Great Smoky Mountains National Park

A backpacker hiking the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail in Glacier National Park.

10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit

by

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.

Read on

Larch trees glowing with fall color, reflected in Rainbow Lake in the North Cascades National Park Complex.

15 Awesome Fall Backpacking Trips

by

By Michael Lanza

The imminent end of summer always feels a little melancholy. After all, it marks the close of the prime season for getting into the mountains. But it also signals the beginning of a time of year when many mountain ranges become less crowded just as they’re hitting a sweet zone in terms of temperatures, the lack of bugs, and fall foliage color. Autumn also stands out as an ideal season for many Southwest hikes, with moderate temperatures and even some stunning color.

Read on

A backpacker above Liberty Lake on the Ruby Crest Trail, Ruby Mountains, Nevada.

18 Great Backpacking Trips You Can Still Take in 2024

by

By Michael Lanza

So you didn’t plan months in advance to reserve a permit for backpacking this summer in Glacier, Yosemite, on the Teton Crest Trail, Wonderland Trail, or John Muir Trail or in another popular national park? Or you tried to reserve a permit but failed? Now what? Where can you still go this year?

You’re in luck. This story describes 18 backpacking trips you can still plan and take this year—because most of them don’t require a permit reservation, and in the case of Yosemite, North Cascades, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Olympic, and Capitol Reef national parks, where one is required, you can still obtain a backcountry permit for this summer or fall.

Read on

A backpacker on the Continental Divide Trail in Glacier National Park.

12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking

by

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.

Read on

Backpackers on Trail 154 to Cramer Divide in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains.

How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking

by

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. 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 matters. The tips below explain the thought process I follow that make my trips much more enjoyable and will do the same for you.

Read on