Canyon, that book was a celebration of some of the qualities of the landscape that many of us point to when we think of a place like Grand Canyon. What do we talk about or what do we think about or what do we tell others when we think about Grand Canyon? We talk about the colors of the rock, we talk about the texture, the lines, the um, the profile of the landscape itself. These are all visual things. We're reaching into the toolbox of the eye when we are describing these qualities. Well, the longer that I spent inside of this place, the more deeply I connected with it, the more convinced I became that one of the greatest treasures the canyon has, one of the least appreciated treasures, and one of the most fragile of them all, is not visual, it's auditory. It's that deep, dense, crystalline silence that not only descends over the landscape, but with time, descends into you. And is capable in some ways of creating, if you'll permit me a kind of clumsy metaphor, opening up a, like a miniature Grand Canyon inside of you. Into which opportunities for reflection and meditation and contemplation and the tranquility that go with those activities are poured and you carry that space inside of you out of the canyon into the, into the other world when you leave. And that is one of the things that changed and transformed me over the course of this journey. 

[00:29:04] Susan Barry: Does that need to be replenished? Or is it permanent? 

[00:29:08] Kevin Fedarko: It's a little bit of both. One's awareness of it and ability to draw from it, like you would draw a bucket of water from a well, diminishes with time. And it does require going back, if not to the canyon itself to places that are capable of evoking and reminding one of that level of silence, the level of silence that you encounter inside of the canyon to replenish the well. But if you're careful, you can make it last for a really long time. 

[00:29:47] Susan Barry: It reminds me of this sense of confidence that I've been able, like deep unshakable confidence, not sort of this like, um, great. Do you know what I mean? Like this, like core feeling that comes from accomplishing things, as you did, that you would never believe you would be able to do. Like, I remember doing a ropes course one time. I have a fear of heights. I was scared to death, but I completed it. And I felt like nothing could challenge me ever, ever again until I needed to replenish that core feeling, if that makes sense. I wonder if it's similar. 

[00:30:31] Kevin Fedarko: I think it might be, although the example that you just cited, I think it's great because it also in some ways reminds me of another thing that I took away from the canyon, which is the opposite of that. I mean, one conclusion that you might imagine me to have drawn from this experience is what you just said, you know, going through something incredibly difficult I would now have enormous confidence in everything else that awaits me in the future and challenges. But my experience was fundamentally different. I went in with a level of hubris and arrogance that was inappropriate to the landscape. I was stripped down to the bones in terms of just, um, what the canyon did to me. And I think that one of the greatest insights and lessons that this journey imparted to me was delivering a sense of how, not just how incompetent I can be, but how tiny and small and irrelevant I am.

You know, when you're inside a world that's framed by mile high walls of rock whose bloodlines extend, you know, 1.7 billion years back into the past. That's the age of the deepest rock, the Vishnu shist at the bottom of the canyon. To give you an idea of how old that is, that's about a third the lifespan of planet earth and almost one tenth the age of the universe itself. And all of the layers of rock above that, none of those layers bear any evidence of human civilization in them. We are irrelevant, we as human beings and human civilization are completely irrelevant for most of the lifespan of this planet. And you cannot be inside that world and surrounded by that rock and all of the time distilled within the folds of that rock without coming to an awareness of how little we matter.

So the lesson I wasn't confidence, it was humility and the humility is something that like the appreciation for silence has stayed with me and shaped me. And made me more aware, not so much of my own accomplishments and ability, but of how little I matter. And in some ways, I welcome that change in perspective and that realignment of values. Because I was a pretty arrogant and hubristic person and in some ways I still am, but at least I have a chance to work on those flaws thanks to my experience in the Canyon. 

[00:33:12] Susan Barry: In some ways your book feels like an ode to the relationships between men, or at least your relationships with men - your friendship with Pete, your relationships with your father and your brother, and your sort of, I don't know if you would call it a professional partnership or mentorship with Rich Rudow, who was one of the people who made sure that you didn't die all along the way here and got you lots of help and backup and all that stuff. What would you think readers might take away from the book about friendship and these types of relationships? Was that an intentional piece of your writing or basically did I just make that up? 

[00:34:01] Kevin Fedarko: Well, it's a great question partly because I hadn't thought of it before. I mean, it hadn't occurred to me that, you know, most of the main characters, including Pete McBride and myself, yes, we are men. And the memory of my father is something that hangs over the the narrative arc of this book. And perhaps in some ways the story itself does offer a kind of a reflection of some qualities of male friendship. One of them perhaps being in the case of Pete and myself, you know, that our, our friendship is, tempestuous and, and cantankerous. And a lot of it involves arguing with one another, berating one another, because we're such fundamentally different people. I mean, you know, I'm a, I don't know, writer. I'm a, I'm an introvert. I'm socially dysfunctional. I'm most comfortable, you know, by myself working with words on a page. Pete’s a photographer, he loves moving through the world, meeting new people and, and, and widening his circle of, of, of human connectivity. He's a creature of light. I'm a creature of darkness or dark as well. And into my last name, like we're just made from different material. And so there's a lot of things that we just disagree on. Um, but there is this, partly it's time and partly it's, for lack of a better word, love.

We have a connection. We have a level of trust in one another. Um, we have a connection that runs incredibly deep and each of us knows that when things begin to go wrong, each of us has the other's back. I will share something with you that, you know, is not in the book. There were two points in this journey where Pete and I got into really nasty arguments. I can't even recall what we were arguing about, but in both cases, halfway through the argument, we both stopped talking and looked at one another with horror. Realizing that the words that were coming out of our mouths were had the potential to harm, perhaps irreparably, the most important friendship that each of us has in his life.

And with that, we stopped arguing. We hugged each other, which sounds like totally woo woo. But, you know, it's a reflection and an affirmation of the friendship that extends, you know, it extends down to the bedrock that connects the two of us. So that's the first thing and the second thing very briefly, but let me just say this because I think it's super important. Yeah. There's a lot of, uh, male friendship in this book and most of the main characters are men. But the most important encounters that we have over the course of this journey are with Native American, members of Native American tribes whose ancestral lands abut or lie directly inside of Grand Canyon National Park. People who are part of the past and the present and the future of this landscape. People have been written out of the history of this park. All of these people had incredibly important lessons to impart. Because they are wiser than us and all of those people were women.

And also the companions who accompanied us, uh, we had, we had a group of people - part of this book is a story of people who realized how incompetent we were and decided to help us move through the canyon. So, it became not the effort of two individuals, but rather a small community of people and the toughest of them all by far were women. And you can read about those women in the pages of this book as well. But I just want to acknowledge the importance that women play, the women played in the course of this journey and the role that they played in, in terms of the lessons and insights and wisdom that was imparted to us. And I feel it's important to acknowledge that. 

[00:38:23] Susan Barry: That's a really good segue to the next line of questioning. We probably don't want to get too far into the details of the fight that was taking place about the hotel and resort development because I want people to have something left to read. But since we've reached the fortune telling portion of this show, you have to predict the future and tell me what you think is going to happen. What is a prediction you have about hotel development around Grand Canyon and other national parks? 

[00:39:01] Kevin Fedarko: I'm sorry to have to tell you that my, I'm not optimistic about the future. You know, I kind of alluded to this earlier in our conversation, a part of our heritage and commonwealth as Americans, a part of it that we don't always acknowledge as much as we should, I think, or celebrate as much as, as much as we should is the fact that we have these magnificent landscapes that we set aside and we protected and we protected them with the intention of handing them off intact to future generations of Americans, to our children and our children's children. These places are, they occupy a space in the minds of many of us, even those of us who have never been to them. You know, if you evoke names like Yosemite, or the Grand Tetons, or the Everglades, or Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone, many of us like to think of these places out there as sacrosanct and inviolable.

They've been protected for all time of all the things that we have to worry about. We don't have to worry about them. And that's just not true. These are landscapes that were carved, carved out and set aside amidst great controversy. Each national park was created over the vehement objections of ranchers and loggers and miners and developers who were all convinced that they had a better way of using the land. And those, that mentality is still very much alive and well across the entire landscape of the United States. And each national park, including Grand Canyon, is beset by enormous challenges. And I think over time, the integrity of these parks tend to erode. And I think that there are developments that have been prevented from happening inside of Grand Canyon, but those victories have been won by a hair's breadth.

And in the future, I think developers will become more sophisticated, better funded, and they will succeed in pushing through more projects, more hotels. We will see tramways. Uh, we will see an increase of motorized recreation inside spaces in which those are not appropriate. Inside spaces that need to be set aside because when you fail to set them aside and protect them from these kind of forces, the thing that I was just talking about, the silence, the least appreciated, greatest and most fragile treasure of all, those are the things you wind up destroying. When you allow an inappropriate level of development and tourism to take place inside of a national park like Grand Canyon. And I don't think that the future, uh, has good things in store unless future generations of Americans do something that I don't see us doing, which is recommitting ourselves to sacrificing and fighting on behalf of these landscapes.

[00:42:08] Susan Barry: Kevin, what's next for you? 

[00:42:11] Kevin Fedarko: A really long vacation. A lot of people are asking me, what's your next book and what's your next project with Pete McBride? And honestly, um, this book took, you know, I, when we were hiking the Canyon, I didn't think there could be anything more difficult or painful than the hike itself, which took more than a year. And then it took seven years to write this book. And when you write a book of that length, you cannot do that without taking away precious time from the people you love most deeply. And there is not a Christmas or a kid's birthday or a holiday in the last seven years where I have not pulled myself away and sat myself down in a corner to meet yet another book deadline. And I, my next thing is to spend time with the people that matter to me most and have some of the experiences that I sacrificed, that they sacrificed in order for this book to come into the world. So that's what I'm looking forward to. 

[00:43:17] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Kevin goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.” 

[00:43:30] Susan Barry: Kevin, your book is full of stories that make even our most salacious and wild loading dock story sound like a fairy tale. So we're going to turn this on its head. And instead of asking you for a crazy story, I'd like to ask for maybe one of the most touching or powerful stories you can tell us.

[00:43:58] Kevin Fedarko: Okay, this is a touching, powerful thing, but it didn't happen just once. In fact, it happened each and every day. It's something that occurs inside of the Grand Canyon, just as the sun is about to disappear beyond the rimrock to the west. And just before it departs, it takes the upper strata of rock layers, the youngest rock layers, the highest rock layers in the canyon, and it paints those layers of rock a molten color of gold. And that gold is reflected off the surface of the rock down to the bottom of the canyon and onto the surface of the Colorado River, which coruscates with golden and peach colored light. That lasts for a minute or two, and then it disappears and gives way to something else. It gives way to a new palette of colors. The lavenders and the purples and the tensions that precede the arrival of twilight. And just behind twilight comes darkness, a level of darkness that people from cities like Boston or Houston or New York or Chicago probably cannot begin to imagine because Grand Canyon is one of the few places in the West where there's almost no light pollution and the level of darkness that looms over the canyon is more pure and more absolute than anything else.

Until the stars begin to come out and they start in ones and twos, but over the course of a half an hour, you get this torrent of stars pouring into the heavens, blinking on and off, pulsating with colors and intensities that differ, which means that the sky itself is not a flat two dimensional surface, but is imbued with dimensionality. It is a cauldron of light. And arcing through that ocean of stars is a river, the Milky Way. You can see the Milky Way galaxy, this smear of light from one horizon to the next, and in that moment, you realize that the space inside of Grand Canyon is defined not by one river, but by two. You have a river made of water flowing along the bottom. You can hear it 2,000 feet above and arcing over the sky at night is this river of starlight. And because the sky, the shape of it inside the canyon is defined by the rims of the canyon, that river of light above perfectly mirrors the shape of the river below. Every curve and camber, every bow knot and bend. And you are held in the palm of the canyon's hand between these two rivers. And in that moment, you are experiencing something that has no analog anywhere else. That happens each and every night inside of Grand Canyon. 

[00:47:17] Susan Barry: Kevin Fedarko, I'm very mad at you because I now feel like my life is meaningless, I want to spend the rest of the day crying, and I need to go to the Grand Canyon. Thank you so much for being here. I loved your book and I know our listeners well too, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor. 

[00:47:38] Kevin Fedarko: Thank you so much, Susan. It's been great talking to you. 

[00:47:41] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/157. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.  

[00:48:17] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.