An estimated six million people visit the Grand Canyon annually. Most visitors look in from the South Rim or through the window of a helicopter, and roughly 26,000 float the Colorado River through all or part of the canyon. Very few in the recorded history of Grand Canyon exploration have walked its length (fewer than have walked on the moon, Kevin Fedarko tells photographer Pete McBride). Likely no one with the photographic skills of National Geographic photographer McBride have made this arduous journey, which covered 750 miles from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the canyon’s western end.

Fedarko, author of the Grand Canyon classic, The Emerald Mile, joined McBride for the entire journey, while others joined the pair for stretches of it. They could not do the trip in one continuous push after McBride, laden with camera equipment, suffered hyponatremia (low sodium levels in the blood) five days into the trip, so they reasonably broke it into segments, lightened their loads, and walked between September 2015 and November 2016, seventy-one days of negotiating incredibly rough terrain. McBride shot 30,000 photos and captured 60 hours of video that resulted in the documentary film Into the Canyon.

Nothing beats a visit to the Grand Canyon, but who has the time, stamina, and skill to explore its inner secrets and beauties like these guys did? McBride and Fedarko had to deal with heat (111 degrees), cold (-5 degrees), snow, rain, lack of water, polluted water, too little food (they could carry only 2,000 calories of food per day on stretches where they burned 5,000 calories), cactus spines, fatigue, and hundreds of miles of terrain with mostly wildlife trails to follow. This was an epic journey, and McBride captured it in the 170 incredible photos presented in this book.

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The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim is not so much about the journey and adventure as it is about the place, one of the wonders of our natural world. In five brief essays scattered through the book, McBride expresses his constant awareness of how they are traveling not only through space but through time, from the billion-year-old Vishnu Schist at river level deep in the canyon, to the merely 300-million-year-old Kaibab Formation at the rim. Deep in the canyon wilderness they find evidence of ancient people, and evidence of more recent human occupation – abandoned mines and associated junk.

The travelers revel in the silence of much of the canyon, then arrive at “Heli Alley,” where they spend an 8-hour day counting sightseeing helicopters, tallying 363. Earlier they hiked out at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers and visited with Navaho women protesting a development proposal called the Grand Canyon Escalade, a tram that would deliver 10,000 people a day to the confluence. Later they visit with Havasupai tribal members protesting uranium mining at the Canyon Mine just outside the national park. While they spend most of their time in wild, inaccessible canyon and mesa terrain, they cannot escape uneasiness about what mines and heli-tours portend for the future of this unique place.

The main thrust of this book, however, is the canyon through the lens of an artist. McBride writes:

Some days we find centimeter-deep potholes from which we use syringes to painstakingly pull the last water. Other days, we find only cracked earth where rainwater had collected earlier, but already evaporated into the arid sky. And each day, I try to find new ways to photograph the beauty around us. Considering this park is the most photographed canyon in the world, fighting redundant, cliché imagery plagues my mind as much as our hunt for water.

He need not have worried, for he had unique opportunities that add up photographically to a remarkable portrait of the canyon. Moonlight reflects off the river deep in the canyon. One caption explains that Grand Canyon National Park is “famous for its daily dance of light and shadow,” and McBride brilliantly captures this dance in many shots. Many double-page panoramas stretch nearly 26 inches in brilliant color, and many others bleed two-thirds across the book. This is a visual feast presented in an 11-by-13 inch format on high quality paper, perspectives ranging from close-ups of prickly pear and agave flowers, potholes, and portraits of some of the park’s 41 reptiles, to the Milky Way, a sky river flowing over the Colorado River, sunrises, sunsets, and billowing storm scenes. There are no clichés.

The marvelous landscape photographs are complemented by shots telling the story of the 750-mile journey. We see McBride and Fedarko tucked into big potholes for a nap, a ball of cholla cactus stuck into a calf, photos of the hikers “navigating ledges that rival skyscrapers,” and small figures traversing “icy ramps above the thousands of feet of terraced ledges below.” McBride captures the scale of the canyon, their brief human presence “mere specks” in both time and space. This book portrays, more than any other visual portrayal of the Grand Canyon I have encountered, its beauty and significance.

In his introduction, Kevin Fedarko writes that this “vast amphitheater of sun-dappled stone that was sculpted over uncountable eons by the Colorado River, stands not only as the centerpiece of America’s National Park System, but also the touchstone of the nation’s topography and geology.” He quotes Theodore Roosevelt, who affirmed it as “one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.” He also quotes Roosevelt’s famous assertion that we should “Leave it as it is. Man cannot improve on it: not a bit.”

The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim is a beautiful and timely book. While the Grand Canyon is a national park, we are not able to “Leave it as it is.” We are encroaching on it with trams, mines, helicopters, and massive developments close by. This book brilliantly reveals what’s at stake here and in many other parts of the American public land today. It’s an adventure story in photographs, a work of photographic art, and a wake-up call to all who love this place.