A ‘hairbrained’ adventure at the great gorge

The question came toward the end of the presentation. 

Acclaimed outdoor adventure writer Kevin Fedarko and his photographer/wisecrack partner Pete McBride — both collaborators on “the toughest hike in the world” — had just captivated their audience Tuesday night in UB’s latest Distinguished Speakers Series event, a must-see, mixed-media program of their “bold and harebrained vision” to walk the more than 700-mile, end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon.

The all-ages audience, many clearly weekend hikers, had absorbed the stories, beauty, danger, humor, pain, despair and euphoria from Fedarko and McBride’s 14-month, trail-less journey that nearly killed them. For about an hour, Fedarko and McBride gave the Center for the Arts audience a glimpse of something they could only imagine.

“Did you ever consider turning around so you didn’t have to finish?” asked Beth Del Genio, moderator and chief of staff to the president. “Did you not want to go back out there?”

“Are you asking if either of us considered not finishing?” replied Fedarko, whose “A Walk in the Park” bestselling book, along with McBride’s stunning precipice-seeking photographs, chronicled their journey.

“Are you asking this in terms of the number of times the question was raised each and every day? Because it was probably around a dozen.”

Their program was like a mind-expanding voyage with the thrills of a carnival ride and the life lessons of a spiritual service.

“Absolutely spectacular,” Del Genio commented at one point. “Absolutely incredible.”

For some, their visit inspired poetry.

When introducing the duo, Provost A. Scott Weber said their “immensely exciting, intense, painful, sketchy, risky, some would say insane but ultimately rewarding journey” demonstrated the value of having a partner to support the other, driving each to achieve more than they could alone.

The source of this latest uber-memorable DSS program were two ordinary-looking, even slight middle-aged men. They mixed best-bud jokes with tales of extreme physical hardship and uncertainly, obscenely more than each had anticipated. They walked the perimeter of what Fedarko’s book called the “great gorge itself, austere and unforgiving, yet suffused with magic, drenched in wonder and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty.”

Those listening and watching McBride’s work on an oversized screen had a good chance to feel a glimpse of the spiritual insight and elevating purpose of the pair’s “harebrained” adventure.

With cliffs taller than five Empire State Buildings as a stage, the two shared hidden dramas they discovered in the Grand Canyon’s embedded life, insights lost to those gazing down from manmade platforms.

On one hand were a New York Times bestseller, an extended lecture circuit, lives and professions exceeding the imaginations of those weekend dreamers of communing with nature. Their adventure left them with an unmistakable aura and enough heightened awareness to teach an undergraduate class on spirituality, ecology and civics — along with adventures they could spin for hours.

Then there were the demanding costs.  

“Seven hundred to 800 miles, 71 days of hiking, on average about 13-14 miles,” said McBride. “Eight pairs of shoes, collectively four sprained ankles, two broken fingers. My heart went into AFib. I had heart surgery. I can’t even begin to count the number of cactus needle infections. Lost two girlfriends.”

Don’t forget their once-in-a-lifetime ringside seat to when “the stillness began to return to the land and the land began to return to itself.”

The near stranger-than-fiction journey was not about “thumping our chests,” McBride said. It was “a way to talk about this place and the metrics of this amazing wonder that is your park. Our park.”

“There are 1,700 kinds of vascular plants inside the Grand Canyon,” McBride said. “Six-hundred-and-fifty wildflower species. Four-hundred-and-fifty different types of birds. In any other part of the world, these birds migrate. In the Grand Canyon, they just shift among layers between seasons. Forty-seven reptiles, 22 bats, and the list goes on and on.”

The slides and videos of the panoramic, savage beauty and the enduring indigenous culture often exceeded words. That’s where McBride’s photography and filmmaking came in.

Words worked much better when the two announced the three lessons they wanted those listening to take away. They were more like gifts, they said.

“The first gift is humility,” said Fedarko. “The second gift is the stillness and tranquility that follow in the wake of, and reside in, the heart of natural silence.

“The third has to do with the reaction,” he said. “It’s the response so many of us have when we move up to the edge of this abyss, and we gaze into it for the very first time. So any of us, upon gazing out against all of those acres and acres of bare, seeming lifeless rock, we say to ourselves the same thing: “‘My god, how empty it is.’

“And yet, the longer Pete and I spent inside of this place, the more we began to appreciate what he (McBride) spoke about a few moments ago,” Fedarko said. “The Grand Canyon is a living, biologic classroom. The biology is arranged in a ladder all the way to the top of the North Rim. In the coldest part of the canyon, you will find a suite of plants and animals comparable to what you will see in sub-Arctic Canada.

“What the Grand Canyon does that no other landscape does, is it takes all of that biodiversity stretched across 2,000 linear miles, flips it on a vertical axis and compresses it into a single vertical mile. That’s remarkable on its own. But consider … the richness inside of this place is not limited to the flora and fauna. Everywhere you step is also evidence people have been part of this landscape, this environment, for a very long time,” he said.

“One of the most inconvenient truths about these people, one of the stories we fail to tell ourselves about them, is that when we created this park in 1919, we evicted these people from their homes. We kicked them out of this place. And yet, despite that, they have remained.

“We came to ultimately celebrate that these people who have been disenfranchised from the land must be re-enfranchised into the conversation. They have things to say that we, as Americans, need to hear.

“That is the third gift. It is the gift of inclusion for voices that are indigenous to the land itself.”