What we're gonna do tonight,
Kevin and I are gonna take you on
an unusual and somewhat remarkable journey
through a remarkable place, the Grand Canyon.
But before we do that,
we felt it's important
to get a little bit of an idea of
how we know each other, and I think that might
reveal who we are a little bit.
- Yeah, and I should say that
this is probably the moment,
those of you who have come here tonight
expecting to get a window into
the sort of deep, symphonic emotional resonance
that sets up between
a professional photographer and a writer,
this is the moment where I disabuse you of that delusion,
because the pattern that
unfolds between Pete and I basically consists of,
it's extremely simple.
Pete comes up with
an apocalyptically bad idea.
(audience laughing)
And in the course of attempting to convince him
of what a bad idea this is
and why we should not do it,
he somehow, through a mysterious alchemy
that involves intellectual seduction
manages to drag me into the idea,
and I find myself in yet another part of the world
that I didn't want to be in in the first place.
(audience laughing)
- Alright, the first bad idea was
to convince Kevin to join me
in the Caucasus Mountains in the Republic of Georgia.
Now, I grew up in the mountains, I love skiing,
and this place is where the border patrol
that patrols the Chechnya border operates on skis,
and I was like, I want to follow these guys,
I want to understand this part of the world,
great idea.
- Would've been a great idea, two problems.
(audience laughing)
These guys were very--
(audience laughing)
Very heavily armed.
Second problem was that Pete
didn't check the weather report.
(audience laughing)
And the avalanches that resulted from
the massive series of snowstorms that descended
across the Black Sea and all of the Republic of Georgia
shut the entire country down.
And we spent the next week
holed up in what should've been a hotel,
except it was a bank...
Eating food like this.
(audience laughing)
Alright, so that wasn't,
maybe not such a good idea.
The next idea I had
less guns, higher chance of success,
was to go to the north of Canada, to the Yukon,
to one of the most remote areas up in the Arctic
to follow the Porcupine Caribou Herd.
And we had this thing dialed.
We're gonna take the Firth River north on rafts,
and we're gonna to time it,
not only to see the greatest migration
of the caribou herd move across there,
but we're gonna float with them as they travel.
- Yeah, and you'd think that two National Geographic
journalists would be able to locate
the Porcupine Caribou Herd.
(audience laughing)
The largest collection of charismatic megafauna
on the face of North America.
But no, after two weeks of searching
we did not manage to locate
a single live animal.
(audience laughing)
- Alright, alright, so.
Third strike, I figured,
this one's gonna be a home run.
How could this possibly go wrong,
I convinced Kevin that
there's this story on the south side of Mount Everest
that is totally unusual and it's unique,
and it's not about the circus
of trying to get to the top of the mountain,
it's about these guys
that live, let me get that clicker to work,
that live inside the Khumbu Icefall
and basically build the route
for everyone else to climb the mountain.
These are the unsung heroes.
And they do this remarkable job
of building and engineering
the route through this icefall
that goes from 18,000 feet to 22,000 feet.
This is their office,
and most people don't know even who they are.
- And here's the problem,
if your office looks like this,
things like this tend to happen in it.
A giant chunk of ice,
about the size of an aircraft carrier
may break off of a cornice,
plummet 600 feet onto the top of the glacier
and detonate, creating a giant cloud
of vaporized ice crystals
which hurdles towards you at about a hundred miles an hour.
Now, at this point,
I'm on the left side of this photograph
running for my life--
(audience laughing)
And this other guy with us
is doing the same thing,
it's a testament to Pete's commitment
to the art of photography
that he managed to stand there and keep shooting.
(audience laughing)
- The reality is I didn't know what else to do,
I thought that the avalanche was gonna basically
snuff us out, so I figured I'd give some evidence
of what happened to us.
At this point, however,
I basically realized that maybe that chasing
these magazine stories all over the world
is maybe not, maybe we need to change,
maybe I'm ready to go home.
And it had been a long journey
and as you might detect,
Kevin and I have a little bit of a different personality.
I have a tendency, in part, because of what I do
to look for the light in the world,
I'm a photographer, I make films,
I'm constantly looking for the bright side of things,
I'd say I'm more optimistic.
And Kevin, he sometimes thinks a little differently.
- Yeah, that would be an understatement.
(audience laughing)
Look, I'm a dark person.
The word itself is woven into my last name.
And part of what that means is that
I sort of specialize in
and my ethos as a human being
is rooted in the idea that
it's necessary and important
to take the worst possible interpretation
of pretty much every situation.
(audience laughing)
If the sun is shining,
it is raining somewhere.
(audience laughing)
Now it's a very sort of complex
psychological matrix that I don't fully understand.
The simplest way I can explain it to you
is to put it into,
well, let's just put it into terms of Winnie the Pooh.
Basically, Pete is Tigger,
and I'm Eeyore.
(audience laughing)
- So at this point,
Tigger and Eeyore basically had a small breakup.
I think we had a little fatigue of
going in these misadventures together.
We both returned home, I returned home to Colorado,
this is basically my backyard river,
and I decided to do something a little different,
I was getting a little tired of
chasing these short magazine stories,
I wanted to do something a little longer
and sink in my heels in a little bit more.
So I followed my, what I call my backyard river,
the Colorado River, I followed it
from the mountains in the source of Colorado,
basically 1,500 miles to try to understand,
where does the western water,
where does this lifeline that supports
40 million people in the Southwest,
where does it go when it travels through
this desert landscape,
and what happens at the end,
and does it reach the end.
And to my amazement,
the Colorado River doesn't.
It gets dried up in this place right here.
The Sea of Cortez a hundred miles shy of the sea.
We dried it up roughly two decades ago,
it ran to the sea for six million years,
and we turned it into
basically this desert wasteland.
And what I realized at this point
is that there are a lot of stories
around rivers and water,
that's the arteries of our planet, so to speak,
that are getting untold.
And so I became very committed, I think,
to try to document these stories on some level.
- And I may have had some notion of your commitment
had I not decided that I had
temporarily stopped speaking to Pete at this point,
and so I was completely unaware
that he was engaged in this very sort of
comprehensive project that was focused on,
as it turns out, the very same thing
that I was focused on, it's just
the only difference was that
I had my eye on one particular section
of the Colorado River.
I'm talking about the most storied
and legendary section of all,
the 277 miles that runs through the Grand Canyon
in Northern Arizona.
The section of river that is defined by exceptional
sections of gorgeous light
and beautiful, beautiful tranquility,
punctuated by moments of unholy chaos
that are known as rapids.
And it's inside of those rapids
that some of the real sort of savagery
unfolds inside the river
and the river really gives you an idea
of how powerful it truly is
and what it's capable of doing to you.
(man yelling)
(waves crashing)
- [Pete] That's you paddling, right?
- That was not me paddling,
but there's some truth to it because
I'd become obsessed,
I'd become obsessed with the world of the river,
and I'd become obsessed with the particular story
attached to a particular man.
This guy's name is Kenton Grua,
he's a legendary Grand Canyon river guide,
in 1983, as Peter Gwin mentioned a few minutes ago,
he set the speed record,
the standing speed record of the fastest boat in history
to race though the Grand Canyon,
but Kenton Grua had achieved something
six years earlier that was arguably
an even greater accomplishment.
It was an incredibly bold vision.
The idea was, what he wanted to do,
was he wanted to start at the eastern end
of the Grand Canyon and walk on foot
all the way through to the western terminus,
where the canyon goes through something called
the Grand Wash Cliffs and ends.
Now he was following in the footsteps
of the man that Peter just mentioned,
John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran,
who accomplished one of the most extraordinary acts
in the history of American exploration
in the summer of 1869 when he led
an expedition consisting of 10 men in four boats,
including himself, down through the Colorado River.
I want you to think for a moment
about the 108 years, that gap between 1869,
John Wesley Powell's pioneering river voyage,
1977, Kenton Grua's first traverse through the Grand Canyon.
And I want you to ask yourself
what that gap says
about the brokenness and brutality
and complexity of this landscape.
It suggests that it is a place that
does not invite and indeed,
ferociously resists human intrusion.
- So I came back to this broken landscape
three years ago.
I was invited by the national park
to do a talk about my project on
the river itself.
And I suddenly, I had this kind of epiphany,
I hiked down into the canyon, and I had this idea.
- Please don't be seduced by the rainbow.
(audience laughing)
Worst idea in the history of journalism.
- Alright, well that's Eeyore saying that,
but fortunately, National Geographic agreed
that this might be a good idea, actually.
And they agreed to sponsor us,
and eventually I was able to convince Kevin
to follow in the footsteps of Kenton Grua.
I'm gonna be honest.
I'm not sure I really like hiking that much.
With a heavy pack, no trail,
and no guarantee of water, it's hard,
stressful and very slow.
Sure, hiking can lead to some zen-like moments,
but not so much if you're lost,
really tired and dehydrated.
Yet there's something about the Grand Canyon
and its rocky, secret world.
It is alluring, magical even.
So in the fall of 2015,
my friend and author Kevin Fedarko and I
set out to walk the entirety of the Grand Canyon
from east to west.
In order to understand the insanity of this venture,
you first have to know a little bit about this place.
In stretches, it is 18 miles wide
and over a mile deep,
so deep, in fact,
you could stack five Empire State Buildings,
one on top of the other inside.
It is 277 miles long,
if you're floating the Colorado River.
But on foot, by the time you've gone up
and back down the numerous side canyons,
it's more like 700 miles.
Oh yeah, and for more most of it,
there's no trail.
How far are we going?
- I don't think we've gone five miles yet.
- This is really hard hiking, it kinda
demoralizes you a little bit.
- As a result, more people have stood
on the surface of the moon
than have completed a continuous thru-hike
of the Grand Canyon.
Unlike those intrepid few,
Kevin and I decided to do a sectional version,
chipping off a hundred to 150-mile chunks at a time.
Just 30 hikers have completed sectional lines
through the park.
And for some, it took them decades to finish.
Tragically, others have perished attempting it.
Kevin and I would be the first journalists
ever to tackle this hiking lunacy.
We plan to complete our mission over a year,
watching the seasons change
and teaming up with hardened canyon veterans
to help us find our way and our legs.
But beyond that challenge,
something else drew us on this quest.
Many claim the Grand Canyon is facing
an unprecedented array of pressures
from all four points on the compass.
Development projects are poised to change
the integrity of perhaps the most
monumental landscape in America.
And we believe walking the park
might give us a unique perspective
on this secret world
and what's at stake to be lost
between the river and the rim.
So like I said,
I think I was quickly reminded
how I don't like hiking that much.
So the real purpose of this project
from the beginning, from the genesis of it,
was to actually shine a spotlight on
what's happening in the park
as it approaches its hundredth birthday.
And the reality of what's happening,
and we're gonna walk you through
some of these issues,
is that it is getting pressure from all four points
on the compass, from all sides,
east, west, north and south.
And we figured that this walk would,
basically we could walk through it,
the walk would be the backbone to talk about this.
We did know when we started that
alright, this was maybe
a place we knew the river better
than we knew the area between the river and the rim
and so we needed some help.
So this guy wearing the Star-Spangled Banner gaiters,
Rich Rudow is one of the gurus of the canyon,
he spent over 700 nights below the canyon.
When we started I asked him
what the hell were these Star-Spangled Banner thingies.
They're maybe the most important little
item you can have if you're a Grand Canyon hiker,
they're these gaiters that keep the ferocious,
angry cactus and everything else
that wants to get into your feet, ankles on,
of course, we didn't know what they were,
so we were a little clueless on some level,
but we basically latched onto these guys.
He agreed to let us follow them
on their 57-day thru-hike.
They were gonna start hiking in September of 2015
and not stop.
- This is basically what a special forces
Grand Canyon A-Team looks like.
(audience laughing)
The level of experience
that's captured in this photograph
extends back into decades.
These are men who spent
an enormous amount of time,
they've invested time and energy
learning this environment.
This is what it looks like through their eyes
when two yahoos from National Geographic show up.
(audience laughing)
Prepare to tie themselves
onto the back of their bumper
like a couple of tin cans,
which raises an interesting question,
why in the world would these guys
allow us to come along?
The answer's interesting,
and it says something about them.
Their commitment to the canyon
and their concern over what's happening
to this environment is so great that basically
they were aware of the fact
that we were capable of telling a story
that they thought was incredibly important,
and they were equally aware of the fact
that this environment is so difficult physically
that we would be incapable of moving through it
without their assistance.
And so we embarked on this journey with them
starting off through the first part of the canyon,
a section known as Marble Canyon.
- And since Kevin and I had,
we'd been down the river a few times,
we both rode the river
successfully, unsuccessfully,
I, however, had this
idyllic view that we would do
basically a raft trip in hiking boots.
We'd be walking and we'd enjoy the tangerine light
and maybe we'd have a little swim
after six hours of hiking,
Kevin might pen some poetry,
I might do some time-lapse photography.
Wrong.
We quickly started realizing, alright,
it was a little more complex,
we knew it was gonna be hard,
but when you start looking at the 22 layers
of rock inside the Grand Canyon
and the endless number of tributaries
that puncture this landscape
and that you have to walk around and leave,
you quickly start realizing like,
this is no raft trip on foot.
- Right, and that's just the first
of a whole series of problems
that start coming at you like a fire hose.
And all of them are rooted, really,
in one basic fact, which is that
there's no trail, right?
And so what that means among so many other things
is that every single step that you take
in this landscape
is a careful negotiation between you
and the terrain itself.
It's an act also that's complicated
and made infinitely more difficult
by the heat, by your level of energy
and by the fact that you are
carrying on your back 50 pounds
and so when you have to perform
a dynamic and energy-draining full body move
in order to maintain your balance,
you do that over and over again.
Minute after minute, hour after hour.
It's so destructive to the body
that by the end of the first day,
you basically end up looking like this.
(audience laughing)
Pete, where's Tigger at this point, huh?
(audience laughing)
- Yeah, I think day one, day two,
Tigger crawled into a dark cave with Eeyore.
Pretty much wanted to just
crawl under the cave permanently at this point.
This looks like a nice, idyllic scene,
I was expecting this,
sit around and tell stories
under the spray of stars at night.
Au contraire, this is September, late September,
an unusual heat wave rolled in.
I just don't do well with heat.
It's 110 degrees consistently throughout the day.
This is about 98 degrees, we're trying to sleep,
this is a furnace.
And this is a total nightmare.
By day three or day four,
I'm starting to feel really weird
and sick, I'm not thinking clearly.
Day four or five, I realized we are completely
in over our heads.
I'm not eating anymore,
Kevin's having a hard time with his ankles.
We're in a bad spot.
- We're in a bad spot,
and most of it really is related to the heat.
It's difficult to overstate just how difficult,
just how awful 105 degrees is.
But to give you an idea,
one of the things it did,
was so hot that the heat was literally
melting the bottoms of our shoes.
And so the story of the impact
that that process had
was written in our feet
for the first couple of days.
But there was another story unfolding
invisibly inside of our body
that was less evident.
By the third day,
I had descended into what seemed to me to be
a bottomless well of despair and death.
(audience laughing)
And as bad as that may sound
what was happening inside of Pete
was far more alarming, I think.
- So by day three I'm starting to have
this weird sensation, I'm not thinking clearly,
and I'm starting to get body cramps.
I got to a point where my tongue cramped and my hand,
I was like, this is weird.
Something ain't right, so I must be dehydrated,
I wasn't peeing all day.
So I started consuming a lot of water,
I'm drinking salts and serum, too,
but basically, I sweat a lot,
I sweated so much,
I sweated all of my natural sodium system out,
and I became hyponatremic,
this is the opposite of dehydration,
you deplete your salt levels so low in your body
that you start to vomit water,
you can go unconscious,
go into seizures and then a coma.
I was, at this point, feeling like I was
headed towards unconsciousness,
we realized we gotta evacuate.
So we hike out, we call in a friend.
This great guy JP
comes in, brings us in salty stuff,
I'm drinking soy sauce desperately,
and we're able to hike out
a hike that should've taken
three hours in normal temperatures,
under normal conditions,
it took us about seven hours,
we limp out and crawl back to Flagstaff,
where I get, really, the first glance
of Kevin's ankles and realize
that they're totally blown out and sprained.
And at this point,
we're basically staring down the barrel of failure.
And I'm embarrassed on one level,
these amazing thru-hikers have us let join them
and we've screwed their plan up,
they kept going, but we delayed them a little bit.
I've brought Kevin in on this mission
where he's miserably depressed at this point.
And then what am I gonna tell National Geographic,
my friend Sadie Quarrier, the editor
who's here somewhere,
what am I gonna tell her,
we're just total clowns
and how are we gonna pull this out because
not only was I messed up, I was sick,
but I was frankly scared to go back into this place.
It was daunting.
It had really, really beaten it out of me.
- Yeah and I felt the same way, no surprise.
(audience laughing)
Which brings me to kind of a difficult moment right now,
because as it turns out, we were on the threshold
of a turning point in this journey.
And it therefore forces me to say something positive,
because much to my surprise
and unbeknownst to Pete,
a miracle was about to occur.
And that miracle had to do with the fact that
Flagstaff is a very small community,
but it sits on the edge of the Grand Canyon,
and there's a very tiny but incredibly passionate
group of people who are deeply
committed to the Grand Canyon.
And because it's a small town,
word travels very, very quickly.
So word got out that these two
idiots from National Geographic--
(audience laughing)
Had basically tailspinned out of control,
retreated back to Flagstaff
with their tails between their legs
and were considering abandoning this very important story
about the Grand Canyon,
and so what these people did
was they decided that they were gonna rally.
They showed up my house,
whole group of them.
And over the next two to three weeks,
they redid our entire program.
They redialed our gear,
they re-engineered our food system,
and they basically embarked on
a process that resulted in
a Grand Canyon hiking makeover
that was designed to get us back into the canyon,
back in gear
and enable us to resume the mission
which was to get our butts continuing downstream.
- And that we did.
They brought us back in,
and one challenge for me is that
usually when you do these assignments
for National Geographic,
you're really afraid that if you go in
with one camera and that camera breaks,
you can't be like, well I didn't have a camera.
But it is so challenging that they convinced me
that I had to drop all my extra lenses,
all of my extra cameras,
all of my extra batteries,
I did the whole thing on one camera and one lens.
And then they brought us back into the canyon
and showed us ways to get through
following the sheep trails.
Don't be near the river, follow,
look for the hoof prints,
look for the little black pellets.
They brought us through ancient ruins,
they brought us through some recent impacts,
you can see some old markings
that people have carved their names a hundred years ago.
And they basically got us back on track
to our initial mission.
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