America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
A vast sea of liquid glass spread out before us as we aimed our kayaks out into Milford Sound, a 4,000-foot-deep fjord in Fiordland National Park, on the southwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island. A thick fur of rainforest clung to cliffs plunging straight into the sea. The sharp, rock-crowned arrowhead of Mitre Peak rose to 5,545 feet (1,690m) out of the ocean, slashing at the sky.
By Michael Lanza
In the refrigerator-like shade at the bottom of a fissure hundreds of feet deep, somewhere in the labyrinth of sandstone canyons that dice up the backcountry of Zion National Park, our keyhole-shaped passageway narrows to the width of a doorway. A shallow, ice-water creek pumps along this slot canyon’s floor, which drops off before us about four feet into a pool extending some 30 feet ahead of us. We’ve been informed the water temperature is around 51° F. And it looks deep.
We’re going for a chilly swim.
Rain Jacket
Arc’teryx Zeta LT Jacket
$475, 12 oz. (men’s medium)
Sizes: men’s S-XXL, women’s XS-XL
backcountry.com
Pulling the trigger on buying a high-end piece of outdoor apparel like a rain jacket can be a tough decision, but it really comes down to a very basic question: Why do you need it? Beyond personal issues regarding budget and priorities, and certainly comparing similar products based on performance and price, consider whether you will use the jacket in ways that take advantage of those aspects of the jacket that justify its price. The Zeta LT seemed like a good example to use to demonstrate how to evaluate those questions, so I took it out hiking and backpacking in wet weather from Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains to Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies, to contemplate the value of a rain shell. And it more than demonstrated its value.
Breathable Insulated Vest
Patagonia Nano-Air Vest
$199, 8 oz./227g (men’s medium)
Sizes: men’s XS-XXL, women’s XS-XL
backcountry.com
If I had a buck for every day I’ve worn a vest outdoors over the years, well, I might not have to rely on a blog as the source of my wealth. But with the recent advent of breathable insulation, the classic vest, in its various iterations, faces serious competition. Curious to see whether a new-tech vest with breathable insulation could still measure up among today’s diverse array of versatile insulation pieces, I wore the Nano-Air Vest on Idaho adventures from July through October, including dayhikes and backpacking trips in the Sawtooth and White Cloud mountains and a five-day whitewater rafting and kayaking trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. It may speak volumes about this vest to say that I wore it a lot.
Three-Season Sleeping Bag
Marmot Scandium (20° F)
$199, 2 lbs. 14 oz. (regular)
Sizes: regular and long ($219)
marmot.com
A backpacking truth: You can say what you want about the details of a bag’s construction, but the real measure of its value comes on nights when you need it to accomplish just one function—keep you warm. Beside Quiet Lake at over 9,200 feet in Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains in early October, I awoke to find frost coating much of our gear that we’d left outside the tent; the overnight low had dropped nearly to freezing. And I had not even noticed the cold, snoozing comfortably all night in the Scandium.