Bug bites, blisters and BO: How two men walked all 750 miles of the Grand Canyon

nypost.com:

live rodent — had burrowed beneath Pete’s skin,” writes Fedarko.But it wasn’t a rat, it was a series of intense muscle spasms caused by a heat-related imbalance of sodium in McBride’s bloodstream — a common reason hikers in the canyon are hospitalized.“The only thing surpassing my bafflement was a sense of relief that whatever kind of rabidly deranged parasite this might be, it had seen fit to drill its way into Pete instead of me,” adds the author.Kevin Fedarko had been fascinated by the Grand Canyon from the age of 12 when his father gave him a copy of “The Man Who Walked Through Time,” a book by Welshman Colin Paterson chronicling his journey through the iconic landscape in 1963 as he became the first person to walk the entire length of the canyon.In the autumn of 2015, writer Fedarko was talking to his friend, Pete McBride, when the photographer suggested they walk the same 750-miles in a year-long adventure, a trip that fewer than two dozen people had completed since Paterson.It would be, as McBride suggested, “a walk in the park.”It was anything but.Indeed, as Fedarko writes, it turned out to be “a misguided odyssey through the heart of perhaps the harshest and least forgiving, but also the most breathtakingly gorgeous, landscape feature on earth.”From the outset, It seemed as though their journey was destined to end in failure and, possibly, death – and this despite invaluable advice along the way from Native American tribes, as well as from wilderness experts and local guides.From running battles with cacti, sleeping on anthills and setting fire to their shoes as they tried to thaw them out, “A Walk In A Park” lays bare the scale of their challenge and the physical demands placed on the bodies of “two of the most.