“Each morning we would stuff ourselves with oatmeal, then set out on a 12- to 14-mile slog that usually involved hauling our packs up as much as a thousand vertical feet, descending impossibly steep slopes, or pushing through thickets of thornbushes,” he wrote in the article.

After the first leg of the journey, Fedarko said he was seriously thinking about how to outsource the assignment to a bunch of college students.

He said the only way the duo made it through most of the canyon (he has two final segments to complete this fall) was thanks to a group of Flagstaff-based Grand Canyon hikers, backpackers and river runners who took McBride and Fedarko under their wing, teaching them what to pack, planning their routes and accompanying them into and out of the canyon.

Despite the hardships, the author said traveling by foot through the canyon’s wildest reaches was the best way he knew to reflect on what would be lost to the creep of development. One of the most compelling is the silence of the canyon, he said.

“The silence was so deep and so dense that it feels like a medium you feel like you're moving through,” Fedarko said last week. “It was walking on foot amid that silence that I fully came to appreciate how abruptly it’s shattered when something like a helicopter flies overhead.”