Bestselling American West writer Kevin Fedarko captivates community at Winter Words

Up close, Kevin Fedarko looks like the most generic outdoorsy white guy imaginable. His close-cropped haircut, well-worn Patagonia puffy jacket and shy smile help him blend into the crowds who come to hear him speak. When he does, and isn’t in the midst of impassioned appeals for outdoor stewardship, one gets the impression he likes that plausible anonymity. 

On the one hand, Fedarko is an exceptional outdoor writer. His two books about the Grand Canyon, “The Emerald Mile” and “A Walk in the Park,” have each worked their way up New York Times and other bestseller lists. The first won the National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA) and the Reading the West Book Award. The second, published in May 2024, just last month won the  Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, awarded by the American Libraries Association. 

On the other, Fedarko is humble and self-deprecating, deflecting questions about his own accomplishments and visibly squirming on stage when asked about writing about himself. To hear him tell it, he’s just a guy trying to tell passable stories about a place he loves, rather than a wordsmith who can craft golden sentences while dehydrated, hangry, and dog-tired in the deep wilds of the Grand Canyon. It takes his friends, like local photographer and his partner in suffering on the Canyon excursion, Pete McBride, to paint the latter picture. 

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Fedarko is a longtime friend of the Roaring Fork Valley. He was one of the 2018 Aspen Words Writers in Residence, toward the beginning of his work on “A Walk in the Park.” He spent much of that July 2018 residency with local creatives Daniel Shaw and Isa Catto and their family. 

This past Wednesday, Shaw, himself a journalist, filmmaker, and musician, served as Fedarko’s interviewer at The Arts Campus at Willits. This was the second of three events in this year’s Winter Words series. It sold out weeks ago. On the night, Aspen Words and event staff squeezed extra chairs into the packed venue to accommodate waitlist attendees. Some 230 people from throughout the Roaring Fork Valley attended the event in person, with more viewers watching the livestream. 

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After official introductions by Aspen Words associate director Caroline Tory and executive director Adrienne Brodeur, Fedarko and Shaw settled into the interview chairs. Shaw immediately ribbed his friends, telling the audience that he and Fedarko hadn’t yet determined how much time they should spend teasing Pete McBride. The theater responded with comfortable laughter, including McBride, who had sequestered himself in a far back corner of the room. Shaw requested that Fedarko open by reading from “A Walk in the Park.” The author read a section specifically thanking the Aspen Institute and Roaring Fork Valley community for early support for the project. He elaborated on how essential he considers it to practice clear, explicit, public gratitude to the people who help foster the environment for writing books. The audience responded with applause. 

Shaw then dug into the real questions. “Which was harder: the hike or writing the book?”

“At the time, I didn’t think anything could possibly be harder … the two are comparable, but I find writing incredibly arduous,” Fedarko admitted, before joking, “If we have any young people in the audience looking for inspiration, I recommend you leave as soon as possible.” 

“How do you feel writing about yourself?” Shaw asked next, smiling wryly. 

Fedarko grimaced, saying, “Yeah, I felt absolutely terrible about it.” 

He described intense discomfort with writing about himself and using first person singular “I” rather than spotlighting other people. He joked about trying to avoid doing so in “A Walk in the Park,” and discovering it to be impossible. 

Shaw compared Fedarko’s two books again. 

“How do you think your writing evolved from “The Emerald Mile”?”

“I’ve never been asked that question.” 

Fedarko described stumbling backward into journalism, that he never did a Master of Fine Arts degree and had no plan to become a writer. 

“I felt like I had to prove myself,” he said, when writing “The Emerald Mile.” “My writing can be extremely baroque, it’s kind of complex, it’s the opposite of Ernest Hemingway.” 

“A Walk in the Park,” despite its many years in the making, was different. 

“With this book, I didn’t feel as much to prove,” he said. “I felt the job was communicating the magic of the place, and do so by reducing the complexity of the language.” 

Fedarko spoke with deep affection about the Grand Canyon and its complex beauty before returning to his thoughts on writing. 

“Books are a reflection of who we are and where we are in our lives.” 

He feels his books reflect the respective perspectives of his 40s and 50s. 

Fedarko continued that he wanted readers to get a stronger impression of the Grand Canyon as a place than of him as the storyteller. 

“One of the highest duties of a writer is not to impress others with what they can do but to act as a windowpane,” he said.

The conversation turned toward the magnificent geography in Arizona, as Shaw asked his friend to speak about the canyon, the conception of the project, and some of the challenges facing the national park. Fedarko answered in parts, noting that the book grew out of a National Geographic story that Pete McBride had pitched and persuaded him into joining to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the National Park System. 

As he responded, there were seeming glimmers of Edward Abbey in the passion and pitch of the words. 

“The magic of the park is tucked in the places nobody goes,” Fedarko declared, stating that the millions of tourists who visit the canyon’s rim each year barely scratch the surface. 

He and McBride also wanted their excursion to be a portal to discuss the many threats to the nation’s public lands. The Grand Canyon faces myriad challenges, from heavy tourist traffic including hundreds of daily helicopter tours to extractive capitalism via uranium mining and water rights concerns. 

“On one level, this is incredibly unfair,” said Fedarko, because “if conservationists lose even one battle, we lose the whole thing.” 

By contrast, he said, capitalists have the resources to keep pursuing profit interests from the park indefinitely. He spoke to an implicit seventh generation ethos of ecosystem stewardship and love of place. 

“Although these lands are handed to us intact by those who came before us, they’re handed to us with a question: what will we do to protect them?”

Shaw reiterated Western US ethics and value for wild spaces and public lands. 

“How does that message resonate elsewhere?” he said.

Fedarko turned the question around, saying, “I think it speaks to the yearning we all have.” 

He shared about growing up in Pittsburgh, surrounded by industrialism in service of economic profit, and a childhood with a pervasive sense that something about his environment was “off.” People with the privilege to live in beautiful places like the Roaring Fork Valley must be careful not to take it for granted, Fedarko emphasized. 

He described the polluted environment of his childhood, the rotten egg smell when passing steel plants, how he learned to hike in tailings fields of strip mines, past blackened hills and ponds of vivid orange chemical-tainted water. He didn’t know anything else, he said, until his father gifted him a copy of Colin Fletcher’s “The Man Who Walked Through Time” when he was in elementary school. 

“The image on the cover of that book electrified me,” he said. That cover and the idea of the place enchanted him. He finds immense value in inspiring kids through writing about nature. 

Shaw turned the conversation to broader human perspective: “Did this journey change your understanding of our place in the world?”

“It’s hard to think about journeys outside of solo terms,” Fedarko said, because so many outdoor writers have described the individual internal journey. He came to the Grand Canyon endeavor with the preconception that the most important parts would occur in his head. But that didn’t happen. 

Fedarko shared how inadvertently underprepared he and McBride were at the outset of their adventure. They were on the brink of giving up after the overwhelming difficulty of their first attempt. Instead, “Pete and I got adopted by a passionate group of recreationalists as their project.” That group helped to train Fedarko and McBride and bring up their skills for the endeavor over several weeks. Rich Rudow and other canyoneers ended up guiding the duo for sections of the second journey through the canyon. “My takeaway,” Fedarko said, “is that some of the most valuable gifts the wilderness has to give us have less to do with the individual and more to do with the community.”

Shaw asked next about the worst parts of the journey through the canyon, and what Fedarko found most mentally challenging. “This would be a great setup for me to tell a super cool story,” Fedarko laughed, “but I’m not gonna do that.” He noted the human desire to hear about perseverance in adverse circumstances and the epic heroic notion of overcoming. But he did share a memorable tribulation. 

“The worst of them all was a winter storm in January on the Great Thumb Mesa.” Around a foot of snow “shellacked this vertical wilderness inside the canyon with snow and ice” almost down to the river. “What was terrifying was watching my best friend ahead of or behind me. The prospect of watching something happen to him was indescribable.” Moments like that were far scarier to Fedarko than the same danger to himself.

Yet he sees benefit to that terror, and similar risk throughout the national park system. “There’s no handrails out there, they are not amusement parks. They are places we are privileged to go into and embrace consequences. We need places like this, we need things like this in our lives.”

Shaw called Pete McBride onto the stage for the final fifteen minutes. “What do you say to people who come up and say they want to do this?” he asked the pair. 

McBride responded first. “I would tell people not to do it just because we did it. It’s not a place to conquer. The greatest thing it can offer is humility. Go have your own experience, your own journey.” He elaborated that he and Fedarko deliberately kept their route description and details vague, to prevent endurance athletes from trying to recreate their exact route competitively.

Fedarko nodded throughout McBride’s words before exclaiming “my answer to that question is DON’T.”

“Would you do it again or in the first place knowing what you know now?” Shaw nudged.

“Absolutely,” grinned McBride. He paused for the audience’s laughter, then shared an anecdote about him and Fedarko steadily whittling down their gear and simplifying along the adventure. Shaw, ever the filmmaker, wrapped his queries with a joke. “My last question is who would you guys want to play you in the movie?” McBride, Fedarko, and the audience all laughed in response. Both men deferred earnest answers and turned to a few audience questions.

“How do we save our parks?” he said.

Fedarko answered with demonstrable passion. “Take your kids. And take them over and over.” He painted a picture of people growing relative to a place, and the way so many of us measure time via pilgrimages to certain outdoor spaces. There is immense power in place, he said, and value in consistent visits to a specific area of wilderness for perspective versus check-off-the-list tours of as many national parks as possible. This reporting does not do justice to his elegant phraseology in his response. He concluded, “Go deep rather than going wide.”

Another audience member thanked Fedarko for his representation of Indigenous people in “A Walk in the Park” and asked about how he went about it. He deflected the compliment and expressed regret that he didn’t mention or write about Indigenous peoples in “The Emerald Mile.” The National Park Service creation exiled and forced out 12 native tribes from their ancestral homes in and adjacent to the Grand Canyon, he reminded the audience. Those tribes play an essential role today in determining protections for the park and what kinds of recreation are and are not permitted. Fedarko channeled preceding American West writers in his passionate vocalization about the need to do better moving forward. He also articulated frustration with simplistic noble savage portrayals of indigenous tribes. They are people, complex and imperfect, he said, and reminded the audience that different tribes disagree on the best ways to manage and steward the land, that some of the tribes have contributed to over-recreationalization.

The applause at the end of the event seemed as much for the love of wild spaces as for Fedarko himself. It is a testament to his work that his and McBride’s tribulations on their own walk through time resonate so deeply with this community of mountain people.

You can read a brief glimpse of the adventure through McBride’s eyes in National Geographic archives from August 2016, or delve into the full experience by reading “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.”