America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
As I nosed my two-person sea kayak, shared with my seven-year-old daughter, Alex, onto a wilderness beach in Johns Hopkins Inlet, deep in Southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, our lead guide, Sarah, strolled over to me and announced, “We’re thinking of camping here. There’s just one problem: It’s a bear highway.”
By Michael Lanza
Horsetail Falls slices a thin, glowing white, 176-foot-tall incision down a cliff of black rock wallpapered with moss and ferns, crashing into a shallow, chilly wading pool at its base. To see it, today’s first waterfall, we had to hike all the way across the road from the parking lot.
My son, Nate, and daughter, Alex, give Horsetail the once-over without much comment or enthusiasm. It’s not easy to impress elementary-school-age kids with nature, not even when it roars louder and looms larger than their favorite video games. I understand why: To kids, nature’s no good if it’s no better than a picture on the wall—they want to immerse themselves in it, get dirty and wet and throw stuff. And that water’s too chilly on this overcast, cool, June day to wade into that pool. But I know they’ll be more impressed with the next falls awaiting us. And sure enough, a little while later, when we turn a corner on the trail through dense, dripping rainforest and see Ponytail Falls, they pick up the pace and gush, “That’s cool!”
By Michael Lanza
I feel the familiar nervous excitement just walking up to the base of the sun-warmed granite cliff, climbing gear jangling on my harness, rope over my shoulder. For various reasons, I haven’t gotten on rock in months. But as soon as I start moving upward and stick the first cam into a crack, I realize how much I’ve missed this intensity of focus, this sensation that there’s nothing else in the world except what I’m experiencing right here and now.
There aren’t many things in life that replicate the feeling of an eighth-grade date. For me, rock climbing still does it, after all these years.
By Michael Lanza
The trail tilts abruptly to a much steeper angle ahead of me. This is the uphill stretch that always whips the snot out of me. For several minutes that pass like epochs, I take a painful waltz with my anaerobic threshold, willing myself to keep running—even slowly—when my body just wants to stop, walk, and breathe without the sensation of flames in my lungs.
By Michael Lanza
My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, is engaged in some heavy intellectual lifting. I can tell by the way she stares quietly, her brow knitted in thought, at Upper Yosemite Falls. We’ve hiked for 90 minutes up a thousand vertical feet of hot, dusty trail above Yosemite Valley to stand below this curtain of water that plunges a sheer 1,430 feet off a cliff, ripping through the air with a sound like fighter jets buzzing us.