Arizona

A backpacker on the Tonto Trail above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon

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By Michael Lanza

All three of us have hiked this footpath before, and even still, our first steps down the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail leave us with hanging jaws. It’s early morning under clear skies, with the low-angle sunlight bringing the vastness of this chasm into sharp clarity—every inconceivably towering monolith, bottomless abyss, and sheer precipice—and we’re sputtering silly superlatives about the vista unfurling before us.

This is, after all, the world’s grandest canyon. It does that to people, even hardened veteran backpackers like us.

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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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A backpacker at a waterfall on the Deer Creek Trail in the Grand Canyon.

Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop

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By Michael Lanza

The heat presses in from all sides as we hike down the Bill Hall Trail off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The overhead sun feels as if it has expanded to a supernova threatening to engulf the planet. The rocks radiate waves of heat up at us; I wonder if they might actually reach egg-frying temperature today. Even the air seems to be rising to a boil like a vast kettle on a stove. We hike cautiously over broken stones that slide underfoot, leaning out onto our trekking poles for the two- and three-foot ledge drops on this path—which appears better suited to bighorn sheep than to bipedal primates hauling backpacks weighed down with gear, food, and a surplus of a rare element out here: water.

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The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Photo Gallery: Celebrating the National Park Service Centennial

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By Michael Lanza

When the National Park Service turns 100 on Aug. 25, it will mark not just the diamond anniversary of what writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously called “the best idea we ever had”—it marks the evolution and growth of that idea from a handful of parks created in the early days to a system in many ways without parallel, that protects 52 million acres of mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, deserts, prairies, caves, islands, bays, fjords, badlands, natural arches, and seashores in 59 parks. Without that protection, these places that draw visitors from around the world would otherwise almost certainly have been exploited and destroyed.

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Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona.

3-Minute Read: Hiking Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly

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By Michael Lanza

Our guide Edwina, a woman from the Navajo Nation—or as she tells us the people call themselves, the “Diné” (pronounced da-NAY)—leads our two-family group of eight along a zigzagging, sometimes exposed, primitive “trail” dropping several hundred feet into Canyon del Muerto, a wide, river-cut gorge of sheer, red-rock walls, one of the two main chasms of Canyon de Chelly. Descending narrow ledges, tilting slabs, dry water runnels, and manmade steps carved into the rock, we follow her on a storied and occasionally heart-pounding path into the history of ancient and modern civilizations—and in many ways, the history of the United States.

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