America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
We all have many reasons to celebrate National Trails Day, when individuals and groups across the country dedicate time and effort to ensuring that the trails we use, from local parks to national parks, remain in good condition for everyone. I like to also see this day as a marker for the fast-approaching summer season, and a reminder to make sure you have hiking or backpacking plans on your calendar.
Hi Mike,
We are planning a trip across the country in July to Seattle/Tacoma. We have six kids (ages one to 12). We’re planning to drive all the way across and back in about a month. There are lots of places we’d like to experience, but we don’t want to just spend 30 nights in 30 different places, so we are planning spend two to three nights in the most interesting places and four nights in and around Yellowstone. We aren’t campers, don’t boat/canoe, and while we enjoy hikes with the kids, anything more than a few miles (or less if there is significant elevation change) is challenging. Given your experience and all of our constraints, I was curious which parks/areas you might recommend we visit (vs. better to visit later when the kids are older and some of those constraints are removed).
Hi Mike,
I am 63 and retired. I have done multiple bicycle tours up to 600 miles around Lake Ontario. Now this boy in and old man’s body wants to hike the Appalachian Trail in the spring of 2016, at 64. Your articles on light backpacking have been valuable in making smart equipment choices. I can use some of my bike gear but the MSR Hubba Hubba tent and MSR WhisperLite stove have to go. I have some questions for you about gear.
By Michael Lanza
Sea kayaking and wilderness-beach camping on a five-day trip in Johns Hopkins Inlet, in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, my family saw sea otters, seals, uncountable numbers of sea lions, bald eagles, puffins, and countless other birds, mountain goats—and a brown bear (from a healthy distance). We listened to the concussive explosions of enormous chunks of ice calving from giant glaciers into the sea. For a fleeting handful of days, we had a glimpse of what the Earth was like during the last Ice Age.
By Michael Lanza
We follow a zigzagging line of stone cairns over waves of slickrock in the backcountry of the Needles District of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Cliffs and 300-foot-tall sandstone candlesticks tower around us, in more shades of red than Crayola has yet replicated, glowing in the warm afternoon sunshine of late March. Five adults and four kids from three families, we traverse slabs, scramble in single file up the smooth, dry bottom of a narrow water runnel, and pump out calf muscles walking straight up steep ramps. In the desert Southwest, trails haven’t learned the axiom of Euclidian geometry that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We’re navigating a maze without walls.