Trips

A hiker on Bondcliff in the White Mountains, N.H.

Being Stupid With Friends: A 32-Mile Dayhike in the White Mountains

By Michael Lanza

As we near the top of Mount Flume in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the first of nine summits we hope to reach today, a light shower begins falling. It seems a less-than-ideal portent near the front end of one of the longest and hardest days of hiking any of us has ever undertaken—especially for three people somewhere between two and three decades past their hiking prime. But this only strikes us as one more in a long list of reasons to laugh at the absurdity of our self-imposed mission: to see whether we still have the stuff to knock off a dayhike that few mountain walkers would even contemplate. In that context, the arrival of the rain we knew was forecasted comes all in a day’s foolishness.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once opined, “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

Read on

Crabtree Falls, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah National Forest, N.C.

Photo Gallery: Waterfalls of the North Carolina Mountains

By Michael Lanza

Sunlight still lit up the trees high up the mountainside above me, visible through the canopy of maple, oak, and tulip poplar trees, but down in the bottom of the valley, dusk had settled in at least an hour earlier. Rosebay rhododendron and a variety of ferns carpeted the ground. I had the trail all to myself hiking to Moore Cove, in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina; and save for the songs of some birds and the soft conversation of water flowing over rocks, the silence exerted an immediate calming effect—like I had taken a happy pill. It’s lovely to have a piece of Appalachian forest to yourself.

Then I reached Moore Cove and gazed up at a 50-foot waterfall free falling in a veil of silvery water over the lip of a deep, rock alcove. 

Read on

Rafters floating the Gates of Lodore section of the Green River through Dinosaur National Monument.

Why Conservation Matters: Rafting the Green River’s Gates of Lodore

By Michael Lanza

The momentarily sedate current of the Green River pulls our flotilla of five rafts and two kayaks toward what looks like a geological impossibility: a gigantic cleft at least a thousand feet deep, where the river appears to have chopped a path right through the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah. Sheer, cracked cliffs of burgundy-brown rock frame the gap. Box elder, juniper, and a few cottonwoods grow on broad sand bars backed by tiered walls that seem to reach infinitely upward and backward, eclipsing broad swaths of blue sky. A great blue heron stalks fish by the riverbank. We notice movement on river left and glance over to see two bighorn sheep dash up a rocky canyon wall so steep that none of us can imagine even walking up it.

These are the Gates of Lodore, portal to a canyon as famous today for its scenery and wilderness character as it was infamous for the catastrophes suffered by its first explorers, who set out in wooden boats a century and a half ago to map the West’s greatest river system.

Read on

A hiker in Garnet Canyon, Grand Teton National Park.

Great Hike: Garnet Canyon, Grand Teton National Park

By Michael Lanza

Snow still covered the ground deeply at the very end of May as my friend Dave Simpson and I hiked up into Garnet Canyon, in Grand Teton National Park. We were there to attempt a one-day climb of the Middle Teton; but in the mountains, things do not always go as planned. Snow conditions were softer and more unstable than we expected, and as we hiked to well above 10,000 feet, we saw seven wet avalanches slough off the peaks to either side of us (none, fortunately, threatening us). So we abandoned our climbing plans, but still enjoyed one of the premier dayhikes in the Tetons—as I think you’ll see in this photo gallery from that day.

Read on

Climbers hiking toward the Mountaineers Route on California's Mount Whitney.

Roof of the High Sierra: A Father-Son Climb of Mount Whitney

By Michael Lanza On the long, uphill hike toward the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, in the middle of April, the alpine sun and wind behave like a couple married for far too long, who take their frequent disagreements to extremes that make everyone else uncomfortable. The sun offers us a hug of much-needed warmth one moment, only …

Read on