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Snowflakes envelop Kevin Fedarko, his best friend Pete McBride and a stalwart trio of their companions as they inch across Grand Canyon’s Owl Eyes Bay, a remote and exposed set of hollowed out orbs that give the escarpment its name. One misstep on the snow-sheathed soil or icy, tilted slabs of rock and they will plunge 400 feet into the abyss. They have three hours of daylight left to cross the formation. They are also out of food.

It would not be too much of a spoiler to reveal that Fedarko and McBride survived Owl Eyes Bay, despite a few heartstopping wobbles. In fact, they survived the entire length of the Grand Canyon, an approximately 800-mile trek retold in a National Geographic documentary, three photo books by McBride and most recently, in Fedarko’s “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.�

In order to grasp the undertaking “A Walk in the Park'' catalogs, however, one must first, like its bestselling author, like the billions of years of geologic time that formed the canyon, like all good stories, start at the beginning. Not with a Big Bang but with a phone call. In this case, between McBride and an editor for National Geographic Magazine who wanted to know if he might be interested in hiking the whole Grand Canyon and then documenting it in time for the park’s centennial.

McBride said yes and called up his friend Kevin.

As an outdoor adventure writer and photographer respectively, Fedarko and McBride are no strangers to this type-three-fun variety of journalism. Past assignments have seen them documenting drug deals in Djibouti and following sherpas to the most dangerous face of Mount Everest where they watched in frozen horror as an avalanche careened toward them.

Yet, what emerges in the course of their journey, alongside blisters, twisted ankles, feet rubbed raw as uncooked hamburger, cactus wounds and McBride’s near-fatal encounter with hyponatremia, is that when it comes to the Grand Canyon, there are some places that will remain unknowable, much less confinable within a magazine article or a national park.

“A Walk in the Park� is a story of profound and harsh unlearning, followed by re-learning, plus a chasm’s-worth of challenges and danger unlike any Fedarko and McBride had ever experienced before.

From the prologue onward, Fedarko lays bare the naivitäe with which he and McBride left home. The bewilderment, the horror, of their expert backcountry companions is palpable as the two arrive at the trailhead with their brand new gear still in boxes. Several cameras stuffed into their unorganized packs well-exceed five pounds each.

Then, utterly defeated, literally broken and forced to hike out not 30 miles into their journey, they return to the drawing board and decide to divide the hike into four parts spanning one year. At each juncture they receive help in the form of food caches, experienced guides-turned-friends, as well as their own growing prowess in the backcountry.

Even when they think they have it all figured out and are oh-so very close to their final destination, Grand Wash Cliffs, the friends find themselves “spanked� (as Fedarko put it) yet again. This time, the culprits are a familiar dearth of water, maybe hundreds of cactus spines embedded in Fedarko’s skin and a vertical ascent beleaguered by multiple extra pounds of a fresh food cache.

Not once does Fedarko shy away from a healthy dose of self-critical humor, however, calling himself and his partner everything from “incompetent ding-dongs� to people deserving of “mockery and disdain.� Though these are sentiments McBride does not entirely share, in the eyes of its author the book cannot exist without them.

“I keep bringing that stuff up because it is incredibly important. Having my arrogance and hubris revealed and stripped away is a powerful metaphor because that is what the forces of nature have done to the canyon itself and that is what the canyon has done to humans. It has the ability and power to scour you down to bedrock,� Fedarko said. “I refuse to shy away from that and pretend or lie about my incompetency, my shortcomings, my arrogance because the biggest lesson the canyon has to teach is humility. It catalyzes a realignment of your perspective: you are not at the center of things. None of us are.�

From accounts of rare albino millipedes to those of birds boasting wingspans greater than 10-feet, the breadth and detail of Fedarko’s canyon knowledge fills up hundreds of pages. A personal obsession paired with years of research bolster his wellspring of information, resulting in a bibliography so long Scribner had to publish it separately online. But all this exists alongside knowledge gathered and shared by the Native people who form the backbone of “A Walk in the Park� and the canyon as a whole.

“The limited success the book appears to be enjoying at the moment is particularly gratifying to me because on the surface it is the story of two clowns making their way through Grand Canyon and having an adventure…or misadventure,� Fedarko said. “But the heart and soul of this book is the 11 Native American tribes whose ancestral lands abut or lie inside of what is now Grand Canyon National Park, who form an integral and essential part of the past and present and the future and who are very much still here.�

For each mention of rock and water, which Fedarko paints in hues of cantaloupe and toasted bourbon, eggplant and coffee, olive for the color of the river; for every ecological and geological variation, he includes descriptions of objects which mark the lives of, and bear witness to, human beings who date as far back as 25,000 years.

He does not omit the forced removal of Billy Burro from Indian Garden. Burro was the very last Havasupai tribal member still living in the luscious and water-rife area between the south rim and the Colorado River. Nor does he leave out how ranchers, empowered by the U.S. Army, fenced off all of the Hualapai’s water sources and killed the wild game before confining their ever-dwindling population to a comparatively miniature fraction of the land that was once all theirs.

Instead, Fedarko dwells in these realities. In doing so, he prompts his readers to really listen to people like Renae Yellowhorse, a Navajo woman who fought against the construction of a tramway leading to the sacred confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers or Diana Uqualla, who wails when speaking about all the Havasupai have endured.

He also does not omit apparent contradictions, like a section of western Grand Canyon known among many river guides as Helicopter Alley or the famous glass-bottomed Grand Canyon West Skywalk. Both major tourist attractions exist on a mere sliver of what is left of the Hualapai’s ancestral lands. More than 500 whirring machines crowd the airspace on any given day, from sunrise to sunset. Together, Fedarko writes, the Skywalk and the helicopter tours bring in about $110 million in revenue, which goes directly to the tribe for things like emergency medical services and scholarships.

Here, or maybe just somewhere between Lee’s Ferry and the Grand Wash Cliffs, Fedarko closes some kind of circle that seemingly started during childhood when he played atop abandoned strip mines near his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Where, he writes, “the connective tissue that binds people to the land has been severed.� Helicopters whirring overhead force a confrontation that pulls from him a series of questions, ones that become more urgent with every step he takes into this desert world of wonder. That is, how can we have conversations that bring about the protection of sacred and beautiful places without excluding those who stewarded the land long before its desecration? Or something along those lines.

Those picking up his book in search of answers will likely be disappointed, Fedarko said.

Several years after, and many degrees warmer than that stormy day atop Owl Eyes Bay, Fedarko published “A Walk in the Park.� His sense of awe toward the mighty crevasse, he said, is as strong as it was when he saw it on the cover of thru-hiker Colin Fletcher’s opus at the tender age of 11 and just as breathtaking as the first time he peered over the rim himself, years later.

“A Walk in the Park� is available for purchase on the shelves of your local bookstore or online.