America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
How was your 2025? I hope you got outdoors as much as possible with the people you care about—and you enjoyed adventures that inspired you. I’m sharing in this story photos from several backpacking and hiking trips I took this year, from the Grand Canyon in March and southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, Buckskin Gulch, and Paria Canyon in April to Idaho’s Sawtooths in August and again in early October and Wyoming’s Wind River Range in September.
By Michael Lanza
As a parent of two young adults who’s taken them outdoors since before they can remember, I’ll share with you the biggest and in some ways most surprising lesson I’ve learned from these trips: Our outdoor adventures have been the best times we’ve had together as a family—and not just because the places are so special. The greatest benefit of these trips is that they have given us innumerable days with only each other and nature for entertainment—no electronic devices or other distractions that construct virtual walls within families in everyday life.
For my family, our experiences together outdoors make up most of our richest and favorite memories. They have brought us closer together.
By Michael Lanza
America’s 63 national parks preserve over 52 million acres of uniquely beautiful and genuinely awe-inspiring places in nature, and the payoff for our country’s foresight in protecting them is a lifetime’s worth of unforgettable experiences—many of them entirely feasible, safe, and really fun for families with kids of all ages. Best of all, you’ll find that sharing these adventures will create your best times together as a family, as they have for mine.
By Michael Lanza
A thin, hazy overcast keeps the sun from frying my longtime friend and adventure partner David Ports and me as we descend the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail—a trail I’ve now hiked more times than I can immediately recall. And yet, watching how the marching, broken clouds cause the light to shift across the broad expanse of canyon visible to us, seeming to repaint and reshape the landscape every few minutes, it still feels fresh and thrilling to me.
By Michael Lanza
After descending seven miles and over 4,800 feet on the Grand Canyon’s always-stunning South Kaibab Trail and crossing the footbridge to the north side of the Colorado River, we follow the path through the Bright Angel backpacker campground to its end. There, not marked by any sign and not obvious to anyone unaware of it, a faint path leads through low bushes. Within moments, it turns and runs straight up a steep canyon wall of cacti and other desert flora, loose scree, and boulders, ascending about 1,500 vertical feet in the first mile, beyond what we can see from the bottom of it.
Gazing up with a volatile mix of excitement and trepidation, we start a long uphill grind.