America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
Are you looking for great trip ideas for your bucket list? Well, you’ve clicked to the right place. This freshly updated story spotlights some of the most iconic wildlands in the U.S., including Glacier (photo above), Yosemite, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Sequoia national parks, southern Utah’s national parks and monuments, two wilderness areas, and two international adventures that may not be on your radar—all of them worthy of your bucket list.
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.
By Michael Lanza
We can all remember specific places that we consider the best days of hiking we’ve ever had. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate: I have hiked many trails in America and around the world that would probably make anyone’s list of most-scenic hikes. From numerous trips in iconic national parks like Yosemite, Zion, Grand Canyon, and Glacier to the John Muir Trail and Teton Crest Trail and some of the world’s great treks, including the Alta Via 2 in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, the Tour du Mont Blanc, New Zealand’s Tongariro Alpine Crossing, Iceland’s Laugavegur and Fimmvörðuháls trails, and the icy and jagged mountains of Norway and Patagonia, here’s a list of the hands-down prettiest days I’ve ever spent walking dirt and rock footpaths.
I think you’ll find some places in here to add to your must-do list.
By Michael Lanza
At a bit over 148,000 acres, Zion comes nowhere near America’s largest national parks in sheer immensity. Zion could fit inside Yosemite National Park five times, inside the Everglades 10 times, inside Yellowstone 15 times, and inside our largest park, Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias, 89 times. But if you’re a hiker, Zion harbors, mile for mile, some of the most breathtaking scenery to be found on any trails in the National Park System.
By Michael Lanza
Thrilling, scenic, and enormously popular, an impressive feat of trail building, an intimidating and exposed scramble—these are some of the descriptions commonly given to Angels Landing in Zion National Park, all of them accurate. It also has a reputation as one of the scariest and most dangerous hikes in the National Park System—a claim that would seem somewhat overblown just by virtue of the fact that innumerable thousands of people, including many novice hikers, safely venture up and down it every year. For those willing to brave the exposure, the 5,790-foot summit offers arguably the best view of Zion Canyon.
Constructed nearly a century ago and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, now one of the classic dayhikes in America and certainly one of “The Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks“ and “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes,” Angels Landing is safe for anyone exercising reasonable caution and should be in the sights of every avid hiker. This story explains what you need to know about it.