America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
Bryce Canyon’s Navajo Loop/Queens Garden Loop is a popular trail for good reason, with constant views of hoodoos—the multi-colored, limestone, sandstone, and mudstone spires that look like giant, melting candles, including the famous formation called Thor’s Hammer. But once turning onto the Peek-a-Boo Loop, you lose the crowds—and discover the scenic heart of Bryce Canyon while hiking below the Wall of Windows and row after row of towers in fluorescent shades of red and orange.
By Michael Lanza
While I always prefer to get as far from any road as possible whenever I visit a mountain range, one truth that may—and perhaps must—be said of the Canadian Rockies is that they will leave you smitten with an lifelong, unshakeable love before you even step out of the car. Driving to any trailhead along the 143-mile-long (232-kilometer) Icefields Parkway between Lake Louise and the town of Jasper, or along the Trans-Canada Highway across the mountains, and you will struggle to sound like a literate person as superlatives and simple gasps of “wow” roll repeatedly off your tongue. On my most recent visit we saw, in addition to countless, sizable glaciers tumbling off a chain of peaks stretching for miles, perhaps the largest grizzly bear of my life (a sow with two cubs), two bull elk with racks possibly broader than my wingspan, and a pod of bighorn sheep—all from the car in one afternoon on the Icefields Parkway.
But if you’re like me, you go to the Canadian Rockies to walk deeply into the mountains, either for a day or multiple days. This story will provide you with a window into that experience, sharing images from many of the backpacking trips and dayhikes I have taken in Canada’s Rockies on my recent trip and over the past three-plus decades, including the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.
By Michael Lanza
If you invited all of the major Western national parks to a big family dinner, Zion would sit at the kids’ table. At a bit over 148,000 acres, Zion is dwarfed by the iconic wilderness parks that are the most sought-after by backpackers, like Yosemite (which is five times larger), Glacier (nearly seven times larger), and Grand Canyon (eight times larger), all of them with hundreds of miles of trails for backpackers to explore. But what Zion lacks in size it more than makes up for in breathtaking scenery—and for backpackers, some of the most unique, wonderful, and relatively easy multi-day hikes in the National Park System.
By Michael Lanza
Thrilling, scenic, and enormously popular, an impressive feat of trail building, an intimidating and exposed scramble—these are some of the descriptions commonly given to Angels Landing in Zion National Park, all of them accurate. It also has a reputation as one of the scariest and most dangerous hikes in the National Park System—a claim that would seem somewhat overblown just by virtue of the fact that innumerable thousands of people, including many novice hikers, safely venture up and down it every year. For those willing to brave the exposure, the 5,790-foot summit offers arguably the best view of Zion Canyon.
Constructed nearly a century ago and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, now one of the classic dayhikes in America and certainly one of “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes,” Angels Landing is safe for anyone exercising reasonable caution and should be in the sights of every avid hiker. This story explains what you need to know about it.
By Michael Lanza
As we neared Gunsight Pass in Glacier National Park, on a three-day family backpacking trip, a man and woman in their fifties stopped to talk with us. They sized up our kids and smiled; Nate was nine and Alex was seven. “We’re impressed!” they told us. “We never had any luck trying to get our kids to backpack when they were young.” We chatted a bit and then headed off in opposite directions on the trail.
After they were out of earshot, Alex turned to me, wanting to clarify a point: “You didn’t get us to do this,” she told me. “We wanted to do it.” Her words, of course, warmed my heart. But her comment also spotlighted the biggest lesson for parents hoping to raise their kids to love the outdoors: Create experiences that make them eager to go out again the next time.