America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
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.
By Michael Lanza
Sea kayaking and wilderness-beach camping on a five-day trip in Johns Hopkins Inlet, in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, my family saw sea otters, seals, uncountable numbers of sea lions, bald eagles, puffins, and countless other birds, mountain goats—and a brown bear (from a healthy distance). We listened to the concussive explosions of enormous chunks of ice calving from giant glaciers into the sea. For a fleeting handful of days, we had a glimpse of what the Earth was like during the last Ice Age.
By Michael Lanza
We follow a zigzagging line of stone cairns over waves of slickrock in the backcountry of the Needles District of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Cliffs and 300-foot-tall sandstone candlesticks tower around us, in more shades of red than Crayola has yet replicated, glowing in the warm afternoon sunshine of late March. Five adults and four kids from three families, we traverse slabs, scramble in single file up the smooth, dry bottom of a narrow water runnel, and pump out calf muscles walking straight up steep ramps. In the desert Southwest, trails haven’t learned the axiom of Euclidian geometry that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We’re navigating a maze without walls.
By Michael Lanza
As I nosed my two-person sea kayak, shared with my seven-year-old daughter, Alex, onto a wilderness beach in Johns Hopkins Inlet, deep in Southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, our lead guide, Sarah, strolled over to me and announced, “We’re thinking of camping here. There’s just one problem: It’s a bear highway.”
By Michael Lanza
As we slide uphill on skis, each of us carrying a full backpack, the three kids—two of them 14, one almost 12, but an advanced apprentice teenager—trail at least a tenth of a mile behind. If we parents slow down to let them catch up, they stop and tell us, “You can keep going.” So we do. Their audible, constant chatter and occasional screeches inform us that they remain within earshot—close enough that we’ll know if they need us, distant enough to not feel like we’re crowding their space with our oppressive adultness.
Yes, it has now come to this: They don’t want to ski with us anymore.