America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
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.
By Michael Lanza
Take three minutes right now to daydream about hiking in a wild place half a world away, a rugged, Arctic-looking landscape vibrantly colorful with shrubs, mosses, and wildflowers, where cliffs and mountains look like they were chopped from the earth with an axe. A place where thick, crack-riddled glaciers pour off snow-plastered peaks like pancake batter that needs more water, and wild, braided rivers meander down mostly treeless valleys. Where reindeer are real (but don’t fly—sorry)—and you stay in supremely comfortable huts with excellent food.
By Michael Lanza
The hike begins with a short walk to the base of Takakkaw Falls, which plummets thunderously more than 1,100 feet (350m) over a cliff, raining mist on hikers below. Fed by the Daly Glacier and Waputik Icefield, the waterfall takes its name from the Cree word meaning “it is magnificent.” You won’t contest the claim. Beyond, you begin a long, steady ascent, first through forest, but soon with expansive views of the Yoho Valley in the Canadian Rockies, where sprawling icefields cap the mountains. A bit over two miles from the trailhead, traversing an ice-ravaged, open landscape of rock, dirt, and a few tiny but hardy plants and wildflowers, you get your first view of the thick, severely cracked Emerald Glacier, pouring off of 10,000-foot peaks in the President Range.
By Michael Lanza
Standing on the rocky bank of Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, deep within the second-largest U.S. wilderness outside Alaska, my 14-year-old son, Nate, and I look down at the foaming, frothing, spitting energy of Marble Rapid—the first big whitewater of our six-day rafting and kayaking trip down one of the world’s premier wilderness rivers. One of our guides, Matt Leidecker, points to the rapid’s entrance, where the river makes a hard, 90-degree right turn at a “hole,” a depression where the roaring current recirculates powerfully enough to toss a person in a kayak around like a bathtub toy. “I’ve seen that hole keep kayaks,” he warns us.
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.