America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
First-time backpackers in the Grand Canyon quickly absorb two lessons about this one-of-a-kind place. Foremost, the canyon’s infinite vistas and deceptive scale, the beauty of desert oases and wildflower blooms, the peacefulness and quietude of some of the best wilderness campsites you will ever enjoy—all of these qualities will hook you forever.
And you learn how difficult it can be to get a permit for backpacking there.
By Michael Lanza
With our first steps on the descent from Maze Overlook into the labyrinth of mostly dry desert canyons that comprise one of the greatest geological oddities in the National Park System—the Maze in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park—we had to remove and pass our backpacks over a ledge drop of several feet. But that was nothing compared to what lay ahead. Following a wildly circuitous trail marked by cairns but otherwise unobvious and not visible on the slickrock, we passed below redrock cliffs and towers, traversed the sloping rims of giant bowls of rippled stone, and several more times passed our packs to scramble through tight crevices and downclimb a ladder of shallow footsteps chiseled into a sandstone cliff face.
“The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations… which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
—The Organic Act of 1916, creating the National Park Service
By Michael Lanza
With the widespread, deep cuts to federal spending, which have often seemed chaotic and not even remotely thought out, since President Trump began his second term in January, I’ve occasionally heard from readers of this blog asking what they should expect visiting the national parks this year. I haven’t really had a good answer, in part because there seemed neither any plan behind the cuts nor much information about how and where funding would be slashed.
I backpacked in the Grand Canyon in late March and, besides one unusually long line to board a shuttle bus, I didn’t see evidence of any deterioration of public services or natural resources. Like, perhaps, many people, I wondered whether the parks would somehow, miraculously, dodge a death by a thousand cuts.
Now it’s clear that is not at all true.
By Michael Lanza
America’s 63 national parks preserve over 52 million acres of uniquely beautiful and genuinely awe-inspiring places in nature, and the payoff for our country’s foresight in protecting them is a lifetime’s worth of unforgettable experiences—many of them entirely feasible, safe, and really fun for families with kids of all ages. Best of all, you’ll find that sharing these adventures will create your best times together as a family, as they have for mine.
By Michael Lanza
A thin, hazy overcast keeps the sun from frying my longtime friend and adventure partner David Ports and me as we descend the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail—a trail I’ve now hiked more times than I can immediately recall. And yet, watching how the marching, broken clouds cause the light to shift across the broad expanse of canyon visible to us, seeming to repaint and reshape the landscape every few minutes, it still feels fresh and thrilling to me.