Bright Angel Trail

A backpacker above Crack-in-the-Wall, Coyote Gulch, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah.

7 Great Southwest Backpacking Trips for Beginners

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By Michael Lanza

You want to explore the best backpacking in America’s desert Southwest, but you’re not sure where to begin, or how some of these trips you’ve read about compare for scenery and difficulty. You’ve heard about the need to carry huge loads of water, and environmental challenges like dangerous heat, rugged terrain, flash floods and even (gulp) quicksand. Or you want to take your kids and make sure you pick an appropriate trip for them. Or you’ve taken one or two backpacking trips there and now you’re hungry for another one and seeking ideas for where to go next.

Well, I gotcha covered. The seven trips described in this story comprise what might be called a Southwest Backpacking Starter Package. They are all beginner- and family-friendly in terms of trail or route quality, access, and navigability, and some have good water availability. But most importantly, regardless of their relative ease logistically, they all deliver the goods on the kind of adventure and scenery you go to the Southwest hoping to find.

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A backpacker hiking over Clouds Rest in Yosemite National Park.

10 Perfect National Park Backpacking Trips for Beginners

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By Michael Lanza

So you’re a novice backpacker, or you’re planning your first backpacking trip in a big, Western national park, or you have kids you want to take on a relatively easy backpacking trip—and you want to sample the best scenery, trails, and backcountry campsites that experienced backpackers get to enjoy in our national parks. No worries. These 10 trips in Grand Teton, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Mount Rainier, Canyonlands, and two in Yosemite (photo above) are ideal for beginners and families, with easy to moderately difficult days and simple logistics, while delivering the spectacular vistas that each of these parks is famous for.

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Backpackers hiking the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia National Park.

The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips

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By Michael Lanza

Olympic, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier, Zion, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, Canyonlands, Sequoia, Great Smoky Mountains. To backpackers, these names read like a list of America’s greatest cathedrals in nature—and no surprise, because these parks harbor some of the most scenic wilderness trails in the country. Hike any of them and it will earn a spot on your personal top-10 list. Knock off every trip on this list and you will experience some of the finest landscapes not only in the nation, but on the planet.

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A backpacker overlooking the Colorado River on the Tonto Trail east of Bass Canyon, along the Gems Route in the Grand Canyon.

10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit

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By Michael Lanza

Backpackers planning a trip in popular national parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Glacier, Zion, Grand Canyon (photo above), Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Great Smoky Mountains, and others have one experience in common: A high percentage of them fail in their attempt to reserve a backcountry permit—and many probably don’t fully understand why. This story will answer your questions about how and when to reserve a backcountry permit in many parks—most of which have their own, unique reservation process and dates to make a reservation. And this story will share my expert tips on maximizing your chances of success.

Countless backpacking trips over more than three decades—during which I was the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine for 10 years and have now run this blog for even longer—have taught me many tricks for landing coveted permits in flagship parks, which receive far more requests than they can fill. The strategies and knowledge of these permit processes outlined below will help you land a hard-to-get national park backcountry permit—just as they have worked countless times for me.

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David Ports backpacking the Tonto Trail west of Horn Creek in Grand Canyon National Park.

16 Photos From 2025 That Will Inspire Your Next Adventure

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By Michael Lanza

How was your 2025? I hope you got outdoors as much as possible with the people you care about—and you enjoyed adventures that inspired you. I’m sharing in this story photos from several backpacking and hiking trips I took this year, from the Grand Canyon in March and southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, Buckskin Gulch, and Paria Canyon in April to Idaho’s Sawtooths in August and again in early October and Wyoming’s Wind River Range in September.

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