Grand Canyon South Rim backpacking trips

A backpacker hiking the Beamer Trail above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon Years Later: As Hard—And Amazing—As Ever

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By Nate Lanza

The relentless midday sun of this harsh desert seems to bake the parched earth and all the animals upon it—with its greatest cruelty reserved, it seems, for me—as I pound down the biggest descent on the Beamer Trail, one of the most remote paths in the Grand Canyon. I’m racing the pain in my joints and the building heat in my head, as well as the steadily rising heat of the day, toward my salvation: a sandy beach on the shore of a refreshingly frigid and uncharacteristically clear Colorado River. 

Reaching it, I escape my pack and shoes as though they’re on fire and flop into the crystalline waters of a shallow eddy, where the river and I rest together for a few blissful seconds, until I rise in a spell of cold-induced euphoria to dash gleefully around my new sanctuary. Unfortunately, my reverie proves short-lived: Eight miles remain to our next camp, and it’s already noon.

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A backpacker hiking the Tonto Trail from Hermit Canyon to Boucher Canyon in the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon’s Best Backpacking Trips—A Photo Gallery

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By Michael Lanza

I returned to the Grand Canyon yet again in April, my ninth backpacking trip there in the past 17 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, a group of family and friends, including my son, Nate, spent five days hiking about 54 miles from the Tanner Trailhead to the Grandview Trailhead off the South Rim, including a route with a reputation as one of the canyon’s most difficult: the Escalante (photos in the gallery, below). Four of us, all accustomed to difficult backcountry terrain, found it matched its reputation for loose sections and a lot of steep uphill, including one scramble up a cliff; we spent about seven hours covering nine miles on it. And our last day consisted of hiking more than 12 miles and about 5,700 feet uphill. A typical Grand Canyon adventure.

But our entire hike also delivered the typical, incomparably Grand Canyon-scale vistas from start to finish, culminating with the long ascent of the Grandview Trail, overlooking a huge swath of the canyon.

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A backpacker at a waterfall on the Deer Creek Trail in the Grand Canyon.

The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest

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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.

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A backpacker on the Tonto Trail in the Grand Canyon.

5 Reasons You Must Backpack in the Grand Canyon

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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.

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A backpacker above Liberty Lake on the Ruby Crest Trail in Nevada's Ruby Mountains.

The 30 Nicest Backcountry Campsites I’ve Hiked Past

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By Michael Lanza

It is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of life, like death and taxes: Occasionally on backpacking trips you will hike past one of the most sublime patches of wilderness real estate you have ever laid eyes on, a spot so idyllic you can already see your tent pitched there and you standing outside it, warm mug in your hands, watching a glorious sunset. But it’s early and your plan entails hiking farther before you stop for the day—not camping there. Or your permit isn’t for that site. Or even worse, you are looking for a campsite, but someone else has already occupied this little corner of Heaven.

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