Bright Angel Trail

A backpacker hiking the Teton Crest Trail on Death Canyon Shelf, Grand Teton National Park.

10 Outdoor Adventures to Put on Your Bucket List Now

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By Michael Lanza

Are you looking for great trip ideas for your personal “bucket list?” Well, you’ve clicked to the right place. This freshly updated list spotlights 10 of the best backpacking and hiking trips in the U.S. and around the world—from Grand Teton, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Canyonlands national parks to Canadian Rockies hikes that belong on any list of the world’s great treks, plus some adventures that may not be on your radar—all of them worthy of your bucket list.

All of them are also trips that you should—or must—start planning now to take them in 2027.

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A backpacker hiking down the South Kaibab Trail in the Grand Canyon.

10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do

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By Michael Lanza

This is, in a way, a story about obsession. Or a love affair. Or both. Those metaphors best describe how the Grand Canyon constantly lures me back when I’m thinking about spring and fall hiking and backpacking trips.

It is that rare kind of natural environment that exists on a scale of its own, like Alaska or the Himalaya. There’s something soul-stirring and hypnotic about its infinite vistas, the deceptive immensity of the canyon walls and stone towers, and the way the foreground and background continually expand and shrink as you ascend and descend elevation gradients of a vertical mile or more—all of which validates enduring the wilting heat and trails that sometimes seem better suited to rattlesnakes and scorpions than bipedal primates.

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A backpacker descending toward Granite Creek on the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.

10 Awe-Inspiring Wild Places in America’s West

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By Michael Lanza

Over more than three decades of backpacking adventures throughout America’s West, I’ve been fortunate to explore deeply into our most cherished national parks, wilderness areas, and protected backcountry. All of them are special. But some places rise above the rest, inspiring a sense of awe that can motivate us to reorder our priorities and rearrange our lives—and they have that effect on us every time we return to them. This story spotlights those special places in the West and many trips that you can take in them.

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

How to Hike or Run the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim in a Day

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By Michael Lanza

Minutes after we started hiking down the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail, we descended through short, tight switchbacks where the trail clings to the face of a cliff. The earth dropped away precipitously beyond the trail’s edge; we gazed down nearly a vertical mile into the bottom of The Big Ditch. Not much farther along, we stopped, awestruck, at a breathtaking overlook of perhaps the most famous canyon on the planet.

Those first vistas laid bare the audacity of our plans: to walk across this awesome chasm in one push, on a 21-mile, nearly 11,000-vertical-foot, rim-to-rim dayhike.

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Larch trees glowing with fall color, reflected in Rainbow Lake in the North Cascades National Park Complex.

15 Awesome Fall Backpacking Trips

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By Michael Lanza

The imminent end of summer always feels a little melancholy. After all, it marks the close of the prime season for getting into the mountains. But it also signals the beginning of a time of year when many mountain ranges become less crowded just as they’re hitting a sweet zone in terms of temperatures, the lack of bugs, and foliage color. Autumn also stands out as an ideal season for many Southwest hikes, with moderate temperatures and even some stunning color.

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