A backpacker hiking up the Half Dome Trail in Yosemite National Park.

10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit

by

By Michael Lanza

Backpackers planning a trip in popular national parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Glacier, Zion, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Great Smoky Mountains, and others have one experience in common: A high percentage of them fail in their attempt to reserve a backcountry permit—and many probably don’t fully understand why. This story will answer your questions about how and when to reserve a backcountry permit in many parks—most of which have their own, unique reservation process and dates to make a reservation. And this story will share my expert tips on maximizing your chances of success.

Countless backpacking trips over more than three decades—during which I was the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine for 10 years and have now run this blog for even longer—have taught me many tricks for landing coveted permits in flagship parks, which receive far more requests than they can fill. The strategies and knowledge of these permit processes outlined below will help you land a hard-to-get national park backcountry permit—just as they have worked countless times for me.

Read on

David Ports backpacking the Tonto Trail west of Horn Creek in Grand Canyon National Park.

16 Photos From 2025 That Will Inspire Your Next Adventure

by

By Michael Lanza

How was your 2025? I hope you got outdoors as much as possible with the people you care about—and you enjoyed adventures that inspired you. I’m sharing in this story photos from several backpacking and hiking trips I took this year, from the Grand Canyon in March and southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, Buckskin Gulch, and Paria Canyon in April to Idaho’s Sawtooths in August and again in early October and Wyoming’s Wind River Range in September.

Read on

The Flylow Baker Bib.

Review: Flylow Baker Bib

by

Skiing and Riding Bib
Flylow Baker Bib
$440, 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.

Read on

A backcountry skier at Baldy Knoll in Wyoming's Tetons Range.

How to Dress in Layers for Winter in the Backcountry

by

By Michael Lanza

If hiking, backpacking, and climbing from spring through fall teaches us the fundamentals of layering our clothing for comfort in variable weather, the backcountry in winter confers a graduate degree in layering. In mild temperatures, getting wet with perspiration or precipitation merely risks discomfort. In freezing temps, it can quickly lead to hypothermia and actually become life-threatening.

Read on

Trekkers on the Alta Via 2 in Parco Naturale Paneveggio Pale di San Martino, in Italy's Dolomite Mountains.

New Year Inspiration: My Top 10 Adventure Trips

by

By Michael Lanza

I often get asked the question, “What’s your favorite trip?” And I don’t have an answer. To pick just one from all the amazing adventures I’ve had the good fortune to take over more than three decades feels like an impossible task. Instead, I maintain this list of my 10 all-time favorites (so far). It includes some of America’s best backpacking trips, from the Teton Crest Trail and John Muir Trail to Glacier National Park, plus hiking across the Grand Canyon, trekking in Iceland, Patagonia, Norway, and Italy’s Dolomite Mountains (photo above), and some places that might surprise you.

Read on