America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
We all have many reasons to celebrate National Trails Day, when individuals and groups across the country dedicate time and effort to ensuring that the trails we use, from local parks to national parks, remain in good condition for everyone. I like to also see this day as a marker for the fast-approaching summer season, and a reminder to make sure you have hiking or backpacking plans on your calendar.
Hi Mike,
We are planning a trip across the country in July to Seattle/Tacoma. We have six kids (ages one to 12). We’re planning to drive all the way across and back in about a month. There are lots of places we’d like to experience, but we don’t want to just spend 30 nights in 30 different places, so we are planning spend two to three nights in the most interesting places and four nights in and around Yellowstone. We aren’t campers, don’t boat/canoe, and while we enjoy hikes with the kids, anything more than a few miles (or less if there is significant elevation change) is challenging. Given your experience and all of our constraints, I was curious which parks/areas you might recommend we visit (vs. better to visit later when the kids are older and some of those constraints are removed).
By Michael Lanza
We’re moments from embarking on one of the hardest, long dayhikes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when we come to a screeching stop before our first teenager moment. My 16-year-old nephew, Marco, discovers his hydration bladder mouthpiece is cracked and unusable. Then I notice he’s carrying a one-liter bladder from an old, little kid’s daypack he used years ago—hardly enough water capacity for a 20-mile day traversing eight summits. Fortunately, we’re starting today’s hike at the Appalachian Mountain Club visitor center in Pinkham Notch, so we buy him a three-liter bladder. Then I see that his daypack belt has no buckle; he insists it’s fine, but I persuade him that the dollar spent on a new buckle will feel like money well invested by around mile 10.
By Michael Lanza
Few places bear a name as simultaneously hyperbolic and yet as descriptively true as Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in south-central Idaho. Over the past 15,000 years, eight distinct lava flows erupting from fissures in the earth have created the largest lava field of its kind in the continental United States, made up of about 60 flows and 25 cones and sprawling over more than 600 square miles. Explore the place with young kids and they just may believe you’ve transported them to the moon.
By Michael Lanza
Shanti and Mark Hodges took their son, Mason, on his first hike when he was nine days old, walking a flat, quarter-mile trail at Oswald State Park on the Oregon coast. That was in July 2013. Then Mark, 35, an avid hiker, started carrying Mason on regular walks in the woods—just the two of them. Shanti worried about that.