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The journalist Kevin Fadarko admits it.

He had no business trying to hike the length of the Grand Canyon from east to west.

Even if you break it into sections, which was the idea, we're talking about a trek that amounts to 750 miles of zigzagging trails, thousand-foot walls, shaky ledges, not to mention intense heat and barely any water

above the river. The trip was Pete's idea. You'll meet him here in a bit, but Fadarko signed on,

even though it was, as he puts it, a conflation of willful ignorance and outrageous hubris.

But the Grand Canyon does something to you.

In his latest book, Fadarko says it did something to him and it did something to a man named

Colin Fletcher. Colin Fletcher was the middle-aged man in the 1960s who by the the time he stumbled onto the Green Canyon, had already lived more lives than many other people in an entire lifetime.

He'd been a young soldier who participated in the D-Day invasion in Normandy.

He'd been a farmer in Africa. He had worked a whole series of

jobs across North America. He was someone who would evolve into a figure who would be

considered the godfather of modern American backpacking. But in those days, all of that kind of fame still lay ahead. And he was in the

midst of a cross-country road trip with a friend from the East Coast to the West Coast. And he decided

when they reached Flagstaff that they were just going to veer north for a, you know, one and a half

hour drive to this giant

chasm in this big national park that lay just to the north.

And he found himself walking across a parking lot with a set of expectations based on the

fact that he'd seen the Grand Canyon countless times

and photographs and postcards, and he sort of thought he knew what was going to greet him at the edge of that abyss.

And like so many of us, he arrived at the edge, he found himself staring into this giant hole in the ground, absolutely transfixed.

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