International Adventures

Trekkers hiking toward the Thorung La mountain pass on Nepal's Annapurna Circuit.

Himalayan Shangri-La: Trekking Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit

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By Michael Lanza The old school bus rumbles to life with a painful metallic grinding and we roll forward, our chariot rocking side to side down a rutted, muddy street of a small crossroads town called Dumre in central Nepal. Angling down a hillside, the bus lists heavily to starboard and moves too slowly to escape its own cloud of …

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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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Video: Hiking the Steaming Volcanoes of New Zealand’s Tongariro National Park

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Tongariro National Park, on New Zealand’s North Island, was the world’s fourth national park, established just five years after Yellowstone. Hiking its active volcanoes is a wild journey across a stark and brilliantly colorful landscape. Watch the video below about 12.1-mile loop over three of the main volcanoes and craters of Tongariro, read the story and view a gallery of photos. …

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