-412.The Man Who Walked Through Time

The Man Who Walked Through Time
-Colin Fletcher

In 1963 Colin Fletcher realized a year long dream of hiking the Grand Canyon. He brings the reader along from conceptualizing the idea through completion of his hiking the canyon below the rim. While popular to boat the Colorado, hiking the river's length within the Grand Canyon National Park had not been previously accomplished afoot in one trip.

After arriving in the mid-morning at the lip of the Rim on a quick detour to see the canyon he wrote that: "some time during the afternoon, as I sat on the brink of this strange new world, it came to me that if a route existed I would walk from one end of the Canyon to the other. Once the idea had crystallized, no hideously sensible doubts reared up to plague me. And I did not need such fragile props as "reasons." The only question I asked myself was whether the project would turn out to be physically possible. Perhaps it is in this kind of simple certainty that most of the world's rediculous and wonderful dreams are born."

It should be noted, as Colin did himself in a footnote following this excerpt from the book, that he is a self-described compulsive walker. "Any free weekend I am liable to pick up a road map, choose a large, blank area that intrigues me" and hike it with a backpack just to find out what there is to find out.

While reading of Colin's journey, I discovered many similarities in the plain elegance of both our having decided to hike a stretch of land. While my journey is a guided tour compared to his, I feel a connection in how we came to the point of wanting to hike. For whatever reason, I started and will read next Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I couldn't get my hands on Bryson's A Walk in the Woods just yet, and wanted to read a book by the same author if I couldn't get the book I wanted.