America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
An elegant, high-elevation, multi-day walk through a magnificent mountain range is the stuff of dreams for many backpackers, and there may be no walk better than the Wind River High Route. Traversing a range with few equals by any measure—elevations, abundance of alpine lakes and glaciers, remoteness, length and breadth, or raw splendor—the WRHR embodies everything we imagine a great hike in the mountains should be.
Daypack
Gregory Miko 20 and Maya 20
$130, 20L/1,220 c.i., 2 lbs. 1 oz./936g (men’s Miko 20)
One size each for men and women, adjustable
Miko 20: backcountry.com
Maya 20: backcountry.com
Don’t fix what ain’t broke has proven a timeless rule to follow and Gregory seems to take it to heart with the Miko and Maya, the brand’s 2023 updates of its classic Miwok and Maya. Wearing the men’s Miko on dayhikes of nearly 10 miles and 4,700 feet up and down 5,774-foot Mount Adams in New Hampshire’s rugged northern Presidential Range and a mostly off-trail dayhike-scramble of 11,330-foot Twin Peaks in Utah’s Wasatch Range that spanned eight hours with 5,200 feet of up and down, I concluded that these daypacks remain true to a successful lineage while showing subtle improvements to excellent daypacks.
Ultralight Alpine/Four-Season Tent
SlingFin Hotbox
$650, 3 lbs. 9 oz.
slingfin.com
Through three cold December nights camped at over 8,000 feet in Idaho’s Boulder Mountains, snow fell hard enough that I had to dig this tent out a few times. All that cold, white smoke was great for two reasons: the backcountry skiing my kids and I did—and testing the Hotbox, SlingFin’s answer to the challenge of creating a lightweight tent built for alpine climbing and other four-season adventures.
By Michael Lanza
The three bighorn sheep lifted their heavily horned heads to gaze at us, but never budged from their beds of grass amid boulders on a mountainside above the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park. The mountain goats we saw on various occasions gave us little more attention than that. And fortunately, the grizzly bear sow with two cubs in tow that passed within about 30 feet of us—an encounter of less than 10 seconds that is etched into my memory forever—gave us no more than a passing glance.
By Michael Lanza
Walking across the campground at Landmannalaugar, in Iceland’s remote Central Highlands, we can see the entire uphill portion of today’s hike ahead of us. A trail zigzags through dozens of short switchbacks more than a thousand vertical feet (well over 300 meters) up the crest of a ridge on a virtually barren, steep-sided, blue-black little mountain called Bláhnúkur, which means “blue peak.” Scudding clouds flash over the peak like tracer fire revealing the wind scraping the peak’s summit.