America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
Rock-climbing Shoes
Five Ten Hueco
$140, 1 lb. 2 oz. (men’s 10)
Sizes: unisex 6-13
fiveten.com
Count me as one of those climbers who was heartsick when Five Ten stopped making the Hueco some years back. And apparently, we were a pretty big club, because the Hueco was an awfully popular shoe in the 1990s. Now it’s back and improved, and after test-driving a pair on moderate routes at Idaho’s Castle Rocks State Park, I’m a kid in love again.
By Michael Lanza
I feel the familiar nervous excitement just walking up to the base of the sun-warmed granite cliff, climbing gear jangling on my harness, rope over my shoulder. For various reasons, I haven’t gotten on rock in months. But as soon as I start moving upward and stick the first cam into a crack, I realize how much I’ve missed this intensity of focus, this sensation that there’s nothing else in the world except what I’m experiencing right here and now.
There aren’t many things in life that replicate the feeling of an eighth-grade date. For me, rock climbing still does it, after all these years.
By Michael Lanza
We hike slowly but steadily uphill in the cool shade of Pacific silver fir and Alaska yellow cedar draped in Spanish moss. With melting snow swelling every river, stream, and rivulet in the 470 miles of waterways within the boundaries of Mt. Rainier National Park, the Cascade Range erupts in a riot of greenery all around us. The forest is a happy drunk on an H2O bender.
Davek Traveler Umbrella
$79, 13 oz.
davekny.com
When the skies opened up at Mt. Rainier National Park and we faced two hours of slogging through steady rain before reaching our next campsite, I was very glad to have Davek’s Traveler umbrella—not for me, actually, but for my nine-year-old son. It made a big difference in his outlook toward hiking in the cool rain.
Mini-Crampons
Kahtoola Microspikes
$59, 13 oz. (medium)
XS-XL (fit boots from youth size 1 to men’s 16, or insulated boots up to men’s 13.5)
kahtoola.com
Conditions on the Grand Canyon’s Grandview Trail were—as a ranger warned us when we picked up our permit—“treacherous” for our late-March backpacking trip. Hard ice and frozen snow covered the trail’s uppermost couple of miles, where you frequently traverse sloping ledges a foot or two wide, with huge drop-offs. “Microspikes are mandatory,” the ranger told us, and he was right. Without them, we’d have risked becoming tomorrow’s news—or, more likely, have aborted our four-day trip.