National Park Adventures

A lightweight backpacker on the Titcomb Basin Trail in Wyoming's Wind River Range.

A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking

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By Michael Lanza

What if you could do one thing to make every backpacking trip more enjoyable? Thousands of miles of backpacking have taught me what that one thing is: keeping my pack light. All of the superfluous ounces removed from my pack add up to fewer pounds on my back, and that makes each trip better. And a smart approach to ultralight and lightweight backpacking does not compromise safety or comfort—the point is to increase comfort and safety. If you’re not accomplishing both objectives, you need a new strategy.

In this article, I’ll share my tips for minimizing pack weight while staying safe and comfortable on every trip, learned over the course of more than three decades of backpacking—including the 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, and even longer running this blog.

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A backpacker at a campsite along the Teton Crest Trail on Death Canyon Shelf in Grand Teton National Park.

American Classic: Backpacking The Teton Crest Trail

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By Michael Lanza

That first full day was a hard one.

We had hiked less than an hour into the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park the night before, camping in the dense forest surrounding Phelps Lake, where we saw mule deer grazing at dusk and the wind howled through the dark night. In the morning, probably tired from the long previous day of traveling to Jackson, we got a slow start under packs heavy with too much old, oversize gear. The sun starts baking the open lower section of the Death Canyon Trail by mid-morning; so our gorgeous hike beneath soaring granite cliffs and along a roaring cascade quickly also became a hot, dusty climb.

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Backpackers hiking the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia National Park.

Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park

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By Michael Lanza

I stare at the backpack on the ground in front of me. At 85 liters, with every milliliter of it stuffed with about 60 pounds of gear and food, it looks like something that should be lowered by a crane into a container ship rather than attached to a person’s back. If it had legs, teeth, and an appetite for meat, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

In fact, standing at the Sawtooth Pass Trailhead at 7,820 feet in Sequoia National Park, looking up at our imminent ascent to 9,511-foot Timber Gap, I’m thinking the chances that I’ll have an easy time of it are very, very slim. Probably like most parents, before I became a dad I had absolutely no idea how much heavy lifting was involved.

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Morning Eagle Falls and backpackers on the Piegan Pass Trail in Glacier National Park.

Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier

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By Michael Lanza

The air temperature feels not much above freezing, pinching our faces as we hit the trail just after 8 a.m. on our second day of backpacking in Glacier National Park. The still, glassy water of Elizabeth Lake captures a razor-sharp, upside-down reflection of the jagged mountains flanking it; only the upper slopes of the peaks above Elizabeth’s western shore catch the early sunlight on this September morning. We pause occasionally on the strip of sandy beach along the lakeshore just to gawk at our surroundings.

Then we hear it.

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A hiker near Skeleton Point on the South Kaibab Trail in the Grand Canyon.

Fit to be Tired: Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim in a Day

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By Michael Lanza

Minutes after we start hiking down the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail, we descend steeply through a series of short, tight switchbacks where the trail appears to cling tenuously to the face of a cliff. The earth drops away abruptly beyond the trail’s edge—we’re gazing down nearly a vertical mile into the basement of The Big Ditch. Patches of early-morning sunlight waltz with cloud shadows across the infinite complexity of the tortured landscape sprawling before us, the high-contrast light magnifying the perception of endlessness. Not much farther, we pause at a clifftop overlook of possibly the most famous canyon on Earth.

The view is breathtaking. But less than a mile into our hike, it also lays bare the audacity, or maybe the folly, of our plans: to walk from South Rim to North Rim across this awesome chasm—21 miles and almost 11,000 cumulative vertical feet—today. From here, tonight’s destination looks very, very far away.

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