Kevin Fedarko went to the bottom of the Grand Canyon hoping to become a river guide. It did not go particularly well.
Fedarko, who left a career in magazine journalism in New York to come west, fell in love with the canyon and the Colorado River during a previous river trip. He became so enamored with the place that he spent portions of six summers working for free for a river company, determined to learn how to guide boats through some of the most formidable whitewater in the country. As it turned out, that was easier to imagine than to accomplish.
“I was such an incredibly bad oarsman, and I was so bad at both rowing and reading whitewater that I failed completely at my dream and my goal of becoming a guide,” Fedarko said.
Instead of moving up the river-running hierarchy, Fedarko remained on the baggage boats. At one point, he said, he was permanently relegated to what was known as the “poop boat” — the boat carrying the toilet system down the Colorado.
But failure has a funny way of changing the narrative. At night, Fedarko sat around campfires listening to experienced river guides tell stories about the canyon. One of those stories involved three men who, during the historic Colorado River runoff of 1983, climbed aboard a wooden dory and attempted to set a speed record through the Grand Canyon while another drama was unfolding upstream at Glen Canyon Dam.
Fedarko had gone into the canyon hoping to become a river guide. Instead, he came out with the story that eventually became The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon.
“I was being handed something of possibly as great of a value, if not greater value,” he said. “Which was a pretty amazing story.”
More than two decades later, the Grand Canyon continues to shape Fedarko's life and work. And on Sunday, Sept. 13, it will bring him to the Glenwood Community Library for an author event in a small southwestern New Mexico community to which Fedarko admits he otherwise has little connection. That visit has a story of its own.
Fedarko grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, far removed from the landscape that would eventually dominate his writing. He had little exposure to nature or outdoor adventure growing up and knew nothing about whitewater, rowing or paddling. He didn't make his way west until his mid-30s, after receiving a job offer from Outside magazine in Santa Fe.
Fedarko was working for Time in New York when the opportunity arose. He quit his job and bought his first vehicle.
“I drove west and kind of restarted my life,” he said.
What he found was a landscape almost completely foreign to the one in which he had grown up. Fedarko's childhood home was in a region shaped by coal mining and steel production. He remembers a landscape where the effects of industry were everywhere — in the air, water and soil. Then he encountered the Grand Canyon.
“The canyon represented a kind of antithesis of all of that,” Fedarko said. “I didn't know what it meant to visit a national park. I didn't know what it meant to stand on the edge of a cliff and allow your eye to travel as far as you possibly can” without the landscape being interrupted by a smokestack, blast furnace or coal train.
The fascination led him first to the Colorado River and his unsuccessful attempt to become a guide, then eventually to The Emerald Mile. His second book placed Fedarko himself inside the story.
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon recounts a yearlong journey Fedarko undertook in 2015 and 2016 with his close friend, National Geographic photographer and filmmaker Peter McBride. The pair attempted to hike the Grand Canyon from end to end, a grueling journey of roughly 750 miles.
The two books approach the canyon from different directions. The Emerald Mile is a third-person narrative history of the 1983 speed run. A Walk in the Park is Fedarko's first-person account of his own journey through the landscape that had captivated him years earlier.
Both became New York Times bestsellers and received National Outdoor Book Awards. Fedarko has also received the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Reading the West Book Award. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times and Esquire, among other publications.
That success recently sent Fedarko on a five-week paperback tour for A Walk in the Park that included 17 cities and nearly 4,000 miles of driving, stretching from Texas to the Pacific Northwest and Montana.
Glenwood wasn't one of those stops. In fact, his Sept. 13 appearance isn't really part of a book tour at all.
Fedarko's connection to Glenwood began at an appearance in the Albuquerque area in 2024 or early 2025. Among those in attendance were Glenwood Community Library Director Lynn Neidermayer and her sister.
Fedarko remembers the two women as “incredibly kind and gracious.” They also weren't going to let an opportunity pass.
“They extracted a promise from me that if I could figure out how to do it, I would pay a visit to their library,” Fedarko said.
The opportunity finally arrived. Fedarko, who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, will be traveling through New Mexico for speaking engagements in Hobbs and Santa Fe in September. He decided to add Glenwood to the trip.
“This is me just trying to keep my word,” he said.
It's a promise that carries particular meaning for the Glenwood library. According to the library, Fedarko's books are among its most frequently circulated titles and he has become a favorite author among local readers.
At the Sept. 13 event, Fedarko expects to talk about both books, his experiences in the canyon and the landscape that has held his attention for much of his adult life.
“For most of the stops on the tour that I just completed, it's a conversation with a local writer or conservationist or somebody who is kind of a voice for nature,” Fedarko said about his typical tour stop. “The folks at Glenwood, I tried to convince them to do that, but they said, ‘No, we just want to hear you talk,’ so unfortunately, I'm burdened with coming up with a solo lecture and everybody who attends is going to be burdened with having to listen to me. I'll be talking about my obsession with the canyon and the power of that particular landscape.”
He may not yet be finished with the canyon. Fedarko said he is considering a third Grand Canyon book, one that would focus on the North Rim and wildfire. The North Rim, one of the park's most isolated and remote areas, was devastated by the Dragon Bravo Fire in 2025.
If he is able to pursue the project, Fedarko said the book could complete a trilogy about the canyon. It would also continue a relationship that began somewhat accidentally decades ago, when a magazine writer with little outdoor experience headed into the Grand Canyon with ambitions of becoming a river guide.
He never accomplished that, but all these years later, Fedarko is still energized by the stories he found there.
