Hiking

A hiker on the Peek-a-Boo Loop in Bryce Canyon National Park.

The Two Best Hikes in Bryce Canyon National park

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By Michael Lanza

Bryce Canyon’s relatively easy, nearly three-mile Navajo Loop/Queens Garden Loop regularly draws a steady stream of hikers for good reason, with constant views of hoodoos—the multi-colored, limestone, sandstone, and mudstone spires that look like giant, melting candles, including the famous formation called Thor’s Hammer. But once turning onto the Peekaboo Loop (photo above), you lose the crowds—and discover the scenic heart of Bryce Canyon while hiking below the Wall of Windows and row after row of towers in fluorescent shades of red and orange.

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Backpackers at night with headlamps in a campsite in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park.

The Best Headlamps of 2026

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By Michael Lanza

A headlamp is unquestionably essential gear for hiking, backpacking, climbing, trail running, ultra-running and ultra-hiking, ski touring, and other backcountry activities that sometimes push into darkness (whether intentionally or not). But with so many to pick from, how do you choose which one to buy? Price? Brightness? Weight? Design and range of lighting modes? Go with a brand you know and trust? This review cuts through the information overload to help you pick the right headlamp for your adventures.

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Eve Garry on Snowbird's Cirque Trail

The Best Hikes In Salt Lake City’s Wasatch Mountains

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It’s no secret that Salt Lake City offers some of the best and most-accessible hiking of any city in the U.S. Unfortunately, the digital overload from over a million people living next door to the famous Wasatch Mountains spawns “too much information:” Every conceivable route has been posted in countless places, making it easy to end up at the most viral option and hard to figure out which hikes will give you some solitude after a tough day at work, provide the type of challenge that you find worth training for, or definitely make your visiting family or first-time-hiker friend come back for more. 

With this assortment of classics and less-well-known gems, I hope to make that decision easier—by providing a manageable number of hikes with a broad range of difficulty levels, popularity, and scenery. I’m confident that anyone will find a hike they’ll love on this list (and probably several).

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Hikers descending off Mount Bláhnúkur, above Landmannalaugar, Iceland.

Trekking Iceland’s Laugavegur and Fimmvörðuháls Trails—A Photo Gallery

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By Michael Lanza

We followed the trail upward through innumerable, short switchbacks to the summit of a battleship-gray, treeless, steep-sided peak called Bláhnúkur in the remote Fjallabak Nature Reserve of Iceland’s Central Highlands, one of the most active geothermal areas on Earth. At the summit, we turned a slow 360, gaping at a mind-boggling, kaleidoscopic landscape painted in more colors than there likely were species of plant life—none of it more than knee-high—on the volcanic slopes surrounding us. An old, hardened lava flow poured down one mountainside in a jumbled train wreck of razor-sharp black rhyolite. Barren peaks and ridges wearing the white splotches of July snowfields reached to every horizon.

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Hikers overlooking Iceland's second-tallest waterfall,, Glymur, at the head of the fjord Hvalfjörður.

9 Great Hikes and Walks Along Iceland’s Ring Road

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By Michael Lanza

Driving Iceland’s Highway 1, or Ring Road, in the country’s southeast on the kind of sunny day that’s almost as rare here as the sensation of boredom, we reached the seacoast—and the landscape and seascape suddenly seemed to exceed the capacity of our vision and minds to take it all in. The two-lane highway snaked along this island nation’s ragged edge, weaving in and out of one fjord after another, each as impossible to comprehend in its magnificence as it was to pronounce. The ocean crashed up against starkly barren yet wildly colorful mountains as we crossed bridges over intricately braided rivers, gazing up valleys where multiple, cracked glaciers tumbled nearly to sea level.

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