Michael Lanza

The Flylow Baker Bib.

Review: Flylow Baker Bib

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Skiing and Riding Bib
Flylow Baker Bib
$430, 2 lbs. 2 oz./952g (men’s medium)
Sizes: men’s XS-XXL, with tall and short sizes
backcountry.com

Skiing in Utah’s Wasatch mountains virtually every single time it snows exposes me to a wide range of inclement weather conditions: from subzero temperatures and cold smoke to warm, humid clouds dumping wet snow that can soak outerwear in minutes. Moreover, skiing as often and hard as I do exposes my clothing to a serious amount of wear. For these reasons, I went on a quest for a bib that would keep me dry through wet, seven-plus-hour days of skiing and have the durability to last hundreds of ski days. That search that led me to the Flylow Baker, which I’ve found ideal for resort skiing and colder, wetter days in the backcountry.

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A campsite at night by the Colorado River at Hance Rapids in the Grand Canyon.

Ultralight Backpacking Tents: How to Choose One

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By Michael Lanza

Switching from a standard backpacking tent to an ultralight tent can shave pounds from your total pack weight—which for many backpackers will be the biggest step they can take toward a lighter pack. But it can be confusing to sort through the various ultralight tents out there, and the specs on them can look like a big pot of numeral soup, leaving you wondering: How are they different? And ultimately, which one is best for you?

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Backpackers hiking to Island Lake in Wyoming's Wind River Range.

How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking

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By Michael Lanza

You can find abundant information online offering advice on how to plan a backpacking trip (including my 12 expert tips)—some of it good and some, frankly, not very thorough or simply clickbait created by sites lacking any expertise in backpacking. But there’s little advice out there on how to choose where to go backpacking—and many backpackers fail to consider key aspects of trips that greatly affect their experience: They follow an essentially backward decision-making process.

While this may sound esoteric and irrelevant to you, I’ve learned that how you decide where to go greatly affects how well your trip goes—it really does matter. The tips below explain the thought process I follow that make my trips much more enjoyable and will do the same for you.

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A backpacker above Oldman Lake along the Dawson Pass Trail in Glacier National Park.

10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

Is it possible to find solitude backpacking in a national park as popular as Glacier? The answer is an unequivocal yes—even in Glacier’s relatively short peak season of mid-July through mid-September. And the strategies for doing so are remarkably simple and will not compromise the quality of your experience in other ways—in fact, encountering fewer people only increases the chances of encountering wildlife. This article describes five backpacking trips where you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy serious solitude in Glacier National Park.

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A backpacker on the Continental Divide Trail above Medicine Grizzly Lake in Glacier National Park.

How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

There are two immutable truths about backpacking in Glacier National Park. First, from its stirring landscape, where glaciers hang off muscular mountains and sheer cliffs soar above deeply green valleys dappled with lakes and waterfalls, to almost certain sightings of wildlife like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, moose, elk, and grizzly and black bears, there’s really no place in the continental United States quite like Glacier.

Second, it’s one of the hardest backcountry permits to get in the National Park System. But the new wilderness permit reservation system that Glacier adopted in 2023 and greatly improved on in 2024 continues in 2025, bringing equity to the process and eliminating the frantic scramble for a permit that the 2023 changes had spawned

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