America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
I deserve to be plagued by blisters. I field test several models of hiking, backpacking, and trail-running shoes and boots every year. I’m constantly wearing new footwear right out of the box, often hiking 15 to 20 or more miles a day—usually without doing anything more than trying them on, virtually never allowing for any break-in time. And I almost never get a blister. Best of all, the tricks I use to avoid them are simple and easy for anyone to follow.
By Michael Lanza
You just finished a big dayhike, backpacking trip, mountain climb, or trail run convinced it was one of the best experiences of your life—and now your body seems to have mounted a loud protest of pain against it. And you wonder: Is this suffering necessary? The simple answer is no. Follow the tips in this article—or even just some of them—to greatly lessen the physical aches and pains that sometimes follow an outdoors adventure.
In the ink-black darkness long before dawn on a morning in May, seven of us panned our headlamp beams over La Verkin Creek, deep in the Kolob Canyons of Utah’s Zion National Park, contemplating where—and whether—to cross it. Bloated and bellowing with spring snowmelt and brown with the silt of dirt torn violently from its banks, the creek charged past us with a force and noise level that could make any reasonable person question the wisdom of stepping into its path.
By Michael Lanza
Our group of three adults and six teenagers crossed the 9,200-foot pass on the Alice-Toxaway Divide, separating Alice and Twin lakes from Toxaway Lake, on our third straight bluebird August afternoon backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Before us, an arc of spires and jagged peaks wrapped around a pair of alpine lakes appropriately named Twin Lakes. And although I had hiked over this pass many times before, I stopped in my tracks and just stared at our vista.
Perhaps most impressively, even the jaded teens with us found themselves awestruck, too.
By Michael Lanza The zigzagging trail up the Southwest Ridge of Borah Peak, Idaho’s high point at 12,662 feet, rose above us on the almost barren mountainside and appeared to end abruptly where the ridge narrowed to a crest of jagged rock—the route’s crux, known as Chickenout Ridge. We reached the base of this stone fin, looked at each other, …