Family Adventures

A trekker hiking above Lake Harris toward Harris Saddle on the Routeburn Track, South Island, New Zealand.

Trekking New Zealand’s World-Class Routeburn Track

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By Michael Lanza

We follow the Routeburn Track’s winding path through the dense, vibrant greenery of ferns, mosses, and ubiquitous beech trees of the forest in Mount Aspiring National Park, in the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island. The track parallels the raging whitewater of the river known as the Route Burn, which crashes thunderously over a train wreck of boulders in its bed, foaming white almost without interruption on its steep course, only occasionally slowing and calming to reveal its emerald color in the rare flat spots in this vertiginous canyon.

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Trekkers hiking the Milford Track to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.

Learning to—Love?—the Rain on New Zealand’s Milford Track

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By Michael Lanza

As if by some celestial act of deception, our first day on New Zealand’s Milford Track is, by far, the easiest: We hike just three nearly flat miles—five kilometers—following the track along the rain-fattened and fast-moving Clinton River. And the pleasant temperature and warm sunshine pouring onto us from partly cloudy skies almost lulls us into illusions of such relatively ideal (for this place) weather persisting throughout our four days on the Milford.

But we’re not fooled. We’ve seen the forecast and already received other warning signals of what awaits us. And the truth is, even those data points will not, could not paint a complete picture of just how wet it would get out here over the next few days.

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A backpacker hiking west from Porcupine Pass on the Uinta Highline Trail, High Uintas Wilderness, Utah.

17 Photos From 2024 That Will Inspire Your Next Adventure

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By Michael Lanza

How was your 2024? 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 April and southern Utah in May to the Tetons and Montana’s Beartooths in August, Colorado’s San Juans in September, northern Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness in early October—and culminating with three classic Great Walks and dayhiking in New Zealand in late November and December.

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A backpacker hiking west from Porcupine Pass on the Uinta Highline Trail, High Uintas Wilderness, Utah.

Backpacking—and Sandbagging—Utah’s Uinta Highline Trail

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By Michael Lanza

The strongest signal that late afternoon has begun its inexorably precipitous October slide into a freezing evening comes as my son, Nate, and I step from almost-warm sunshine into the deep shade of a peak whose shadow tops out at over 13,000 feet in eastern Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness. The wind cranks up in volume as we continue upward, wearing shell jackets with hoods up, wool hats, and gloves while carrying full backpacks uphill at a lung-busting elevation—and still feeling just marginally warm enough.

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Backpackers in the narrows of Paria Canyon, in southern Utah and northern Arizona.

Paria Canyon—A Top 5 Southwest Backpacking Trip

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By Michael Lanza

Walls of searing, orange-red sandstone towered hundreds of feet overhead in a chasm at times no more than a dozen strides across. A shallow river flowed like very thin chocolate milk down the canyon, spanning it from wall to wall in spots. And the spectacle had only just begun: We were mere hours into the first day of one of the most continually stunning, multi-day canyon hikes in the Southwest: Paria Canyon.

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