International Adventures

Jotunheimen National Park, Norway.

Photo Gallery: Trekking Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park

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By Michael Lanza

We hiked hut-to-hut for a week through 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. Jotunheimen National Park—the name translates as “Home of the Giants”—contains the highest European mountains north of the Alps, starkly barren peaks rising to more than 8,000 feet. Thick, crack-riddled glaciers pour off them like pancake batter that needs more water. Braided rivers meander down mostly treeless valleys, and reindeer roam wild.

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Castle ruins, Aitana Mountains, Spain.

Photo Gallery: Trekking Europe’s Best-Kept Secret, Spain’s Aitana Mountains

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By Michael Lanza

By day, you hike across a chronically sunny range of mountains of endless limestone cliffs, past ruins of castles built by Moors centuries ago, looking down on bleached terracotta villages dotting the valley bottom. Every evening, in one of those villages, you feast in good Old World style on Spanish delicacies like stuffed aubergines, paella, and olleta de blat, washing it down with excellent Spanish vino. That, in a nutshell, describes the 60-mile, village-to-village trek I took across the most stunning European mountains you’ve never heard of (they don’t even have an official name), in the Valencia region on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

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Ask Me: Can I Backpack With a Tent in the Alps?

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Dear Michael,

I am 22 and am looking to do some backpacking with a friend in Austria’s Alps this summer, specifically the Grossglockner and Schober Groups out of Zell am See.

You wrote an article in 2009 for Backpacker Magazine on backpacking Austria’s Alps and so I hope you can help me with a question on the subject: What is the tent environment like in the Alps?

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River of Many Stories: Canoeing New Zealand’s Stunning Whanganui

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By Michael Lanza

Within minutes after launching our canoe into the chocolate-brown and, at the moment, tranquil Whanganui River, in the southwestern corner of New Zealand’s North Island, I begin to get a sense of why the native Maori people believed that every bend in this striking waterway had a mauri, or “life force.” We’ve entered a nearly unbroken gorge of sheer sandstone and mudstone cliffs soaring up to 200 feet straight out of the water, draped with jungle-like foliage in infinite hues of green. Cicadas buzz and rattle almost deafeningly. Ribbon waterfalls pour in straight, pencil-thin lines down walls so oversaturated that they weep tears from every fern and leaf.

The Maori are right: this place is very much alive.

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Torres del Paine National Park, in Chile's Patagonia region.

Patagonian Classic: Trekking the ‘W’ in Torres del Paine

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By Michael Lanza

We march upward through innumerable switchbacks on the steep and dusty last mile of trail to the Torres del Paine. Small stands of Patagonia’s ubiquitous, twisted lenga trees cling to an otherwise barren mountainside of dirt and rock, earth overturned by glaciers and continually rubbed raw by the abrasive wind.

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