America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
When can you claim to know a mountain range well? Maybe it’s once you have spent enough time—certainly measured in years, and probably decades—that you have explored beyond the most accessible and popular spots to the obscure, unknown corners. Perhaps it’s when you have hiked most of its trails. Just possibly, it’s when you unfold a map and it takes several minutes to tick off for someone all the places you have visited. That’s a good start, anyway.
By Michael Lanza
It is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of life, like death and taxes: Occasionally on backpacking trips you will hike past one of the most sublime patches of wilderness real estate you have ever laid eyes on, a spot so idyllic you can already see your tent pitched there and you standing outside it, warm mug in your hands, watching a glorious sunset. But it’s early and your plan entails hiking farther before you stop for the day—not camping there. Or your permit isn’t for that site. Or even worse, you are looking for a campsite, but someone else has already occupied this little corner of Heaven.
By Michael Lanza
I may be risking an impassioned debate here, but I think there are very few mountain ranges in America with as many drop-dead, gorgeous high mountain lakes as Idaho’s Sawtooths. Yes, a few mountain ranges clearly outnumber the Sawtooths in that department, like the High Sierra, Cascades, and Wind River Range. But I believe the Sawtooths deserve similar recognition, and I’ve seen many of those watery jewels over more than 20 years of wandering around Idaho’s best-known hills. This gallery of photos of many of them may persuade you to agree with me—and to see them for yourself.
By Michael Lanza
At a pass just below 9,400 feet on the north side of 10,229-foot Mt. Heyburn, in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, the wind that has been steadily turning the dial upward for the past hour reaches full volume. Another snow squall bursts upon us, spraying white bullets sideways and dropping a veil over the rocky, snow-spattered, serrated ridge just overhead.
Six of us have labored 2,000 feet uphill on skis this morning in search of a doorway into a secluded mountain paradise of sorts, a high basin known in some circles as the Monolith Valley, though not marked as such on any map. A slender gash between Heyburn and another 10,000-footer, Braxon Peak (which I’ve stood atop in summer), the Monolith exists in the topographical shadows, easily overlooked. Most of our group have only seen tantalizing photos that revealed legions of rock spires towering above untracked snow. The images inspired visions of marking up deep powder on slopes rarely inscribed by skiers—like Zorro, but leaving many “S” signatures instead of a “Z.”
By Michael Lanza
In the dead-calm, 30-degree, predawn chill of a fall morning, our headlamp beams bore into the enveloping darkness on a trail through lodgepole pine forest in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Stars salt what we can see of the sky through the trees. We’re not saying much, a little tired after having driven out here too late last night to camp, and not slept quite enough before rising at 5 a.m.
But then, it’s probably wise of us to hoard our energy in reserve, given the day laid out before us: at least 14 miles of hiking, with roughly two of those miles off-trail and nearly 4,000 feet of up and down, plus a couple pitches of rock climbing to a summit neither of us has stood on before.