America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
Chances are that, by now, you’ve heard of Idaho’s Sawtooths—having typed that name into a search box may be the reason you’ve landed on this story. Maybe you’ve been intrigued at what you’ve heard or images you’ve seen from Idaho’s best-known mountain range. Perhaps you’ve even been there and the experience has only amplified your curiosity to see more of this range.
By Michael Lanza
I returned to the Grand Canyon yet again in April, my eighth backpacking trip there in the past 16 years. Any psychologist, behavioral scientist, or criminologist would describe that as an established pattern of behavior. I confess: I can’t get enough of that place. This time, six of us, family and friends, spent four days hiking about 36 miles from the Bright Angel Trailhead to the Hermit Trailhead off the South Rim, including a trail with a reputation as one of the canyon’s most difficult: the Boucher (photos in the gallery, below). Hiking more than nine miles and about 4,000 feet up it on our last day (and you would not want to hike down it), we found it matched its reputation as strenuous, with sections of scrambling over rockslide debris and a lot of steep uphill.
But it also matched its reputation for beauty, with incomparably Grand Canyon-scale vistas from the moment you step onto the trail, culminating with a long traverse on the rim of The Esplanade, overlooking a huge swath of the canyon (and seeing one of the best backcountry campsites I’ve hiked past). Plus, we traversed an excellent section of the Tonto Trail, including the stretch between Hermit Canyon and Boucher Canyon that sees much less human traffic (photo above).
By Michael Lanza
We all love the majesty of mountains. But the vividly colored, sometimes bizarre, often incomprehensible geology of the Southwest canyon country enchants and inspires us in ways that words can only begin to describe. And while you will find very worthy dayhikes and even roadside eye candy in classic parks like Grand Canyon, Zion, and Canyonlands, you really have to put on a backpack and probe more deeply into those parks—and other canyon-country gems you may not know much about—to get a full sense of the scale, details, and hidden mysteries of these mystical landscapes.
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.
By Michael Lanza
The Grand Canyon’s appeal to backpackers may seem elusive. It’s hard, it’s dry, it’s often quite hot with little respite from the blazing sun. But while those aspects of hiking there are rarely out of mind, when I recall backpacking in the canyon, I conjure mental images of waterfalls, creeks, and intimate side canyons sheltering perennial streams that nurture lush oases in the desert. I think of wildflowers carpeting the ground for as far as the eye can see. I recall campsites on beaches by the Colorado River and on promontories overlooking a wide expanse of the canyon.
And, of course, I picture the endless vistas stretching for miles in every direction, where impossibly immense stone towers loom thousands of feet above an unfathomably vertiginous and complex landscape.