Welcome to The Big Outside!
Hi, I'm Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside and former Northwest Editor at Backpacker magazine. Click my photo to learn more about me and my blog. Sign up for my free email newsletter in the blue box above. Click on Subscribe Now! in the main menu (top right) to get full access to all of my stories on America's best backpacking, hiking, and outdoor adventures. And click on Ask Me in the main menu to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.
Read My Book
Tag Archives: Utah
Insider Tips: The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park
By Michael Lanza
At a bit over 147,000 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.
This story will point you to Zion’s 10 best dayhikes (based on my personal experience of many visits there). See also my story “How to Avoid the Crowds When Hiking in Zion,” with insider tips on how to have a much more pleasant experience when hiking in what has become the third most-visited national park (after Great Smoky Mountains and Grand Canyon). Follow those tips and you will discover an entirely different experience when you’re not sharing the trails with hundreds of other hikers—as are often seen on hikes like Angels Landing and the lower Narrows from spring through fall. Continue reading →
The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First
By Michael Lanza
You want to explore the best backpacking in America’s desert Southwest, but you’re not sure where to begin, or how some of these trips you’ve read about compare for scenery and difficulty. You’ve heard about the need to carry huge loads of water, and environmental challenges like dangerous heat, rugged terrain, flash floods and even (gulp) quicksand. Or maybe you’ve taken one or two backpacking trips there and now you’re hungry for another one and seeking ideas for where to go next.
Well, I gotcha covered. The five trips described in this story comprise what might be called a Southwest Backpacking Starter Package. They are all beginner- and family-friendly in terms of trail or route quality, access, and navigability, and some have good water availability. But most importantly, regardless of their relative ease logistically, they all deliver the goods on the kind of adventure and scenery you go to the Southwest hoping to find. Continue reading →
The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest
David Ports backpacking the Royal Arch Loop in the Grand Canyon.
By Michael Lanza
Everyone remembers his or her first visit to the desert Southwest. The bizarre, vividly colored geology of southern Utah and Arizona ignites wildfires of the imagination that burn permanent impressions. I recall staring at rock formations sculpted in ways I’d never observed before and thinking, “How can this be?” And you’ll find very worthy dayhikes and roadside eye candy in classic parks like Grand Canyon, Zion, and Canyonlands. But leaving civilization for days to probe more deeply into those parks—and other canyon-country gems you may not know much about—opens invisible doors to experiences that amplify the feelings inspired by these mystical landscapes.
After a quarter-century of chasing the best backpacking trips in southern Utah and the Grand Canyon area, I’ve put together this list of what I submit are the 10 best. Continue reading →
The Must-Do Dayhikes in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks
Skyline Arch in Arches National Park.
Hi Michael,
My wife and I are heading to Moab at the end of April for a week of hiking in Canyonlands and Arches. We’re excited about the trip; it’s our first to that area. We are dayhikers, but we’re not afraid of mileage. (The Highline Trail from Logan Pass down to Swiftcurrent Pass in Glacier National Park was one the most enjoyable days we’ve had in the national park system.)
I’ve been weighing our many options for hikes and I have a question: What are the must-do dayhikes in Arches and Canyonlands? Continue reading →
What Zion’s Narrows Closure to Backpackers Means to Us All
A backpacker in The Narrows in Zion National Park.
By Michael Lanza
We rightly think of America’s national parks as inviolable public treasures, protected in perpetuity to remain unchanged forever, always there for us to admire and enjoy. Zion National Park’s closure yesterday of one of the very best backpacking trips in the Southwest—the 16-mile descent of The Narrows from top to bottom—due to a landowner suddenly revoking public access to the trailhead where the trek begins, reminds us that even the best-guarded treasures can be looted. Continue reading →