Great Smoky Mountains National Park

A backpacker hiking the Uinta Highline Trail west of Red Knob Pass, High Uintas Wilderness, Utah.

12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking

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By Michael Lanza

Solitude has always reigned as one of the holy grails of backpacking: We all dream of finding that lonely campsite deep in the wilderness with an amazing vista, or hiking for miles or days encountering few or even no other people on the trail. Unfortunately, reality often conflicts with expectations for many backpackers when they discover that the dream trip they’ve been anticipating for months was apparently a dream trip for an awful lot of other people, too.

But the truth is that there are many ways to find backcountry solitude because the odds work in your favor: Most wilderness trails have few or no people on them most of the time. The search for solitude is less a needle-in-a-haystack conundrum and more a matter of thinking outside the box: You simply have to understand where and when to look for it—and stop thinking like everyone else thinks.

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Backpackers hiking to Island Lake in Wyoming's Wind River Range.

How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking

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By Michael Lanza

You can find abundant information online offering advice on how to plan a backpacking trip (including my 12 expert tips)—some of it good and some, frankly, not very thorough or simply clickbait created by sites lacking any expertise in backpacking. But there’s little advice out there on how to choose where to go backpacking—and many backpackers fail to consider key aspects of trips that greatly affect their experience: They follow an essentially backward decision-making process.

While this may sound esoteric and irrelevant to you, I’ve learned that how you decide where to go greatly affects how well your trip goes—it really does matter. The tips below explain the thought process I follow that make my trips much more enjoyable and will do the same for you.

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A hiker in the North Fork Cascade Canyon, Grand Teton National Park.

The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes

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By Michael Lanza

America’s most stunning landscapes are protected within our 63 national parks, and some of the very finest scenery within our national heritage can be reached on dayhikes. Some of these hikes you may not have done yet or heard of. Others are famous, but there’s a reason for that: They are mind-blowingly gorgeous, so they stand out even in parks with multiple, five-star footpaths. You take these hikes for a one-of-a-kind experience.

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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 hiking the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail in Glacier National Park.

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, 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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