Backpacking

Seven People, One Mountain, and Hundreds of Kids Getting Outdoors

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By Michael Lanza

I first tied my son, Nate, into a climbing rope when he was four or five years old. As I stood next to him at the base of an easy rock climb in Idaho’s City of Rocks National Reserve, belaying him on a top-rope, he gazed up at the wall of granite rising more than 100 feet above him and started scrabbling upward. He got maybe six feet off the ground—I could still reach up and touch him—then stopped and asked me, “Is this as high as Mount Everest, Dad?” I said, “Yup, I’m pretty sure it is.” Satisfied with his accomplishment, he told me, “Okay, I’ll come down now.” And I lowered him back to the ground.

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Young kids backpacking through Spray Park in Mount Rainier National Park.

Photo Gallery: 11 National Parks, One Year

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By Michael Lanza

Backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, North Cascades, and Mount Rainier (lead photo, above) national parks. Hiking to Yosemite’s waterfalls. Paddling the Everglades and sea kayaking Glacier Bay. Rock climbing in Joshua Tree, and cross-country skiing in Yellowstone. In one magical year, we took 11 national park adventures with our kids, sharing experiences that expanded their understanding of their world, times filled with joy and wonder.

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Lower Yellowstone Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Giving Thanks For ‘The Best Idea We Ever Had’

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By Michael Lanza

From Lookout Point, along the North Rim Trail in Yellowstone National Park, you gaze down hundreds of feet into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its crumbling walls of golden, gray, and cream-colored rock and patches of evergreens framing the roaring river. Just upstream, 308-foot-tall Lower Yellowstone Falls explodes through a notch in the cliffs, sending a plume of water and mist shooting into the canyon. Every time I see it, as I did again earlier this fall, I feel the same sense of awe that I felt the first time I saw this view.

Big more than that, I think about the foresight behind the creation of America’s national parks—what the writer Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had”—including the first one, Yellowstone. That’s one of the many things I’m thankful for on this Thanksgiving day.

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Rick Baron, Grand Teton

My Friend Who Never Grew Old

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How a Climbing Tragedy Shaped My View of Risk, the Outdoors, Parenting, and Life

By Michael Lanza

The finger-numbing morning shadow of Maine’s highest peak, Katahdin, hung over us as we organized ropes and gear to rock climb the Pamola Cliffs, a slab of heavily fractured granite rising several hundred feet above us. Somewhere up there, Katahdin’s famous Knife Edge ridge—where we intended to finish the climb—scraped at the heavens. Below us, Chimney Pond caught the light of the clear sky like an unblinking eye in the dark green conifer forest.

I felt a powerful and untarnished sense of joy and excitement that always washed over me on the brink of a great, new adventure. I was back in one of my favorite spots in New England, Baxter State Park. I’d organized the trip months earlier, planning to climb that first day, hike a loop over Katahdin the next day, and backpack north of Katahdin for three days after that, with an assortment of friends, some of whom were arriving that night. None of that ever took place; we never even reached the top of the Pamola Cliffs. Within a few hours, a good friend was dead and the way I viewed the outdoors would be changed forever.

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My kids in Spray Park, Mount Rainier National Park.

Video: Backpacking Mount Rainier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

Mount Rainier National Park presents a multitude of excellent backpacking options. But one that encapsulates the experience well, shows off some of the park’s highlight views, glaciers, and wildflower meadows, and can be knocked off in a weekend is the traverse from Mowich Lake to Sunrise. Hiking below Rainier’s north face makes it look so impossibly big it seems unreal, rising 8,000 to 11,000 vertical feet above hikers on trails. Few North American peaks have visible relief of two vertical miles. You naturally react as you might to a full-blown, heat stroke-induced hallucination: Compelled to believe your eyes, you nonetheless struggle with the nagging intuition that the delicate fruit that is your frontal lobe has spoiled badly in the heat.

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