backpacking Glacier National Park

A backpacker hiking the Dawson Pass Trail in Glacier National Park.

Backpacking Glacier National Park—a Photo Gallery

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By Michael Lanza

If you have ever backpacked in Glacier National Park, you know you want to return. If you haven’t yet, then isn’t it time? One of America’s flagship national parks, it’s a must-see destination for backpackers because of the eye-popping scenery, remoteness, and an extremely rare variety of megafauna—including mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and black and grizzly bears—as the photo gallery below from my numerous trips in Glacier shows. It includes images from my most-recent trip, a nearly 70-mile hike a week ago through some of the park’s premier scenery on its east side.

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A campsite at Overland Lake on the Ruby Crest Trail, Ruby Mountains, Nevada.

Tent Flap With A View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites

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By Michael Lanza

An unforgettable campsite can define a backcountry trip. Sometimes that perfect spot where you spend a night forges the memory that remains the most vivid long after you’ve gone home. A photo of that camp can send recollections of the entire adventure rushing back to you—it does for me. I’ve been very fortunate to have pitched a tent in many great backcountry campsites over more than three decades of backpacking all over the U.S. and the world. I’ve distilled the list of my favorite spots down to these 25.

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A backpacker on the northern Highline Trail in Glacier National Park.

10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

Is it possible to find solitude backpacking in a national park as popular as Glacier? The answer is an unequivocal yes—even in Glacier’s relatively short peak season of mid-July through mid-September. And the strategies for doing so are remarkably simple and will not compromise the quality of your experience in other ways—in fact, encountering fewer people only increases the chances of encountering wildlife. This article describes five backpacking trips where you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy serious solitude in Glacier National Park.

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A backpacker on the Continental Divide Trail above Medicine Grizzly Lake in Glacier National Park.

How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

There are two immutable truths about backpacking in Glacier National Park. First, from its stirring landscape, where glaciers hang off muscular mountains and sheer cliffs soar above deeply green valleys dappled with lakes and waterfalls, to almost certain sightings of wildlife like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, moose, elk, and grizzly and black bears, there’s really no place in the continental United States quite like Glacier.

Second, it’s one of the hardest backcountry or wilderness permits to get in the National Park System. And Glacier has just announced its new wilderness permit reservation system for 2023.

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A backpacker above the Belly River Valley in Glacier National Park.

The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park

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By Michael Lanza

The three bighorn sheep lifted their heavily horned heads to gaze at us, but never budged from their beds of grass amid boulders on a mountainside above the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park. The mountain goats we saw on various occasions gave us little more attention than that. And fortunately, the grizzly bear sow with two cubs in tow that passed within about 30 feet of us—an encounter of less than 10 seconds that is etched into my memory forever—gave us no more than a passing glance.

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