Is it possible to find solitude backpacking in a national park as popular as Glacier? The answer is an unequivocal yes—even in Glacier’s relatively short peak season of mid-July through mid-September. And the strategies for doing so are remarkably simple and will not compromise the quality of your experience in other ways—in fact, encountering fewer people only increases the chances of encountering wildlife. This article describes five backpacking trips where you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy serious solitude in Glacier National Park.

For backpackers, Glacier delivers one of the most inspiring and unique wilderness experiences in the country, with scenery almost unmatched and a high likelihood of spotting megafauna seen in few places in the Lower 48, including mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and black and grizzly bears. I have enjoyed stretches of solitude on each of the several backpacking trips I’ve taken in Glacier over the past three decades—including the 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. Most recently, I backpacked a variation of much of the Continental Divide Trail through the park, one of the trips described below.

This story describes 10 backpacking trips that deliver a high degree of solitude over most of their route—and a few represent the very best backpacking trips in Glacier, while also striking an optimum balance between five-star scenery and a high solitude quotient. This article really presents a list of the best multi-day hikes in Glacier, with a focus on avoiding the huddled masses most of the time. Each writeup below provides details on the overall degree of solitude on that trip and where you’ll find it, plus links to full stories at The Big Outside (which require a paid subscription to read in full; in this story, too, the first six trip descriptions below are free for anyone to read and the last four trips require a subscription  to read).

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

Key Details About Glacier

A Glacier backpacking permit is one of the hardest to get in the National Park System. Glacier holds two early-access lotteries at recreation.gov/permits/4675321, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people. General reservations open for all remaining backcountry campsites on May 1, running through Sept. 30. Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for reservations and 30 percent of campsites available for walk-in permits no more than one day in advance. See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Full disclosure: Complete solitude is rare during summer because most available permits get used, but you can walk for hours, even on some popular trails that are farther from trailheads and see few or no people; and by avoiding the easily accessible, very scenic areas like Lake McDonald, Many Glacier, Logan Pass, St. Mary, and Two Medicine, which attract the most dayhikers and backpackers.

Go after Labor Day and you’ll probably see fewer people than in July or August. Keep in mind that you could certainly see a snowstorm in September (or even in late August). Check the forecast before you head out, and have good base layers, insulation, and rain shells, waterproof-breathable boots, a warm bag, and a good tent. Snow at that time of year tends to melt away as soon as the sun comes out again, but be ready for any weather. And certainly carry pepper spray in grizzly country.

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See my feature stories about a 90-mile backpacking trip in northern Glacier, part of which is a 65-mile hike that I consider the best backpacking trip in Glacier; a 94-mile traverse of Glacier mostly on the Continental Divide Trail; and my family’s three-day backpacking trip on Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail. (Those stories require a paid subscription to read in full; in this story, too, the first six trip descriptions below are free for anyone to read and the last four trips require a subscription to read.)

As I suggest in the very first of my “12 Expert Tips For Finding Solitude When Backpacking,” the best strategy for finding solitude in a popular park like Glacier is to head to the less well-known areas of the park. Large parts of each trip described in this story do exactly that, and every one of them has Glacier-caliber natural beauty and a high likelihood of seeing wildlife.

Want to explore Glacier on dayhikes? See “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park” and “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park.”

Tell me what you think of these trips, or offer your own, in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

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Chief Mountain to Many Glacier

Distance: 20 miles
Solitude: Virtually the entire hike except south of the Iceberg Lake spur trail.

Arrange a shuttle from Many Glacier to the Chief Mountain customs station on the Canadian border, and hike from there up the Belly River Trail and Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail back to Many Glacier; an awesome 20-mile trip over two to three days. If you can, add the 8.6 miles (but not much elevation gain) out-and-back to Helen Lake, and camp there; the trail ends there, so you could have the place to yourself, and the lake sits in a deep mountain cirque below the soaring cliffs of Ahern Peak.

Even though Iceberg Lake is a popular dayhike, the short side trip out to it is well worth the time and putting up with the crowds—although dayhikers are generally there mostly during the middle hours of the day. See photos from these areas in my feature stories “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park” and “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier.”

After Glacier, hike the other nine of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

Bowman Lake to Kintla Lake

Distance: 37 miles
Solitude: The entire hike except within a few miles of Bowman or Kintla Lake.

The first backpacking trip I did in Glacier was a nearly 37-mile, point-to-point hike from Bowman Lake to Kintla Lake in the park’s northwest corner, via Brown Pass and Boulder Pass. It’s a beautiful hike in a less-accessible corner of the park, going from forest and lakes to alpine terrain with views of peaks and glaciers and likely sightings of mountain goats.

The three high camping areas along the route—Brown Pass, Hole in the Wall, and Boulder Pass—are all excellent, with views of the peaks in that corner of the park. I rode my mountain bike between the trailheads instead of arranging a vehicle shuttle; I recall it being less than an hour from Kintla (where I left our car) downhill to Bowman.

I can help you plan your Glacier hike or any trip you read about at my blog. Find out more here.

Traverse Glacier on the CDT

Distance: about 90 miles, with shorter options
Solitude: Most of the trip, except the Many Glacier and Two Medicine areas and within dayhiking range of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

The Continental Divide Trail crosses Glacier from north to south (but you can hike it in either direction), traversing some of the richest scenery and loneliest corners of the park—as well as, to be sure, a few popular areas where you’ll see more hikers, like Many Glacier, the southwest end of St. Mary Lake, and Two Medicine. Still, for the price of those short periods within range of dayhikers, you’ll enjoy the jaw-dropping vistas in those marquis spots while spending most of this gorgeous trip just in the company of your companions.

The CDT through Glacier has a primary and an alternate route. I wrote about combining parts of both on a 94-mile traverse I designed to hit much of the park’s best backcountry, including the high, alpine trail from Pitamakan Pass to Dawson Pass that’s among the best high-level hikes I’ve ever done (see lead photo at top of this story). Over six days, we saw bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, moose, and a griz, and heard elk bugling almost every morning and evening (it was September). Many shorter trips on pieces of the CDT are possible.

I wrote about two slightly different variations of this hike in my feature stories “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park” and “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier.” My downloadable e-guide “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park” explains all you need to know to plan and execute that trip—and it describes several shorter alternative itineraries that hit parts of Glacier that provide the best opportunities for solitude.

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Flattop Mountain

Distance: 28 to 31.5 miles
Solitude: Much of the trip, except the southern Highline Trail, Granite Park, and anywhere close to the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

This three- to four-day hike incorporates a piece of the exceptional Highline Trail with another high trail that sees far fewer hikers, starting from a trailhead that sees much less demand for a wilderness permit than starting at Logan Pass or Many Glacier. Plus, the dayhiking crowds on the southern end of the Highline Trail diminish greatly beyond a few miles north of Logan Pass—and it’s hands-down one of the most spectacular trails in the park. (The lead photo at the top of this story was taken on the Highline Trail just north of the Fifty Mountain backcountry campground.) You can also take in the awesome vistas from Sue Lake Overlook and Ahern Pass, both reached on short spur trails.

Take the free park shuttle bus to The Loop, west of Logan Pass on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, and hike from there north on the less-traveled Flattop Mountain Trail to the Fifty Mountain backcountry campground, then return south on the Highline Trail to finish either at The Loop (28.1 miles total) or go all the way to Logan Pass (31.5 miles); I recommend the latter, but hike the busier section, the 7.6 miles from Granite Park to Logan Pass, in early morning to see fewer hikers.

See “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park.”

Glacier’s Northern Loop

Distance: 52 to 65 miles
Solitude: Most of the trip, except the southern Highline Trail, Many Glacier area, and within dayhiking range of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

The popular, 52-mile Northern Loop takes in some of the most scenic and best-known areas of the park, including the northern section of the Highline Trail, the Ptarmigan Tunnel, and Many Glacier. It also may be the park’s most sought-after permit, or certainly one of them. And yes, you’ll see plenty of dayhikers along some of this route and Many Glacier feels like a small town. A 65-mile variation of the Northern Loop that I’ve hiked—which I consider the best multi-day hike in Glacier—adds stunning Piegan Pass below the Garden Wall and the entire Highline Trail.

But long stretches of both options for this route still deliver a satisfying degree of solitude. As I suggest in tip no. 6 of my “12 Expert Tips For Finding Solitude When Backpacking,” go deeper into the backcountry and you will find solitude. On most of this hike, you’ll walk through remote parts of the park’s northern tier, occasionally encountering only other backpackers. You’ll also see some of the park’s finest wilderness lakes and high country. And you might not mind spending one “backcountry” night in the Many Glacier campground and gorging on a restaurant dinner and breakfast.

See my story “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” photos of part of this loop in my story “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” and my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park,” which covers all the details on planning that trip, including my tips on the best way to do it and best campsites.

Nyack Creek-Coal Creek Loop

Distance: 45 miles
Solitude: The entire trip except when near either trailhead.

The approximately 45-mile Nyack Creek-Coal Creek loop, in the park’s much less-visited southwest corner, will deliver solitude, remoteness, and wildness in spades. Highlights of it are where Nyack Creek drops steeply over waterfalls through a narrow, rocky gorge; views of peaks on the Continental Divide along upper Nyack; Buffalo Woman Lake, which has a pretty waterfall and is ringed by mountains (Beaver Woman Lake is hard to reach—there’s no trail to it); and where the Coal Creek Trail passes through a large burned area with sweeping views of surrounding peaks.

Here on the west side of the Divide, the terrain is mostly less vertiginous than found in areas like Many Glacier, Logan Pass, and St. Mary, and much of this loop remains in forest; plus, sections of trail around Surprise Pass may be overgrown. There is a ford of the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, which can run high and fast in early summer, and several fords of Coal Creek, which is shallow; it may be more convenient to hike in water shoes or sandals for a while there.

Get the right gear for your trips. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents.”

See the two Glacier trips that rank among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips,” “12 Expert Tips For Finding Solitude When Backpacking,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside. Note that most of those stories require a paid subscription to read in full.

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those three stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-book versions of “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

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There are two immutable truths about backpacking in Glacier National Park. First, from its stirring landscape, where glaciers hang off muscular mountains and sheer cliffs soar above deeply green valleys dappled with lakes and waterfalls, to almost certain sightings of wildlife like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, moose, elk, and grizzly and black bears, there’s really no place in the continental United States quite like Glacier.

Second, it’s one of the hardest backcountry permits to get in the National Park System. But the new wilderness permit reservation system that Glacier adopted in 2023 and greatly improved in 2024 brings equity and order to the process. Still, knowing when and how to get a Glacier permit is critical if you want to backpack there.

In this story, I will offer tips on how to maximize your chances of getting a permit to backpack in Glacier, sharing expertise I’ve acquired from several trips there over the past three decades, including the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

And remember this: The permit system preserves a wilderness experience for backpackers in Glacier (as well as protecting the park from overuse). That’s a major reason why Glacier ranks among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips.”

Glacier National Park conducts two lotteries at recreation.gov/permits/4675321, for early-access times to reserve a backcountry permit: on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people (details below). For trips between June 15 and Sept. 30, Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for permit reservations and 30 percent of campsites available for walk-in permits no more than one day in advance during the backpacking season.

See my expert e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” both of which provide all you need to know to plan those trips, including very detailed tips on getting a high-demand backcountry permit, multiple itinerary options of varied lengths, the best campsites, plus expert advice on the ideal time of year, gear, and safety in bear country.

I’ve also helped many readers plan a very enjoyable backpacking trip in Glacier—including tips on maximizing their chances of getting a very hard-to-get permit and an itinerary customized for them. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can do that for you.

Like many stories at my blog, part of this story is free for anyone to read. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of this story—including tips it offers on strategies for maximizing your chances of getting a Glacier permit—and all stories about Glacier, as well as all stories at this blog, plus get a free or deeply discounted e-book.

Please share any thoughts or questions about this story, or your own tips, in the comments section at the bottom. I try to respond to all comments.

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Apply on Specific Dates in March

For backpacking permit reservations during the peak season of early summer into early autumn, Glacier National Park conducts two early-access lotteries at recreation.gov/permits/4675321, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people. The lottery only determines who gets awarded an early-access time to make a permit reservation; you won’t include any hiking itinerary details in your lottery entry.

The lotteries offer the best chance of reserving a backcountry permit for backpacking in most of the park, especially the most popular trails or an itinerary of more than one or two nights. People with earlier lottery timeslots will obviously see more camping availability than those who draw a later time. You can enter a lottery anytime during its 24-hour period and all applicants have an equal chance of being selected. Every person in your a party can enter and see who obtains the best time—and if multiple group members obtain a timeslot, all of them could try to reserve a permit.

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Standard group lottery winners will get an email on March 17 with a date and time between March 21 and April 30 when they can attempt to make a permit reservation. The recreation.gov system shows availability in real time; you will either find availability for your dates and campsites and complete the process with a permit reservation or fail to get one.

Successful large-group lottery entrants will receive an email from park wilderness permit staff on March 3 with instructions for making their permit reservation. The park issues just five reservations for large-group permits every year; other large-group permits must be obtained on a walk-in basis based on availability, which is hard to do.

After the early-access reservation period closes, general reservations open for all remaining backcountry campsites on May 1 at 8 a.m. Mountain Time, running through Sept. 30, although most backcountry camps will book very quickly. Glacier imposes a daily hiking limit of 16 miles for reserved permits.

There is a non-refundable $10 fee for a lottery application or any permit issued plus $7 per person per night, which can be refunded if canceled more than seven days prior to the trip start date at recreation.gov/permits/4675321.

See nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/backcountry-reservations.htm for more information and instructions on using Glacier’s permit page at recreation.gov/permits/4675321.

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Be Flexible With Your Dates and Itinerary

I’ve backpacked several times in Glacier over the years and I’ve failed to get a wilderness permit just once, for a reason I understood when I submitted that application: I sought only one specific itinerary and our dates were fixed, not flexible. I decided to just throw a hail Mary pass for a trip I wanted and see if I’d get really lucky. I didn’t. In a park like Glacier, that will almost guarantee you don’t get a permit—unless you have one of the earliest lottery timeslots to make a reservation.

As I write in my “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit,” the single most-effective strategy for maximizing your chances of getting a permit for a popular trip during its peak season is to have flexibility with your dates and itinerary.

Get my expert e-books to the best backpacking trip in Glacier
and backpacking the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier.

See all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside, including “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park,” “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier,” and “Jagged Peaks and Wild Goats: Backpacking Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail.” Like many stories at this blog, reading those in full requires a paid subscription to The Big Outside.

See also my expert e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can plan your backpacking trip in Glacier.

Start planning your next adventure now! See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips.”

So you’re a novice backpacker, or you’re planning your first backpacking trip in a big, Western national park, or you have kids you want to take on a relatively easy backpacking trip—and you want to sample the best scenery, trails, and backcountry campsites that experienced backpackers get to enjoy in our national parks. No worries. These 10 trips in Grand Teton, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Mount Rainier, Canyonlands, and two in Yosemite (photo above) are ideal for beginners and families, with easy to moderately difficult days and simple logistics, while delivering the spectacular vistas that each of these parks is famous for.

In fact, two of them (Yosemite and Grand Teton) were among the very first multi-day hikes I took as a novice backpacker more than three decades ago, and seven (Zion, Grand Teton, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Olympic, Mount Rainier, and Rocky Mountain) were among my kids’ earliest trips, which we took when they ranged in age from six to 10. They are also among the nicest multi-day hikes I’ve taken over more than three decades (and counting) of carrying a backpack, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

Besides delivering on all you expect from a backpacking trip in a flagship national park, any of these outings will help prepare you for bigger, more ambitious adventures. And like many stories at this blog, much of this one is free for anyone to read, but reading it all and seeing the entire list of backpacking trips is an exclusive benefit for paid subscribers to The Big Outside.

I can help you plan any of them—or any trip you read about at this blog, including beginner-friendly backpacking trips not in national parks, avoiding the need to reserve a permit months in advance. See my Custom Trip Planning page.

See also my stories “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips,” “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit,” “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” and “10 Tips for Taking Kids on Their First Backpacking Trip.”

Please tell me what you think of these trip ideas or offer your own in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Grand Teton’s Paintbrush-Cascade Canyons Loop

Distance: 19.7 miles
Difficulty: Moderate

The 19.7-mile loop linking up Paintbrush and Cascade canyons from String Lake offers something of a highlights reel of Grand Teton National Park and is undoubtedly among the most scenic sub-20-mile, multi-day hikes in the National Park System. With nearly 4,000 feet of elevation gain and loss, the loop crosses one of the highest points reached via trail in the park, 10,720-foot Paintbrush Divide, where the panorama takes in a jagged skyline featuring some of the highest summits in the Tetons. It also passes by beloved Lake Solitude, nestled in a cirque of cliffs, and below the striped cliffs of Paintbrush Canyon and waterfalls and soaring peaks of Cascade Canyon.

We backpacked this popular loop over three days with our kids when they were young, camping at Upper Paintbrush the first night and North Fork Cascade the second, and seeing moose in Cascade Canyon; I’ve also dayhiked it. It can be hiked in either direction—and the Paintbrush side is steeper and more strenuous whether going up or down it. But by going counter-clockwise, you enjoy a steady view of the Grand Teton looming high above the North Fork of Cascade Canyon; and you finish down Cascade Canyon, where most of the group can avoid the final slog through the woods and take the boat shuttle across Jenny Lake—with in-your-face views of the peaks—while someone hikes the last 45 minutes to retrieve the car at String Lake.

Click here now to get my expert e-book
to this beginner-friendly backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park.

I can personally help you plan this trip (or any trip you read about at my blog), from permit to daily hiking plan, through my custom trip planning; click here to learn how—and to read hundreds of comments from others who’ve received my custom trip planning, many of which were for backpacking in the Tetons.

See all stories about backpacking in Grand Teton National Park at The Big Outside (some of which require a paid subscription to read in full), including “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” “The 5 Best Backpacking Trips in Grand Teton National Park,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail,” and “Walking Familiar Ground: Reliving Old Memories and Making New Ones on the Teton Crest Trail” about taking our kids at young ages on the TCT.

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The Best First Trip in the Grand Canyon

Distance: 21 to 23.5 miles
Difficulty: Moderate to strenuous

While this is one of the most strenuous trips on this list, for beginner backpackers or families with good stamina who are up for a somewhat bigger challenge, crossing the Grand Canyon from rim to rim constitutes one of the most scenically astonishing experiences in the entire National Park System. Beginning at either the South or North Rim, you will descend through a constantly changing environment and multiple layers of geology, from vistas encompassing a huge swath of the canyon to intimate side canyons with rushing creeks and waterfalls.

The distance ranges from 21 to 23.5 miles depending on whether you combine the South Kaibab Trail or Bright Angel Trail with the North Kaibab Trail, and the cumulative elevation gain and loss is well over 10,000 feet. Many backpackers spread it over three days. Still, water sources are regular and you’re hiking the best-constructed trails in the entire canyon.

Want a shorter Grand Canyon sampler? Hike 16.5 miles rim to river to rim: down the South Kaibab Trail and up the Bright Angel Trail over two or three days, with one night at Bright Angel Campground on the Colorado River and a possible second night at Havasupai Gardens Campground along the Bright Angel Trail to break up the long climb back up from the river.

See my story “Fit to Be Tired: Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim in a Day” for photos from this trip and my tale of dayhiking rim to rim, “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in the Grand Canyon,” and “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do.”

Click here now for my expert e-book to backpacking the Grand Canyon rim to rim.

The Magnificent Heart of Yosemite

Distance: 37.2 miles (with shorter options)
Difficulty: Moderate

Anyone looking for a five-star introduction to backpacking in Yosemite that hits marquis highlights and is beginner friendly need look no further than this 37.2-mile loop from Yosemite Valley. From the popular Happy Isles Trailhead at the east end of The Valley, it winds through the core of the park, starting with ascending the Mist Trail past 317-foot Vernal Fall—which rains a heavy mist on hikers—and thunderous, 594-foot Nevada Fall. The distance includes the optional, out-and-back climb of the steep and exposed cable route up Half Dome, where the summit view of Yosemite Valley is arguably only outdone by the view you’ll get later on the hike from a thousand feet higher on the knife-edge summit ridge of Clouds Rest.

From a campsite on the edge of the alpine meadows at Sunrise, you’ll get a sweeping view of the granite castles of the Cathedral Range. And the hike, spread over four to five days, follows a couple stretches of the world-famous John Muir Trail, descending it on the last day past a calendar-photo vista of Half Dome, Liberty Cap, and Nevada Fall.

See my story “Where to Backpack First Time in Yosemite” for a description of this route, and a much more detailed description with complete trip-planning guidance in my e-book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite,” which also covers alternate multi-day hiking itineraries beginning and ending at various trailheads ringing this core area of the park, including routes from Tuolumne Meadows and stunning Tenaya Lake. Click here to see all e-books available at The Big Outside, including three trips in Yosemite.

This is Yosemite’s most popular area for backpacking; permits are hard to get. See “How to Get a Yosemite or High Sierra Wilderness Permit.”

And check out “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite,” “Hiking Half Dome: How to Do It Right and Get a Permit,” and all stories about backpacking in Yosemite at The Big Outside.

See my five-level difficulty rating system in “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

Glacier’s Glorious Gunsight Pass Trail

Distance: 20 miles
Difficulty: Moderate

Much of the more than 700 miles of trails in one-million-acre Glacier National Park traverse remote wilderness, requiring a commitment of multiple days backpacking in northern mountains thick with grizzly bears, where weather can shift. But the 20-mile traverse of the Gunsight Pass Trail, from Gunsight Pass Trailhead to Lake McDonald Lodge, is one of the logistically easiest and shortest multi-day hikes in the park. Both trailheads are on the Going-to-the-Sun Road and served by the park’s free shuttle bus.

Most of all, though, the hike takes in some of the park’s best scenery, including one of its largest rivers of ice, the Blackfoot Glacier (seen from a distance), scores of waterfalls, and backcountry camps at Gunsight Lake and Lake Ellen Wilson that rank among the prettiest in the park.

Spread it out over four days and add the optional, 6.6-mile, out-and-back side hike to Sperry Glacier—which involves more than 1,700 vertical feet of up and down and some steep sections, making it a relatively demanding side hike for many adults and children. That stunning trail ascends steadily across a barren, rocky, more recently deglaciated landscape, and passes through a narrow notch in the cliffs at Comeau Pass to reach an overlook of the Sperry Glacier.

Unlike trails around Logan Pass and Many Glacier, this route is not crowded with dayhikers. I’ve backpacked it twice—the second time with our kids when they were nine and seven, taking three days—and saw mountain goats near Gunsight Pass both times. The moderately graded trail never gets terribly steep, so it feels easier than the distances suggest, although the long descent to Lake McDonald is a thigh-pounder; still, hike it east to west because in the other direction, the day one uphill from Lake McDonald would be a strenuous and long slog, much of it exposed to the hot sun.

See my story “Jagged Peaks and Wild Goats: Backpacking Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail,” “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park,” “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

I can help you plan any trip you read about at my blog. Find out more here.

Zion’s Otherworldly West Rim Trail

Distance: 14 miles
Difficulty: Moderate

Only in a national park that features The Narrows—which, admittedly, ranks hands-down as one of the best backpacking trips in America and certainly one of the best in the Southwest—could the West Rim Trail be overshadowed. More than a few longtime Zion backcountry denizens have told me the West Rim is their favorite trail in the park—and having dayhiked and backpacked it, I’d say it is, in many ways, just as enchanting as The Narrows.

From the plateau on the trail’s upper sections, you overlook a labyrinth of white-walled canyons and green-topped mesas. Then the trail drops about 2,500 feet in 4.7 miles, zigzagging down a cliff face and through a landscape of towering beehive rock formations and walls streaked in vivid burgundy and salmon hues.

The approximately 14-mile, one-way, north-to-south, mostly downhill hike from Lava Point on Kolob Terrace Road to the Grotto Trailhead in Zion Canyon—requiring a shuttle (available in Springdale)—can be done in one day by fit hikers. But an overnight at one of the campsites along the West Rim Trail lets you see this incomparable scenery in the glorious light of early morning and at sunset, and makes it a more feasible objective for families and novice backpackers. Add just just under a mile for the side hike up Angels Landing, one of the most spectacular and iconic summits in the National Park System.

See my stories about a family backpacking trip on the West Rim Trail, a 50-mile dayhike across Zion that included the West Rim Trail, my e-book to a two-day backpacking trip through Zion’s incomparable Narrows (another relatively beginner-friendly trip), and all stories about Zion at The Big Outside.

See also “7 Great Southwest Backpacking Trips for Beginners,” and read this story about another easy, one- or two-night hike in Capitol Reef National Park’s Spring Canyon.

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The Wild Olympic Coast

Distance: 17.5 miles
Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

Along the 73 miles of seashore within Olympic National Park, you can’t buy fried seafood, ice cream, or a T-shirt. The longest strip of protected wilderness coastline in the contiguous United States, it’s one of the few remaining pieces of ocean-view real estate in the Lower 48 that the explorer Capt. George Vancouver would recognize.

Backpacking the 17.5-mile southern stretch of the Olympic coast from the Hoh River north to La Push Road became one of my kids’ most memorable backpacking trips—mostly for the hours they spent playing in tide pools on the beach (they were nine and seven at the time). But it’s also a hike any adults would find gorgeous and fascinating.

You will walk surprisingly rugged and muddy overland trails in the deep shade of giant trees in one of Earth’s largest virgin temperature rainforests, and scale rope ladders dangling down eroding headlands. Along the beach, you will pass tide pools and boulders teeming with sea stars, mussels, and sea anemones, with sometimes mist-shrouded views of scores of tall stone pinnacles, called sea stacks, rising out of the ocean, some close enough to walk to them at low tide. You may sight seals, sea otters, whales (and to my kids’ delight, lots of slugs).

A fun, beautiful, beginner- and family-friendly trip, especially with school-age kids, it’s also less crowded than the more popular northern stretch of the Olympic coast, an easier permit to obtain—and one of America’s most unique backpacking adventures.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast.”

See my “10 Tips for Taking Kids on Their First Backpacking Trip”
and my very popular “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids.”

See also “7 Great Southwest Backpacking Trips for Beginners,” and all stories about national park trips and family adventures at The Big Outside.

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those three stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-book versions of “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

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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.

Over the past three decades—including the 10 years I was a field editor for Backpacker magazine and longer running this blog—I’ve had the good fortune of backpacking dozens of trips in our national parks—and multiple trips in the most-beloved parks. Countless thousands of miles later, this list represents my picks for the very best multi-day hikes you will find in America’s national parks.

Ready to be blown away? Read on and discover your next unforgettable trip.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

The descriptions below have links to feature-length stories about those trips, with numerous photos and often a video. While anyone can read part of those stories for free, reading them in full—including tips and details on planning those trips—is an exclusive benefit for paid subscribers to The Big Outside.

See my E-Books page for my detailed, expert e-books to several of the trips described below, and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any trip you read about at my blog, customizing it to your preferences and answering all of your questions about it.

Remember that all of these parks require a backcountry permit, which can be hard to get; apply for a permit reservation as soon as they become available, often months in advance. Find the smartest strategies for navigating that application process in my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Please share your thoughts or questions and offer your own trip suggestions in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments and answer any questions.

Want to start with a fairly easy trip?
See “10 Perfect National Park Backpacking Trips for Beginners.”

The Wild Olympic Coast

Distance: 17.5 miles, 2 to 3 days
Why It’s Unique: Sea stacks, giant trees, beach campsites, exciting rope ladders, abundant sea life.

Backpacking the 17.5-mile southern stretch of Olympic National Park’s 73-mile-long wilderness coastline, you will walk in the shadow of scores of sea stacks rising up to 200 feet out of the ocean and giant trees in one of Earth’s largest virgin temperature rainforests. You will see tide pools and boulders teeming with sea stars, mussels, and sea anemones while hiking along the beach, traverse surprisingly rugged and muddy overland trails, and scale rope ladders dangling down eroding headlands.

You also just may spot seals, sea otters, and whales. A fun, beginner- and family-friendly trip, especially with school-age kids, it’s also less crowded than the more popular northern stretch of the Olympic coast and a relatively easier permit to obtain.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast.”

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Grand Canyon Traverse

Distance: 21 to 23.5 miles, 2 to 3 days
Why It’s Unique: Incomparable canyon vistas, geology older than life on Earth, unforgettable campsites, desert oases and wildflowers.

Backpacking across the Grand Canyon via either of two possible routes on the three main “corridor” trails—the South Kaibab or Bright Angel with the North Kaibab—is truly a hike like no other in the world. From long vistas spanning the Grand Canyon’s staggering vastness of towering rock formations and almost 40 geologic layers, to immersion in tributary canyons with soaring walls and waterfalls, your perspective constantly changes. Every backpacker should take this trek or other multi-day hikes in the Big Ditch.

While there are no “easy” trips that descend into the Grand Canyon, this route is definitely the most amenable for beginner backpackers or first-timers there. My expert e-book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon” lays out in detail everything you need to know to plan and take this trip.

But given the enormous demand for backcountry permits on those three trails, other options are easier to get a permit for. Experienced backpackers seeking a higher-level adventure may want to check out my stories “Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop,” “‘Let’s Talk Water:’ Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Gems,” “Not Quite Impassable: Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Royal Arch Loop,” and “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” and my expert e-book to the last one, also titled “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

See “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do,” “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in the Grand Canyon,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in the Grand Canyon,” and all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.  

Get my expert e-books to “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” and the easier trip described above, “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

Yosemite South of Tuolumne Meadows

Distance: 65 to 74 miles, 5 to 8 days
Why It’s Unique: Famous landmarks like Half Dome, Clouds Rest, Tenaya Lake, Nevada Fall, and Tuolumne Meadows, plus some of Yosemite’s most-remote wilderness.

This just may be the perfect Yosemite backpacking trip: You see iconic vistas like the view from atop the sheer, 2,000-foot Northwest Face of Half Dome, and enjoy the solitude and scenery of one of Yosemite’s largest chunks of wilderness, the remote Clark Range in the park’s southeast quadrant.

Besides Half Dome, this 65-mile hike’s highlights include another of the best summits in the park, Clouds Rest (1,000 feet higher than Half Dome); thunderous, 594-foot-tall Nevada Fall; the stunning granite domes of Tuolumne and Tenaya Lake and the peaks of the Vogelsang area; the highest pass crossed by a trail in Yosemite, Red Peak Pass in the Clark Range; and the lakes and creeks at the headwaters of the Merced River. Permit and camping regulations and how you plan out the daily itinerary dictate whether you hike 65 or 74 miles (the latter involving more but shorter days as well as a bit of backtracking, but following a more moderate itinerary).

See my story about that trip, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” which provides basic details on planning it as a rigorous 65-mile hike (and requires a subscription to read in full); and my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Yosemite,” which gets into much greater detail about planning and taking that trip on a moderate 74-mile itinerary.

See also my story about a comparably remote and gorgeous, 87-mile hike, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” and my expert e-book to that trip, “The Best Remote and Uncrowded Backpacking Trip in Yosemite,” which includes shorter variations of it.

Backpackers with less experience or hitting Yosemite for the first time may prefer to check out my story “Where to Backpack First Time in Yosemite” and my very popular e-book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite.”

Check out “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite,” “Backpacking Yosemite: What You Need to Know,” and all stories about backpacking in Yosemite at The Big Outside.

You want to backpack in Yosemite? See my e-books to three amazing multi-day hikes there.

Glacier’s Northern Loop Made Better

Distance: 65 miles, 5 to 6 days
Why It’s Unique: Megafauna like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, moose, elk, and grizzly and black bears, breathtaking mountain scenery, primal wilderness.

Few places in the continental United States harbor the breadth of megafauna found in Glacier. You will likely see mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, and moose—and quite possibly black and grizzly bears. Neck-craning cliffs slash into Montana’s big sky, and glaciers pour down mountainsides.

This 65-mile route expands on the popular, 52-mile Northern Loop from Many Glacier, adding Piegan Pass and the entire Highline Trail to create arguably the best multi-day hike in Glacier. It also features the Many Glacier area, Stoney Indian Pass, the Ptarmigan Wall and Ptarmigan Tunnel, and some of the park’s finest lakes and most-remote wilderness. Have a sense of urgency about this trip: The park’s glaciers are on the fast track to extinction.

Get my expert e-books to backpacking Glacier’s Northern Loop and the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier.

See my story “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” and my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park,” which covers all the details on planning that trip, including my tips on the best way to do it and best campsites.

See also “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park.”

A traverse through Glacier on the Continental Divide Trail offers a similarly complete Glacier experience, overlapping part of the Northern Loop while taking in other areas that rank among the prettiest corners of the park. See my stories “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” and “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” my e-book “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

I’ve helped many readers plan unforgettable backpacking and hiking trips.
Want my help with yours? Click here now.

Zion’s Narrows

Distance: 16 miles, 2 days
Why It’s Unique: A narrow canyon with towering, multi-hued walls, hanging gardens, and pools to wade.

Little wonder that Zion’s Narrows is one of the most sought-after backcountry permits in the National Park System. With sandstone walls that rise up to a thousand feet tall and close in to just 20 to 30 feet apart, the Narrows of the North Fork of the Virgin River has few, if any rivals among the canyons of the Southwest.

Hiking in shallow water for much of the route’s 16 miles, you’ll gradually descend deeper and deeper as the canyon scenery evolves, marveling at the sight of water pouring from solid rock and enjoying one of your most unusual nights of backcountry camping.

Backpacking The Narrows from top to bottom delivers a far superior experience to dayhiking it partway up from the bottom, with real solitude and some of the trip’s best scenery and tightest narrows in the upper canyon, which bottom-up dayhikers never see.

Read my story “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.”

Do this trip right using my e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.”

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The Teton Crest Trail

Distance: 27-39 miles, multiple variations, 3 to 5 days
Why It’s Unique: Big views for much of its distance, beautiful wildflowers and campsites, and that incomparable, mind-boggling Tetons skyline.

Unquestionably one of America’s premier multi-day treks, the Teton Crest Trail stays above treeline for much of its traverse through the range, with nearly constant, long views of the peaks. Certain spots along the TCT have entered the place-name vocabularies of Tetons aficionados: Death Canyon Shelf, Hurricane Pass, the South and North Forks of Cascade Canyon, Lake Solitude, and Paintbrush Divide, one of the highest points reached by trail in the park, at nearly 11,000 feet.

After more than 20 trips in the Tetons backpacking, climbing, and dayhiking—and most recently backpacking the Teton Crest Trail again in August 2019, with three friends who’d never been on the TCT and loved it every step of the way—I have learned that you can return repeatedly and never fail to be awed by these peaks.

I have also learned the ins and outs of every aspect of this trek, from successfully getting one of the most sought-after backcountry permits in the entire National Park System, to the pros and cons of the various possible hiking itineraries. I share my expert tips in my e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park.”

I can also personally help you plan a Teton Crest Trail hike (or any trip you read about at my blog), from experience-based tips on navigating the permit process to a daily hiking itinerary. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how—and to read comments from hundreds of readers like you who’ve used my custom trip planning, many of them for the Teton Crest Trail.

See all stories about backpacking the Teton Crest Trail at The Big Outside, including “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail,” “The 5 Best Backpacking Trips in Grand Teton National Park,” and “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” about my most-recent trip on the TCT.

Didn’t get a Tetons permit? Check out an excellent hike in its neighbor park. See my story, “In Hot (and Cold) Water: Backpacking Yellowstone’s Bechler Canyon.”

Itching to backpack in the Tetons? See my e-books to the Teton Crest Trail
and the best short backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park.

Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail

Distance: 93 miles, 8 to 10 days
Why It’s Unique: Roaring rivers gray with glacial “flour,” countless waterfalls, giant trees, incomparable wildflowers, and ever-changing views of ice- and snow-cloaked Mount Rainier.

One of America’s best multi-day hikes—especially of more than a week—the Wonderland Trail makes a 93-mile, strenuously up-and-down circuit of the peak widely considered the queen of the Pacific Northwest, if not of the entire Lower 48: 14,411-foot Mount Rainier.

The Mountain boggles the mind. Seeing it appear as you round a bend can stop you in your tracks in disbelief over its staggering relief. The Wonderland Trail features innumerable waterfalls and views of Rainier, and some of the best wildflower meadows you will ever walk through.

Don’t underestimate this trip’s strenuousness: With a cumulative elevation gain and loss of over 44,000 feet, the trail regularly dishes up 2,000-foot and 3,000-foot ascents and descents. But the difficulty also depends on planning logistics like which direction you hike the loop and where to begin it, all of which I cover in detail in my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.”

Plus, there isn’t another multi-day hike quite like it.

See my stories “5 Reasons You Must Backpack Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack Rainier’s Wonderland Trail” and “An American Gem: Backpacking Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” about a recent 77-mile hike on what I consider the WT’s best sections (a route described as one of the alternate itineraries in my e-book), and “Wildflowers, Waterfalls, and Giant Slugs at Mount Rainier,” about a three-day, 22-mile family backpacking trip from Mowich Lake to Sunrise.

If you strike out on a Wonderland permit, consider another big multi-day hike a bit farther north in Washington’s Cascades that’s described in my story, “Primal Wild: Backpacking 80 Miles Through the North Cascades.”

Click here now to get my expert e-book
“The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.”

The Needles District of Canyonlands

Distance: 7 to 20+ miles, 2 to 3 days
Why It’s Unique: 300-foot-tall, candlestick-like pinnacles, natural arches, narrow slot canyons.

Waves of rippling rock look like a petrified ocean on a red planet. Sandstone spires rise up to 300 feet tall, with giant heads bigger around than the column on which they sit. Stratified cliffs stretch for miles.

The Needles District doesn’t have the severe, strenuous elevation gain and loss endemic to backpacking in the Grand Canyon and some other Southwest canyons. What it does have is fascinating geology that provides something of a Southwest canyons highlights tour.

Scarce water sources pose the biggest challenge, but the distances between them aren’t too great to prevent inexperienced backpackers from exploring Chesler Park and Big Spring, Squaw, and Lost canyons, as well as the Peekaboo Trail.

This relatively easy hike, with a variety of route options, explores a landscape that’s different in many ways from other favorite corners of the Southwest canyon country.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks.”

Are you up for a more difficult and remote multi-day hike with greater solitude and mind-blowing scenery? Check out my story “Farther Than It Looks: Backpacking the Canyonlands Maze.”

Explore the best of the Southwest. See “The 15 Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks”
and “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Sequoia’s Mineral King Area

Distance: 40 miles, 4 to 6 days
Why It’s Unique: Beautiful lakes and campsites, jagged granite peaks, passes over 11,000 feet, and backcountry groves of giant sequoias.

Looking for a full-value High Sierra backpacking adventure?

This 40-mile loop from Sequoia’s Mineral King area delivers (see lead photo at top of story), from passes up to 11,630 feet high with sweeping views of the majestic southern High Sierra to tranquil backcountry groves of giant sequoias that you may have all to yourselves.

I found the scenery photogenic around every turn, with row upon row of huge, granite spires looming thousands of feet above deep canyons, and campsites beside crystalline mountain lakes reflecting cliffs and razor-sharp peaks—and campsites that made my list of the 25 best spots I’ve ever slept in the backcountry.

While the John Muir Trail and popular paths in Yosemite do not typically offer much solitude, this trip shows a quieter side of the High Sierra without compromising on natural beauty.

See my story “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park.”

I’ve helped many readers plan this trip in Sequoia and others in the High Sierra. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help plan your next trip.

Planning your next big adventure? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes.”

Bottom to Top in the Great Smoky Mountains

Distance: 34 miles, 3 to 4 days
Why It’s Unique: Unparalleled forest diversity, long views from the Appalachian Trail, and lovely streams and cascades.

While the Great Smokies may appear out of place on a list of Western national parks, there are good reasons why these forested mountains are beloved by backpackers.

I discovered their magic on a 34-mile loop from near Fontana Lake up to a stretch of the Appalachian Trail along the park’s crest. That grand tour of this half-million-acre park included rocky streams tumbling through cascades; some of the 1,600 species of flowering plants (76 listed as threatened or endangered); and gazing out over an ocean of blue ridges from 6,643-foot Clingmans Dome and the park’s highest bald, 5,920-foot Andrews Bald.

I also found a surprising degree of solitude, even during the fall foliage season.

See my story “In the Garden of Eden: Backpacking the Great Smoky Mountains” and all stories about hiking and backpacking in western North Carolina at The Big Outside.

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those three stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-book versions of “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

See all stories with expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.

Want to read any story linked here?
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What makes for a great backpacking trip? Certainly top-shelf scenery is mandatory. An element of adventurousness enhances a hike, in my eyes. While there’s definitely something inspirational about a big walk in the wild, some of the finest trips in the country can be done in a few days and half of the hikes on this list are under 50 miles. Another factor that truly matters is a wilderness experience: All 10 are in national parks or wilderness areas.

I’ve probably thought about this more than a mentally stable person should, having done many of America’s (and the world’s) most beautiful multi-day hikes over more than three decades (and counting) of carrying a backpack, including my 10 years as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. In the final analysis, though, the criterion that matters most is more simple and intuitive: that it’s undeniably a great trip. And that character shows itself over and over in my picks for the 10 best backpacking trips in the country.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

Each hike here merits a 10 for scenery. The longest trips on this list can be chopped up into smaller portions. Each description below includes a difficulty rating on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the hardest in terms of strenuousness and challenge. I’ve listed them in a random order that’s not intended as a quality ranking; I think that’s impossible.

I regularly update this list as I take new trips that belong on it—but it has remained largely unchanged for a while (I think you’ll see why), except for adding new photos and links to new stories each time I revisit one of these trails or parks; as well as adding some new Close Runners-Up trip suggestions, which accompany each hike in my top 10.

My advice: Do every one of these top 10 and runner-up hikes that you can, when you can—many of the top 10 are harder to get a permit for than the runners-up, so the latter group provide good backup plans. You won’t be disappointed with any of them.

The descriptions and photos below link to stories at The Big Outside that have more images and information about these trips (most of which require a paid subscription to read in full)—including tips on planning each one yourself and when to apply for a backcountry permit, which is generally months in advance.

See my affordable, expert e-books to several of the trips described below and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any of these classic adventures, variations of them, or any trip you read about at The Big Outside. You might also find helpful tips in my stories “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

If you have a trip to suggest, please tell me about it in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I hope to get to them all. It’s a tough assignment, but I’m on it.

Find your next adventure in your Inbox. Sign up for my FREE email newsletter now.

A Grand Tour of Yosemite

Distance: 152 miles, with multiple shorter variations
Difficulty: 4

John Muir saw more than a few world-class wildernesses, and he focused much of his time and energy on exploring and protecting Yosemite. A lot of people would legitimately argue it’s the best national park for backpackers. After several trips there, I had thought I’d seen Yosemite’s finest corners, including many trails in the park’s core, its section of the John Muir Trail, and the summits of Half Dome and Clouds Rest.

Then, in two trips totaling seven days spread over two years, I backpacked 152 miles through the biggest patches of wilderness in the park, south and north of Tuolumne Meadows (also shown in the lead photo at the top of this story)—and discovered Yosemite’s true soul, a vast reach of deep, granite-walled canyons, peaks rising to over 12,000 feet, and one gorgeous mountain lake after another dappling the landscape. And after those two trips, I returned again to backpack a 45-mile hike that I subsequently dubbed “Yosemite’s Best-Kept Secret Backpacking Trip.”

See my stories “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” about the 65-mile first leg of that 152-mile grand tour of Yosemite, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” about the nearly 87-mile second leg, “Backpacking Yosemite: What You Need to Know,” and all stories about backpacking in Yosemite at The Big Outside.

Get my expert e-books to backpacking the 65-mile hike south of Tuolumne Meadows
and the 87-mile hike through northern Yosemite (which include shorter options).

Want more of a less-committing, introductory backpacking trip in Yosemite? See my story “Where to Backpack First Time in Yosemite.” The trip I suggest in that story is described in much greater detail in my e-book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite.” That e-book offers planning tips and suggested daily itineraries for a primary route and alternate itineraries for backpacking trips in the spectacular core of Yosemite, between Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows.

Close Runners-Up:

See “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite” and “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” about a 40-mile family backpacking trip that featured campsites that made both my top 25 all-time favorites and my list of the nicest backcountry campsites I’ve hiked past, plus all stories about backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.

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Two Hikes in Glacier National Park

Distance of each: 90-94 miles, with shorter variations
Difficulty of each: 3

With rivers of ice pouring off of craggy mountains and cliffs, deeply green forests, over 760 lakes offering mirror reflections of it all, megafauna like bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, moose, and grizzly and black bears, and over a million acres in Montana’s Northern Rockies, most of it wilderness, little wonder that Glacier is so popular with backpackers.

Two big hikes of over 90 miles—both of which have multiple possible shorter variations—deservedly grace this top 10 list. On both, my companions and I saw all of those sights and large beasts described above—yes, including grizzlies—and enjoyed a surprising degree of solitude even while hitting many of the park’s highlights.

One, a 90-miler through northern Glacier, split into 65- and 25-mile legs, was a variation of a hike known as the Northern Loop, following a route I customized to hit some of Glacier’s best scenery, including the entire Highline Trail, the Many Glacier area, Piegan Pass and Stoney Indian Pass, the Ptarmigan Wall and Tunnel, and some of the park’s finest lakes and most-remote wilderness.

On the second hike, three friends and I backpacked about 94 miles through Glacier, from Chief Mountain Trailhead at the Canadian border in the park’s northeast corner to Two Medicine, combining parts of the primary and alternate routes of the Continental Divide Trail, and adding the high, alpine trail from Pitamakan Pass to Dawson Pass above Two Medicine. Yet again, we saw bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, moose, and a griz, and heard elk bugling almost every morning and evening (because it was September)—not to mention vistas unlike anywhere else in America.

See my story about the two-stage, 90-mile hike “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” my story “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” about the 94-mile hike, and “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” about my most recent, weeklong hike in Glacier on a variation of the CDT route.

Get my expert e-books to backpacking Glacier’s Northern Loop and the CDT through Glacier.

And check out “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

Close Runners-Up:

Think of the Canadian Rockies this way: They resemble Glacier but with more and bigger glaciers and covering a much vaster area. For much of its distance, the 34-mile Rockwall Trail in Kootenay National Park passes below a long chain of sheer cliffs and mountains that conjure images of numerous El Capitans lined up in a row, but with thick tongues of glacial ice pouring off them. And the 27-mile Skyline Trail in Jasper National Park remains above treeline for more than half its distance, with nearly constant panoramas of massive walls of rock and a sea of mountains in every direction.

Retaining a surprising degree of anonymity considering that they’re situated between Glacier and Yellowstone, the Beartooth Mountains rise to over 12,000 feet and are most uniquely characterized by high, rolling, alpine plateaus over 10,000 feet. Like Glacier, the Beartooths have deep, glacier-carved canyons with remnant patches of ancient ice, and are home to moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, bald eagles, gray wolves, black bears, and grizzlies—plus hundreds of trout-filled alpine lakes. See my story “Backpacking the High and Mighty Beartooth Mountains.”

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Teton Crest Trail

Distance: 33-40 miles, multiple variations
Difficulty: 4

One of my first big, Western backpacking trips was on the Teton Crest Trail in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, and it so inspired me that I’ve returned more than 20 times since to backpack, dayhike, rock climb, backcountry ski, and paddle a canoe in the Tetons. I can’t imagine that jagged skyline ever failing to give me chills.

Running north-south through the heart of the national park and adjacent national forest lands, the Teton Crest Trail stays above treeline for much of its distance, with expansive views of the peaks, but also drops into the beautiful South Fork and North Fork of Cascade Canyon, Paintbrush Canyon, and the upper forks of Granite Canyon, and crosses Paintbrush Divide at 10,720 feet.

Various trails access it, allowing for multiple route options, any of them making for one of America’s premier multi-day hikes.

See my stories  “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” “5 Reasons You Must Backpack the Teton Crest Trail,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail,” and “Walking Familiar Ground: Reliving Old Memories and Making New Ones on the Teton Crest Trail,” plus all stories about backpacking the Teton Crest Trail at The Big Outside.

I’ve helped countless readers plan a perfect, personally customized itinerary on the Teton Crest Trail. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your trip.

Yearning to backpack in the Tetons? See my e-books to the Teton Crest Trail
and the best short backpacking trip in the Tetons.

Close Runners-Up:

A two- or three-day hike linking any of the east-side canyons in Grand Teton National Park, such as the nearly 20-mile Paintbrush Canyon-Cascade Canyon loop (the most popular in the park). See “The 5 Best Backpacking Trips in Grand Teton National Park.” Or virtually any backpacking trip in the Wind River Range (see below).

The Wonderland Trail

Distance: 93 miles, with shorter variations
Difficulty: 4

No multi-day hike in the contiguous United States compares with the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier—because there’s no mountain in the Lower 48 like glacier-clad, 14,410-foot Mount Rainier.

Backpacking the Wonderland Trail, one repeatedly sees Rainier fill the horizon at a seemingly unbelievable scale, a sight always thrilling and inspiring. This trail features some of the most beautiful wildflower meadows you will ever see, countless waterfalls and cascades, crystalline creeks and raging rivers gray with “glacial flour,” and likely sightings of mountain goats, marmots, deer, and possibly black bears.

Accessed from several trailheads, it can be thru-hiked in its entirety—commonly done over nine to 10 days—or you can backpack shorter trips of varying lengths on sections of the Wonderland. The full loop is a strenuous trip, with over 44,000 cumulative vertical feet of elevation gain and loss, and choices you make like which direction to hike the loop, where to begin it, and whether to take a popular detour onto the higher and more-scenic Spray Park Trail, all affect the trip’s overall difficulty—which I spell out in detail in my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.”

This much I will guarantee: The Wonderland Trail is the kind of adventure that stays with you long afterward.

See my stories “5 Reasons You Must Backpack Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack Rainier’s Wonderland Trail” and “An American Gem: Backpacking Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” about a 77-mile hike on what I consider the WT’s best sections (a route described as one of the alternate itineraries in my e-book).

Close Runner-Up:

See my story “Full of Surprises: Backpacking Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail” about a trip very similar in character to the Wonderland Trail—but much shorter and requiring no permit reservation—the 41-mile Timberline Trail around Oregon’s Mount Hood.

Want to hike the Wonderland Trail? Get my expert e-book
“The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.”

Zion’s Narrows

Distance: 16 miles
Difficulty: 2

The North Fork of the Virgin River carves out a uniquely deep, slender, and awe-inspiring redrock canyon in Utah’s Zion National Park, with walls up to 1,000 feet tall that close in to just 20 feet apart in places. Springs gush from cracks in the walls, nourishing lush hanging gardens. On clear nights, a black sky riddled with stars fills the narrow strip visible between the rock walls soaring overhead.

In the low-water levels when backpackers typically make the two-day descent of The Narrows, you’re walking most of the time in water from ankle-deep (most commonly) to, occasionally, waist-deep, over a cobblestone riverbed that makes for slow progress.

Click here now for my e-book to Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.

But you’ll feel no desire to rush through one of the most enchanting hikes in the National Park System (especially since the lower end is often crowded with dayhikers, while the trip’s first day and second morning are much quieter).

See my story “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.”

Close Runners-Up:

Paria Canyon and Buckskin Gulch
Traversing Zion National Park
The Needles District and Maze District of Canyonlands National Park
Coyote Gulch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Death Hollow Loop, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona

Get the right gear for your trips. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents.”

John Muir Trail

Distance: 221 miles
Difficulty: 4

The John Muir Trail’s 211 miles from Yosemite Valley to the highest summit in the Lower 48, 14,505-foot Mount Whitney in Sequoia National Park, has often been described as “America’s Most Beautiful Trail”—and hyperbolic as it sounds, it’s hard to argue against that lofty claim.

The two- to three-week journey through California’s High Sierra (totaling 221 miles, including the 10-mile descent off Whitney, not actually part of the JMT) stays mostly above 9,000 feet as it traverses mile after jaw-dropping mile of a landscape of incisor peaks, too many waterfalls to name, and countless, pristine wilderness lakes nestled in granite basins.

You climb over numerous passes between 11,000 and over 13,000 feet, with views that stretch a hundred miles. Although not a place for solitude during the peak season (mid-July to mid-September), the JMT may be the one hike on this list that every serious backpacker probably aspires to accomplish.

The hardest part may be what comes long before you lace up your boots: getting a JMT permit, which necessarily requires figuring out your itinerary and how many days you will spend on the trail.

See all stories about backpacking the John Muir Trail at The Big Outside, including “How to Get a John Muir Trail Wilderness Permit,” “Thru-Hiking the John Muir Trail: What You Need to Know,” an “Ultimate, 10-Day, Ultralight Plan” for a JMT thru-hike, and “Thru-Hiking the John Muir Trail in Seven Days: Amazing Experience, or Certifiably Insane?”

Close Runners-Up:

See “10 Great John Muir Trail Section Hikes,” “High Sierra Ramble: 130 Miles On—and Off—the John Muir Trail,” “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” my story about a remote, partly off-trail, 32-mile traverse of the John Muir Wilderness, and all stories about High Sierra backpacking trips at The Big Outside.

Want to hike the Teton Crest Trail, John Muir Trail, or another trip on this list?
Click here for expert custom trip planning you won’t get elsewhere.

South Kaibab to Lipan Point, Grand Canyon

Distance: 74 miles, with shorter variations
Difficulty: 5

Every backpacking trip I’ve taken in the Grand Canyon deserves a spot on this list—the place possesses all the qualities of a great adventure, in a landscape like nowhere else on the planet. But when a longtime backcountry ranger in the park told me this 74-mile hike was “the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon,” of course I had to check it out.

After backpacking it, I decided: He’s right.

For starters, the South Kaibab is one of the best trails in the entire National Park System. Beyond that, this route follows one of the of the prettiest and most adventurous “trails” in the canyon, the Escalante Route, which involves some tricky route-finding and exposed scrambling. This hike also includes an outstanding section of the Tonto Trail, the beautiful and surprisingly rigorous Beamer Trail, and another lovely, rim-to-river footpath, the Tanner Trail.

Plus, you’ll enjoy some of the best backcountry campsites you’ve ever spent a night in, including beaches on the Colorado River, and the kind of solitude that’s rare in many national parks.

See “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

Get my expert e-books to “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
and an easier alternative, “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

I’ve helped many readers plan a perfect, personally customized backpacking itinerary in the Grand Canyon—a place where trip planning is complicated by seasonal temperature extremes and road access, scarce water sources, high competition for backcountry permits, and significant differences in character and difficulty between trails and routes.

See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your Big Ditch backpacking trip.

Close Runners-Up:

Almost any other trip in the Grand Canyon. See “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in the Grand Canyon,” and all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

Hike all of “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”
For a beginner-friendly trip, see “The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First.”

The Southern Olympic Coast

Distance: 17.5 miles
Difficulty: 2

The 17.5-mile hike from the Hoh River north to La Push Road, on the southern coast of Washington’s Olympic National Park, is still one of my kids’ most memorable backpacking trips—mostly for the hours they spent playing in tide pools on the beach (they were nine and seven at the time). But it’s also one that backpackers of all ages find gorgeous and fascinating.

It features giant trees in one of Earth’s largest virgin temperature rainforests; frequently mist-shrouded views of scores of sea stacks rising up to 200 feet out of the ocean; boulders wallpapered with sea stars, mussels, and sea anemones; rugged and very muddy hiking on overland trails around impassable headlands; sightings of seals, sea otters, whales, and to my kids’ delight, lots of slugs; and rope ladders to climb and descend very steep terrain—including cliffs.

Consequently, while just as scenic, it’s less crowded than the more popular northern stretch of the Olympic coast. The 73-mile-long finger of the park on the Pacific Ocean protects the longest stretch of wilderness coastline in the contiguous United States—and one of America’s most unique backpacking adventures.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast.”

Close Runner-Up:

Honestly, nothing.

But for classic wilderness trips in the Pacific Northwest, I suggest the hike to Cascade Pass and up Sahale Arm to Sahale Glacier Camp, in North Cascades National Park, with a jaw-dropping campsite view; this 80-mile hike (and shorter variations of it) in the North Cascades; the Spider Gap-Buck Creek Pass Loop in the Glacier Peak Wilderness; and certainly, Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail.

See all stories about Olympic National Park and stories about the North Cascades at The Big Outside.

See “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites.”

The Wind River Range

Distance: multiple routes and distances
Difficulty: 3 to 5

The Winds can’t honestly be described as “undiscovered,” by any stretch. Still, as popular as a few corners are, much of this Wyoming range offers a rare combination of periods of solitude amid some of the most dramatic peaks and beautiful mountain lakes in the country—lots of lakes. Rank U.S. mountain ranges according to the best scenery and lakes, and I think the top two are the Winds and the High Sierra—and you could argue which is number one for as many years as it would take to visit every lake in the Winds.

I’ve taken several trips into the Winds over the past three decades, backpacking, climbing, and one really long dayhike—all of them outstanding, but a few places stand out.

One was a camp in Titcomb Basin—where granite peaks rise to over 13,000 feet from lakes at over 10,000 feet—on a 41-mile loop where two friends and I hiked past a constellation of beautiful lakes and took a spicy off-trail route over 12,240-foot Knapsack Col.

On long stretches of a lonely, 43-mile loop in a less-visited area of the Winds, we enjoyed one of the best backcountry campsites I’ve ever had, crossed four high passes, and walked one stunning trail after another past numerous alpine lakes, including two of the prettiest backcountry lakes I’ve hiked past without camping at.

I’ve climbed in and hiked through the Cirque of the Towers on multiple epic adventures, including a 27-mile, east-west dayhike across the Winds and a 96-mile, mostly off-trail, south-north traverse of the Wind River High Route. But most recently, a friend and I hiked across the Cirque to cap off a four-day loop from Big Sandy that crosses four passes and features camps by beautiful lakes—a route I consider the best multi-day hike in the Winds.

The Winds can seriously make you wonder: “Why don’t I just come here all the time?”

Don’t forget anything important! See “An Essentials-Only Backpacking Gear Checklist.”

See “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Wind River Range,” “5 Reasons You Must Backpack the Wind River Range,” “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Wind River Range? Yup,” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

Close Runner-Up:

See my stories about another high, rugged mountain range where you can find solitude, northern Utah’s High Uintas: “Backpacking—and Sandbagging—Utah’s Uinta Highline Trail” and “Tall and Lonely: Backpacking Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness.”

Ready to hike one of the world’s great treks?
Click here now for my e-book “The Perfect, Flexible Plan for Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc.”

Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains

Distance: 36 miles, with longer and shorter variations
Difficulty: 2

The Sawtooths are one of the West’s most under-appreciated mountain ranges, with national park-caliber scenery, but nowhere near the numbers of hikers found in the most popular parks (although more and more backpackers are exploring the few popular areas of the Sawtooths).

Having backpacked and climbed through most of the range since settling in Idaho more than 20 years ago, the multi-day hike I’d recommend there is a five-day, roughly 36-mile route from Redfish Lake to Tin Cup Trailhead on Pettit Lake, including an out-and-back side trip to one of the finest lakes basins in the entire range.

Requiring a short shuttle that can be arranged locally—the Sawtooth trails aren’t conducive to creating long loop hikes—this trip crosses four passes over 9,000 feet and features campsites on some of the Sawtooths’ best mountain lakes, below endless jagged ridgelines.

See my story “The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit.” My expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” tells you all you need to know to plan and pull off this trip and includes three alternate itineraries that allow you to shorten the hike to four days or extend it to six or seven days.

Close Runners-Up:

See my stories “Mountain Lakes of Idaho’s Sawtooths—A Photo Gallery,” “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths” and “Going After Goals: Backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains,” about a 57-mile hike in the more remote southern Sawtooths.

See also my story about the Idaho Wilderness Trail, a nearly 300-mile, long-distance trail I helped conceive that passes through the Sawtooths, and all stories about Idaho’s Sawtooths and neighboring White Cloud Mountains at The Big Outside; plus my story about another under-appreciated mountain range dappled with gorgeous lakes, northeastern Oregon’s Wallowas, “Learning the Hard Way: Backpacking Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness.”

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking trip in the Sawtooths.
Want my help with yours? Find out more here.

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my stories “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be,” “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” and “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those three stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-book versions of “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

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I remember my first backpacking trip in Glacier National Park, more than 30 years ago, feeling magical—and a little bit intimidating, which is best illustrated by the fact that I had probably carried bear spray only once before. But I’m pretty sure my girlfriend (now wife) and I did not reserve a backcountry permit months before—we just showed up and got one. (Good luck doing that today.) We did little, if any, research on a route. We encountered some surprises and had what we considered a mostly wonderful adventure.

Today, though, with several multi-day hikes in Glacier under my hipbelt and knowing the park’s terrain, trails, climate, regulations, and permit system well, our uninformed strategy for planning that first, long-ago trip seems both quaint and like a formula that invites frustration and disappointment—especially in this era of much higher numbers of backpackers. Now, I take a very different approach to planning trips there.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

It’s not that planning a backpacking trip in Glacier is unnecessarily complicated. But familiarizing yourself with all that backpacking in Glacier entails—some of which is unique to Glacier—is far more likely to result in the experience that you’re hoping for.

So, what do you need to know about backpacking in Glacier?

This article will answer the biggest questions on how to go about planning and executing what is certainly one of the best of America’s 10 best backpacking trips—including details and tips on obtaining a wilderness permit that can be very hard to get. The information below draws on my several trips backpacking (and dayhiking) there over more than 30 years, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor with Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

See “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park” and all stories at this blog about backpacking in Glacier. Most of those stories require a paid subscription to The Big Outside to read in full, including my expert tips and information on planning each hike. See also my expert e-books to two great multi-day hikes in Glacier and other parks, including “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park.”

I’ve helped many readers plan backpacking trips in Glacier and many other places, answering all of their questions (and many they didn’t think to ask) and customizing an itinerary ideal for them. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you and read hundreds of comments from readers like you who’ve received my custom trip planning.

Click on any photo below to read about that trip. Please share your questions, personal stories, or tips about backpacking in Glacier in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

After Glacier National Park, hike the other nine of
“America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

It’s Not as Hard as You May Think

With a few exceptions, Glacier’s trails are well-constructed, well-marked with signs at junctions, and mostly only moderately steep—built at what’s called a “horse grade” because many early visitors to the park traveled the trails on horseback. The topography, with the Continental Divide splicing the park into approximate halves and valleys filled with long, narrow lakes draining both sides of the Divide, allow for an extensive trail network that blends relatively easier hiking with ascents to and descents from passes that, with few exceptions, are not grueling.

Many backpackers who are reasonably fit and carrying packs weighing 25 to 40 pounds—basically, a total weight that doesn’t feel awful to them—will find hiking eight to 10 miles per day moderately difficult in Glacier, and a hiking pace of two mph feasible to maintain.

Also, trails in Glacier, even at the highest passes, remain below 8,000 feet, an elevation that doesn’t cause problems for most people beyond breathing harder when hiking uphill. That and the moderate grades of most trails result in daily elevation gain when backpacking 10 miles or less per day often totaling less than 3,000 feet and sometimes less than 2,000 feet; and 2,500 feet of uphill spread over 10 miles is an average relatively gentle gradient of 250 feet per mile.

Plus, the distribution of the park’s 65 designated backcountry campgrounds often enables planning days under 10 miles.

For those reasons, you may find that backpacking in Glacier is not as hard as on trails in parks with higher actual elevations, steeper trails, and/or greater elevation ranges between valleys and passes.

Water is generally plentiful throughout Glacier’s backcountry, although you may encounter waterless stretches of a few miles (perhaps two hours) or more when crossing passes. That means you almost never have to carry more than one to two liters, or about two to four pounds, of water. But be aware of water sources along your route. See the best water-treatment systems in my review of “Essential Backpacking Gear Accessories” and a menu of all reviews of water filters at The Big Outside.

Get my expert e-books to the best backpacking trip in Glacier
and backpacking the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier.

How to Get a Glacier Backcountry Permit

As in most major Western national parks (like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, and others), Glacier permits are in high demand for dates in July, August, and the first part of September. First key step for success: Know when to reserve a permit. Fortunately, like many other parks, Glacier in recent years instituted a reasonably user-friendly system created to manage enormous demand.

Glacier conducts two early-access backcountry permit lotteries at recreation.gov/permits/4675321, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people. Those lotteries provide the best chance of reserving a permit for popular trails and backcountry camps for trips between June 15 and Sept. 30, and all applicants during these 24-hour lottery periods have an equal chance of being selected.

Standard-group lottery winners will get an email from the park wilderness office on March 17 with a date and time between March 21 and April 30 when they can make one permit reservation (or anytime after their time slot). Large-group lottery winners will receive an email on March 3 with instructions for making their permit reservation for one of just five permit reservations the park issues annually for large groups.

General reservations open for all remaining backcountry campsites on May 1, running through Sept. 30.

Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for reservations and 30 percent of campsites for walk-in permits no more than one day in advance during the backpacking season and limits daily hiking distance to 16 miles on reserved permits.

See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park.”

As I write in my “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit,” the single most-effective strategy for maximizing your chances of getting a permit for a popular trip during its peak season is to consider at least two starting trailheads and a range of date options.

I’ve helped many readers plan unforgettable backpacking trips in Glacier and elsewhere.
Want my help with yours? Click here now.

The Peak Season

While lower-elevation trails and backcountry camps in Glacier are often snow-free and open from mid-June into October, the peak backpacking season in Glacier generally begins around mid-July, when higher elevations and passes become mostly snow-free, and the season often extends into September, although the first snowstorm can arrive by early September or even late August.

But the best time for hitting the trails in Glacier is late July through early September, when the Rocky Mountains weather is typically idyllic: sunny days with very moderate temperatures, although afternoon thunderstorms are not uncommon, and comfortably cool nights and mornings.

And an early snowfall occurring before your late-summer trip isn’t necessarily a disaster. Snow from those early-season storms often melts away within a day or two after sunshine returns.

On one September backpacking trip, friends and I enjoyed sunny days with moderate temperatures, cool but not freezing nights, and dry trails—just a few days after a snowstorm hit the park. And we benefited from that storm occurring before our trip because it largely smothered a wildfire that was sending smoke throughout the park.

Planning a backpacking trip? See “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips”
and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

Gear

During summer, given the generally good weather in Glacier and nighttime lows that don’t often drop below 40° F/4° C, you can use lightweight to ultralight gear, including your pack, tent, bag, and footwear. Still, look closely at the forecast and, if necessary, be prepared for heavy rain, particularly in thunderstorms, and possibly freezing temperatures.

Glacier National Park provides bearproof food-hanging systems or food lockers in all backcountry campgrounds, so backpackers do not have to carry a bear canister. See nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/bears.htm.

Find categorized menus of gear reviews, best-in-category reviews, and buying tips at my Gear Reviews page, and all reviews of ultralight backpacking gear at The Big Outside.

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Trailhead Transportation Logistics

Depending on where in the park you’re backpacking and whether you’re hiking a loop or a point-to-point route between different trailheads—especially if those trailheads are far apart—travel logistics can be very easy or complicated.

If your backpacking trip starts or finishes (or both) along the Going-to-the-Sun Road, it’s definitely easiest and most convenient to use the park’s free shuttle, which makes several stops along that road. It’s truly much easier—and cheaper—than trying to drive your own vehicle. It runs regularly from early July through Labor Day; see nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/shuttles.htm.

In recent years, Glacier has required timed vehicle reservations to drive a private vehicle from mid-June through late September in two areas: the west side of Going-to-the-Sun Road and the North Fork. See nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/vehicle-reservations.htm.

See my expert e-books to two great multi-day hikes in Glacier, “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips,” and the All Trips page at The Big Outside.

Let The Big Outside help you find the best adventures.
Click here to join now for full access to ALL stories and get a free e-book!

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my stories “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-book versions of “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

These articles at The Big Outside may be useful when planning a Glacier trip:

“8 Pro Tips For Avoiding Blisters”
“How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be”
“12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking”
“How to Plan Food for a Backpacking Trip”
“How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking”
“10 Pro Tips For Staying Warm in a Sleeping Bag”
“5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking”

And see all stories with expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.

Create a list of the attributes that constitute a great backpacking trip and the chances are very high that you will describe Glacier National Park. There’s the incomparable landscape, where the remnants of glaciers hang off craggy mountains, vertiginous cliffs tower above deeply green valleys carved in the classic U shape by ancient rivers of ice, and hundreds of mountain lakes reflect it all. And encounters with wildlife like bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, moose, and, yes, grizzly and black bears: Few places in the continental United States harbor such a breadth of megafauna.

Sprawling over a million acres in Montana’s Northern Rockies, most of it wilderness, Glacier exudes a sense of wildness and beauty that no longer exists in most of the country.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-books to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

Little wonder that this park remains so enduringly popular with backpackers. After more than three decades of backpacking all over the United States and more than a decade running this blog, having taken many of the best multi-day hikes out there—some of them, like Glacier, multiple times—I think that Glacier is, in many respects, the best. (See my lists of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips”—and yes, of course, Glacier graces both lists.)

I’ve had the good fortune to get to know Glacier—and its extremely competitive permit system—very well.

A Glacier backpacking permit is one of the hardest to get in the National Park System. Glacier holds two early-access lotteries at recreation.gov/permits/4675321, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people. General reservations open for all remaining backcountry campsites on May 1, running through Sept. 30. Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for reservations and 30 percent of campsites available for walk-in permits no more than one day in advance. 

See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

See also my expert e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” both of which provide all you need to know to plan those trips, including detailed guidance on getting a high-demand backcountry permit, multiple itinerary options of varied lengths, the best campsites, plus expert advice on the ideal time of year, gear, and safety in bear country.

I’ve also helped many readers of my blog plan a very enjoyable backpacking trip designed specifically for them in Glacier. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can do that for you.

Want to explore Glacier on dayhikes? See “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park” and “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park.”

Please share your thoughts on this article—or your favorite hikes in Glacier—in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

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1. Well, There’s All Those Critters

On nearly every backpacking trip I’ve taken in Glacier, I have seen bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and both black and grizzly bears (the last from a safe distance—most of the time, with the exception of this encounter). I’ve seen mountain goats on every trip. Go in late summer or early fall and you may hear elk bugling every morning and evening (as I did on this mid-September trip).

While you can see all of those megafauna in some other parts of the Lower 48 and Alaska, very few places host such a density of them—which means you are more likely to see them in Glacier than other wildlands.

Every backpacker who walks through the wilderness of Glacier takes home a powerful sense of awe over this park—and a desire to return again and again.

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2. And the Mountains and Lakes—Wow

The Blackfeet who’ve inhabited this area for centuries called these mountains “the backbone of the world.” In 1901, the American anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer George Bird Grinnell, in campaigning for the creation of Glacier National Park, coined the phrase “Crown of the Continent,” and it stuck.

Today, Glacier’s one million acres comprise just one piece of a contiguous, protected ecosystem spanning nearly 13 million acres across the U.S.-Canada border.

But those words and numbers fail to even come close to conveying the majesty of these peaks. The Rocky Mountain chain arguably reaches its full glory in the Northern Rockies of Glacier, where giant axe and knife blades of rock erupt from the earth, slicing into a sky often strikingly blue in summer.

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More than 760 lakes dot Glacier’s landscape, many of them nestled among peaks so jaggedly dramatic that you’ll struggle to leave them—like Elizabeth Lake, Sue Lake, and Lake Ellen Wilson, to name just three that I list among the most gorgeous backcountry lakes I’ve ever seen.

Among Continental Divide Trail thru-hikers, the prevailing opinion is that the two greatest highlights of their multi-month trek were the Wind River Range and Glacier.

Of course, the best way to know this is to go and see for yourself.

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3. It’s Not That Hard

Some big, mountainous parks are notorious for steep, rugged terrain, high elevations, and/or severe weather. But that’s not generally the case in Glacier. Most of the park’s trails are built at what’s called a “horse grade,” meaning never too steep for horses, which is less steep than many trails designed strictly for humans. Step for step, mile for mile, hiking here feels a bit easier than in many other parks.

Trail elevations in Glacier pose significantly less challenge than other parts of the Rockies or the High Sierra: With the highest passes on trails under 8,000 feet, most people feel little effects of altitude beyond shortness of breath hiking uphill.

Like most of the Mountain West, Glacier may see afternoon thunderstorms in summer, and snow can fall in September or even August, although that’s rare. But the park often sees stable, sunny weather with just about perfect temperatures during the peak hiking season of mid-July into mid-September, without as many biting insects as wetter climates.

Don’t expect an easy stroll (and keeping your pack light has the biggest impact on comfort and fatigue). But we took our kids backpacking in Glacier for the first time when they were nine and seven, on a three-day hike on the Gunsight Pass Trail—and they loved it.

The biggest challenge of backpacking in Glacier is staying safe in bear country—and park management all but eliminates the possibility of the most common mistakes people make, with designated backcountry campgrounds all equipped with bearproof food-hanging systems. That delivers another great benefit of relieving you of the weight of a bear canister that’s required in many other parks, from Grand Teton to Yosemite, the parks and national forests of the High Sierra, and other destinations.

See my story “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

Planning your next big adventure? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites.”

4. Finding Solitude and a Wilderness Experience

Sure, you will encounter other backpackers and dayhikers on some trails. But as in many major national parks, Glacier’s management limits the number of backcountry permits issued to backpackers. While virtually all available permits get claimed during the peak summer season, every time I’ve backpacked in Glacier, my party has enjoyed hours every day seeing few other people—especially the farther you hike from any road (and the park has very few roads).

See “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park.”

Certain areas of the park attract the most visitors—including Logan Pass and Many Glacier. But in a park that spans over a million acres, mostly wilderness, it’s not hard to get away from the hordes, especially in more-remote areas like the North Fork, Goat Haunt, and Nyack/Coal Creek areas and even some sections of the Continental Divide Trail.

Yes, it’s hard to get a backcountry permit in Glacier—and that’s a good thing. The wilderness experience remains protected—and amplified by all the factors noted above.

Want deeper solitude? Follow tip no. 2 (“Go outside the peak season”) in my “12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking” and backpack in Glacier in late September or early October, when average temperatures range from highs in the 50s and 60s Fahrenheit to lows in the 30s to around freezing. While precipitation is more likely than in August, September and October both average just over two inches of total precipitation—and none on two out of every three days—falling mostly as rain in September, while the shift to snow occurs sometime in October.

In other words, you can see snow in late summer and early fall, but the weather is dry more often than not, with moderately cool temps. Watch the forecast and take advantage of a good weather window.

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and “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents.”

5. Because It Will Blow You Away

Backpacking my own variation of Glacier’s Northern Loop with two friends who’d never been to the park before, as we reached Piegan Pass—and a view that stopped us in our tracks—one of them remarked, with joking sarcasm, “I can’t see why you wanted to take us here, Mike. It’s not like there’s much to see.” And that was just our first day.

As was the case the first time I backpacked much of the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier with three other friends (I more recently hiked a slight variation of that same route), every day felt like a walk through a time 10,000 years before the present, when nature was pristine (mostly, although human-caused climate change is rapidly causing the park’s glaciers to melt away) and North America’s full complement of original animal species still roamed the mountains. Those two trips culminated with a crossing of the high and stunning Dawson Pass Trail from Pitamakan Pass to Dawson Pass, overlooking some of the biggest peaks and glaciers and most-remote wilderness in the park’s core—and seeing yet more bighorn sheep.

That’s what awaits you in Glacier. Go there.

See all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside, including “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park,” “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier,” and “Jagged Peaks and Wild Goats: Backpacking Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail.” Like many stories at this blog, reading those in full requires a paid subscription to The Big Outside.

See also my expert e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can plan your backpacking trip in Glacier.

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If you have ever backpacked in Glacier National Park, you know you want to return. If you haven’t yet, then isn’t it time? One of America’s flagship national parks, it’s a must-see destination for backpackers because of the eye-popping scenery, remoteness, and an extremely rare variety of megafauna—including mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and black and grizzly bears—as the photo gallery below from my numerous trips in Glacier shows.

And it’s not too early to start planning a backpacking trip in Glacier for next summer.

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There are many good reasons I rank Glacier as one of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips,” a list I base on having backpacked all over the country for more than three decades, including 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

On every multi-day hike I’ve taken there—such as the 65-mile route I consider the best backpacking trip in Glacier—I have marveled at an ocean of mountains spreading out before us, soaring cliffs, some of the park’s 760 lakes, sightings of bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and bears (yes, including grizzlies)—and enjoyed a surprising degree of solitude even while hitting many of the park’s highlights.

See my expert e-books to two outstanding backpacking trips in Glacier
and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can plan every detail of your Glacier trip.

My advice: Start planning your Glacier adventure months in advance. Backcountry campsites can be reserved in advance starting March 15 for groups of one to eight people (although having a group of more than four gets much more complicated) and March 1 for groups of nine to 12. Permits for about 40 percent of backcountry campsites in Glacier are issued on a first-come basis no more than a day before a trip’s start date—but that’s a hard permit to get because of the high demand and backpackers on a multi-day hike may claim some of those walk-in sites farther in advance. 

Glacier holds two 24-hour lotteries for early-access times to reserve a backcountry permit, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people. Standard group lottery winners will get a date and time when they can apply for a permit reservation. Large-group lottery winners will receive special instructions for applying for a permit reservation. Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for reservations and 30 percent of campsites available for walk-in permits no more than one day in advance during the backpacking season.

Click any photo in the gallery to scroll through it. Scroll below the gallery for links to stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

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Read “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside (many of which require a paid subscription to read in full, including expert tips on planning those trips), And find more info at nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/backcountry-reservations.htm.

See also my expert e-books to two outstanding backpacking trips in Glacier and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can plan every detail of a Glacier trip customized to your preferences.

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In the second week of September, the cool air in the shade of the forest nips at our cheeks as we leave our first night’s camp beside Glenns Lake in the backcountry of Glacier National Park, starting at a reasonably early hour for a day where we will walk nearly 16 miles and 6,000 feet of combined uphill and downhill. I’m hiking in a fleece hoodie, pants, and gloves and my friends Pam Solon and Jeff Wilhelm are similarly layered up. Once the sun reaches us within an hour, we’ll strip down to shorts and T-shirts.

Where the trail crosses a meadow, the expansive view west across a calm and insistently blue Cosley Lake reveals what looks like a long wall of overlapping stone shields jammed into the earth, each 2,000 or more feet tall and tilting at different angles. At the lake’s outlet—now in warm sunshine—we ford the Belly River, ankle- to calf-deep here with just a few tiny riffles and not very cold. More hiking through quiet forest brings us to the refrigerated, cliff-shaded alcove below Dawn Mist Falls, which spills thunderously over a sheer drop and crashes onto fallen boulders at its base, its force releasing a perpetual mist. Moss wallpapers the alcove’s short cliffs.

After a thoroughly relaxing lunch break on the pebbly beach at Elizabeth Lake—where the perfect combination of solar warmth and soft breeze probably converts in direct value to about a thousand hours of counseling—we start the long climb to the Ptarmigan Tunnel. Reaching the open alpine terrain, I repeatedly stop to spin 180 degrees and take big bites of our view of the valley of Helen and Elizabeth lakes and the peaks on the other side, which shelter what remains of a couple of glaciers in the shade of north-facing cliffs just below the mountaintops.

I’ve backpacked this trail before; this isn’t new to me. But time slowly renders a bit fuzzier the memory of how constantly breathtaking it is—which is, in a funny way, a gift to us: We get to experience that awe anew each time.

Everyone laughed when the legendary Yogi Berra said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” but I think I knew what he meant.

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The trail leads us upward across the cliff face of the long rampart known as the Ptarmigan Wall, the path growing wide as a city sidewalk, with a stone wall just in case its ample width isn’t enough to prevent anyone tripping into the abyss. Then we walk through the 250-foot-long Ptarmigan Tunnel, blasted through the Ptarmigan Wall and completed in 1930 to enable people to ride horses between the Belly River Valley and Many Glacier. Today, it’s a novelty of a bygone era that happens to create a gorgeous trail for backpackers. The Ptarmigan Wall’s shadow falls over us as we descend past Ptarmigan Lake, rippling in the light wind.

Afternoon slides into evening as we walk below peaks that resemble giant cutting tools attempting to dice and chop the infinite sky. At dusk, we stroll into the backpacker campsites in the campground at Many Glacier—wrapping up another day of hiking that would receive no true justice from overused superlatives because the baseline for any day hiking in Glacier is already “great.”

Being in this campground again (I’ve lost track of how many times), I’m reminded of the only aspect of my planning for this trip that barely missed the target: Due largely to the frenzied process of reserving a Glacier backcountry permit (this story explains how to do that), I got a permit that had us arriving at Many Glacier the day after Nells Restaurant at the Swiftcurrent Motel, across the road from the campground, closed for the season. Jeff and I, with two other friends, had camped here one night on a previous backpacking trip and we were looking forward to another real dinner and gut-packing breakfast at Nells; instead, we’ll settle for backpacking food while sitting just a five-minute walk from a closed restaurant. (Before you question whether a restaurant compromises our wilderness experience, understand this: The Many Glacier campground is basically a small town, anyway. But it’s also a strategically located camp for backpackers. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of good food and trimming your pack’s food weight by two meals. As they say, when in Rome…)

Life really isn’t fair.

But considering that the seven-day hike we started yesterday was, of necessity, the best alternative—and a damn good one—to my original route, for which I had a permit, we have many reasons to be happy with the outcome of a situation that could have turned out much worse.

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Bear Trouble Equals Permit Troubles

Here’s a hard truth about backpacking in Glacier National Park: You can succeed at reserving a very hard-to-get backcountry permit, feel the anticipation building for months as your trip approaches, and then arrive at the park to discover that your planned route has been rendered impossible because of recent bear activity—meaning your only option is to try to alter your permit on the spot, creating a new route based on whatever backcountry campgrounds are still available.

And that’s exactly what happened to us.

When Pam and I drove up to the park backcountry office in Apgar Village in the darkness of 6:15 a.m. yesterday to pick up our permit, we stepped out of the car to our first big surprise of the morning. Expecting to see 20 or more people waiting for walk-in permits—the typical situation, and a backcountry ranger had warned me on the phone yesterday to expect a line forming two hours before the office opened at 7:30 a.m.—I found just one guy comprising the entire “line” until I doubled its length. And just one couple joined us before the office opened, the five of us getting to know each other while waiting together. Pam took orders from everyone and made a run to the nearest coffee shop open that early on a Saturday.

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But the propitious spot second in line only gained us a small advantage. Once inside, we encountered our second big surprise of the morning when a backcountry ranger informed us that my original permit reservation for a variation I’d customized of the classic Northern Loop would not work because two of our six camps—Fifty Mountain and Mokowanis Junction—were closed due to bear activity. (Disturbing detail: A bear at Mokowanis had shredded a tent, fortunately while no one was inside. The catalyst was food inside it, a no-no that proved expensive but could have gone much worse.)

And there were no good alternative camp options available for us on that loop or anywhere near it—another bear-related backcountry campground closure west of the Waterton Valley prevented us from hiking a traverse over to Kintla or Bowman Lake.

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We scrambled to find an alternative route, hoping to preserve a seven-day hike. This ranger, clearly eager to help us, laid out our options for campground availability on our dates. In the end, we walked out of there with an almost completely revamped itinerary, with our first two days unchanged but adding five days following the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) south to Two Medicine. It’s nearly identical to the route Jeff and I backpacked with two other friends five years ago (when we also had to change one day on our itinerary because of bear activity), with just one significant variation.

It feels a little disappointing to miss out on the Northern Loop. But we salvaged a great hike out of a difficult situation that, in reality, can arise anytime in Glacier.

After driving around to the east side of the park and arranging a shuttle to our starting trailhead (see details on that in the trip-planning details at the bottom of this story, available exclusively to subscribers), we finally started hiking at 2 p.m. on a bluebird afternoon. It was even a bit hot in the sun, which silhouetted the jagged peaks along the Continental Divide ahead of us. We passed a few backpacker parties, most doing the Northern Loop by banging out two consecutive days of about 20 miles to bypass the closed campgrounds. We stopped at Gros Ventre Falls, then reached our camp at Glenns Lake with a bit of daylight remaining to pitch tents and cook.

Planning your next big adventure? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites.”

Waterfalls and Lakes

The soft patter of rain on my tent wakes me up around 5:30 a.m. on our fourth day. The showers pause long enough for us to eat and pack up, and then the rain grows more persistent and the wind gathers momentum just as we hit the trail. Low, dark clouds charge across the sky, enshrouding mountaintops. The rain never comes too hard as we round the west shore of St. Mary Lake, passing St. Mary Falls and taking the short, steep spur trail to stand in the mix of rain and waterfall mist at the base of tall Virginia Falls.

By late morning, the rain expends itself and patches of blue sky appear through breaks in the clouds. We hike up a broad valley through a very open, old forest burn where skeletal standing tree trunks occasionally hum softly in the wind—a ghost forest. On both sides, green slopes rise to walls of shattered rock.

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In the cooking and food-hanging area at our camp at Red Eagle Lake, we meet three guys in their early seventies who’ve been coming to Glacier for 35 years and have, by their estimates, climbed at least half the peaks in the park. Now their trips consist of backpacking here for a week or so and they struggle to get a large portion of their old group of friends to join them each summer. Then six more guys gather with us. All 28, they are friends from college and post-college, plus one guy the rest met in a brewery. I tell them I’m pretty sure that’s how Lewis and Clark filled their expedition: in a brewery. We sit around talking, sharing stories, and laughing until well after dark.

Another chilly start on day five blossoms into another sunny, pleasant day, welcome weather for our plan to hike more than 14 miles. We cross Triple Divide Pass at 7,397 feet, below 8,020-foot Triple Divide Peak, named for the topographical rarity of a mountain draining its waters to three oceans: Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic. (The three creeks flowing off it are named for their destinations: Pacific, Atlantic, and Hudson Bay.)

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At the campground at Morning Star Lake, Pam and I spot at least a dozen mountain goats casually grazing the precipitous cliffs across the lake. In the cooking and food-storage area, everyone zipped up inside warm puffy jackets, we talk with three CDT thru-hikers very near the end of their long journey. While eager to finish, they all admit that they will “miss it in a week.”

Later, full darkness falls on this moonless night and the Milky Way spreads itself thickly across the sky.

See my story about a previous backpacking trip that followed this route but with one variation, “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

The Gear I Used See my reviews of the outstanding tents (this one and this one), sleeping bag, boots, rain jacket, down jacket, air mattress, stove, and headlamps (this one and this one) I used on this trip.

Find the best gear, expert buying tips, and best-in-category reviews at my Gear Reviews page.

Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.” With a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read all of those three stories for free; if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the e-guide versions of “12 Expert Tips for Planning a Backpacking Trip,” the lightweight and ultralight backpacking guide, and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

See all stories with expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.

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The three bighorn sheep lifted their heavily horned heads to gaze at us, but never budged from their beds of grass amid boulders on a mountainside above the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park. The mountain goats we saw on various occasions gave us little more attention than that. And fortunately, the grizzly bear sow with two cubs in tow that passed within about 30 feet of us—an encounter of less than 10 seconds that is etched into my memory forever—gave us no more than a passing glance.

While I have backpacked over much of this amazing park, that 65-mile trek gave us the definitive grand tour of Glacier, including must-see spots like the Highline Trail, the Ptarmigan Tunnel, the Many Glacier area, and the Garden Wall. Besides an array of wildlife, two friends and I frequently saw an ocean of mountains spreading out before us, long escarpments of Glacier’s signature soaring cliffs, and some of the prettiest of the park’s 760 lakes.

We even enjoyed an unexpectedly high degree of solitude for long stretches of a multi-day hike—something I have learned, over more than three decades of backpacking all over the country, including more than 10 years running this blog and for many years previously as a field editor for Backpacker magazine—is a rare treat in popular national parks.

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This hike also takes advantage of the park’s free shuttle bus system, easing trip logistics—and there are excellent variations for shortening this 65-mile route, too.

All of the route options and need-to-know planning details for this hike are explained in detail in my downloadable e-guide “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park.”

One of America’s flagship national parks, Glacier is a must-do destination for backpackers because of mountain scenery unlike anywhere else, remoteness, and a rare variety of wildlife. That’s why I consider it one of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

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A Glacier backpacking permit is one of the hardest to get in the National Park System. Glacier opens 70 percent of wilderness campsites for reservations starting March 15 at 8 a.m. Mountain Time at recreation.gov/permits/4675321; and holds a one-day lottery on March 1 only for mid-size groups (five to eight people) at pay.gov/public/form/start/74000984 and large groups (nine to 12) at pay.gov/public/form/start/74000862. During the backpacking season, 30 percent of wilderness campsites will be available for walk-in/first-come permits no more than one day in advance. 

See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and “10 Tips for Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Would you like to have my expert help planning all the details of your backpacking trip in Glacier, including figuring out a hiking itinerary that’s ideal for your party and showing you how to maximize your chances of getting a highly coveted backcountry permit? See my Custom Trip Planning page for details.

Check out the gallery of photos below from this trip.

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Read my story “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” about that trip, including more photos, and my story about a shorter and easier, family backpacking trip on the Gunsight Pass Trail. Most stories about trips at The Big Outside require a paid subscription to read in full.

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Backpack the CDT Through Glacier

If you’ve already backpacked in the areas of Glacier described above, or you’re just looking for a different route that delivers a similar, full Glacier experience, see the photo gallery below, which includes some of the dozens of images in my story “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier,” about a 94-mile traverse of Glacier that follows a customized variation of the Continental Divide Trail through the park. In fact, both trips are equally spectacular, but the CDT traverse requires a longer and more complicated shuttle between trailheads.

My e-guide “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park” provides all the necessary details, plus my expert tips for pulling off that customized CDT traverse of the park, including shorter variations on the route.

See “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park.”

See all stories about backpacking in Glacier, “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park,” “The 7 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park” and all stories about national park adventures at The Big Outside.

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After more than three decades of wilderness backpacking all over the U.S. and around the world, rarely does a new trip immediately leap into my all-time top 10. But that’s exactly what happened when three friends and I backpacked a north-south traverse of 94 miles through Glacier National Park in a glorious week in September, mostly following the Continental Divide Trail.

Backpacking for six days from Chief Mountain Trailhead on the Canadian border to Two Medicine in the park’s southeast corner, we enjoyed the full Glacier experience, from daily wildlife encounters to scenery unlike anything you can find anywhere else in America—as I think you’ll see in the photos below.

We saw bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, moose, and one grizzly bear (from a distance that was adequately safe, though we were wishing it was greater). It being September, we also heard elk bugling almost every morning and evening, and enjoyed mostly sunny, dry days and comfortably cool nights.

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We also happened to meet a number of CDT thru-hikers on the final day or two of their months-long journey, and it was kind of special hearing their stories and seeing their excitement over their imminent completion of an epic trek. Almost to a person, they all said Glacier is one of the two best sections of the CDT (along with the Wind River Range).

And then, of course, there were the views of skyscraping cliffs, waterfalls, and icy peaks looming high above deep, glacier-carved valleys. We made long climbs over five of Glacier ’s finest mountain passes—Redgap, Piegan, Triple Divide, Pitamakan, and Dawson.

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Although the scenery really awed us every day of the trip, it seemed like the perfect culmination of it when, on the last day of backpacking, we followed the high, alpine Dawson Pass Trail. It delivered just maybe the trek’s best, long views of the glaciers and peaks in the park’s remote interior.

After the backpacking trip, we capped off our visit with an eight-mile, out-and-back dayhike from Two Medicine following the CDT up to Scenic Point—for yet more views of those lakes, valleys, and peaks that have reminded visitors for many generations of the Alps.

Click on the photo gallery below and scroll through these pictures from that trip—they’ll give you a strong sense of the inspiring majesty of this north-south traverse through Glacier. Then scroll below the gallery to find links to my stories about this trip and others in Glacier at The Big Outside.

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See my feature story about this 94-mile hike, “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier.”

See also “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and all of stories about Glacier National Park at The Big Outside, including these (some of which require a paid subscription to read in full):

“5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park”
“Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop”
“Jagged Peaks, Mountain Lakes, and Wild Goats: A 3-Day Hike on Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail”
“The 18Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park”

I can help you plan this or any trip you read about at my blog. Find out more here.

Want to take what’s arguably the best long backpacking trip in Glacier? Check out my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park,” which tells you everything you need to know to plan and successfully pull off that 65-mile hike of a lifetime. And see all of my e-books.

If you want to plan a backpacking trip in Glacier or any other popular park, start with my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

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Never mind that it was the seventh straight bluebird morning of backpacking in mountains that constantly look surreal, like a painted mural backdrop in a movie. It didn’t matter that the trip had been a parade of wildlife. We even forgot about the heaviness in our legs from 15-mile days.

The menacing snarl piercing the silence seized our full attention.

My buddy Jerry Hapgood and I stood in the warm sunshine at 7,050-foot Lincoln Pass in Montana’s Glacier National Park. We had stopped for a snack after passing yet another mountain goat with a kid—I’d lost track of our goat tally for the week—and had just started ambling down the trail again when the sound stopped us cold. Then we heard it a second time, and followed it with our eyes.

Below us about 200 vertical feet and three switchbacks, the authors of the menacing snarls wrestled in the sparse conifer forest beside a small tarn: two grizzly cubs. Grazing nearby was their mom, whom I’ll politely describe as a big woman. They were about four steps off the trail we needed to descend, a distance I quickly calculated that sow griz could close, at her max speed of 35 mph, in 0.16 seconds.

I felt suddenly very anxious.

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We waited, watching the bears. No amount of yelling, “Hey bear!” sent them packing. No amount of impatience persuaded us to just go for it and walk past them. An hour crawled by. Then three other hikers came along, two men and a woman in their 20s, going in our direction.

After a brief, excited discussion, we concurred on a plan: The five of us would hike down together, making abundant noise, exploiting the impressive force of our numbers to scare the grizzlies away. It seemed like an excellent idea. As Jerry and I turned to retrieve our packs, the woman in their trio said, gravely, “There are the bears, guys.”

When we looked downhill, she added, “No, behind you.” I doubt I’ll ever forget the cold shiver her words sent through me.

Jerry and I spun around to see the sow not 30 feet from us across a grassy meadow. She had just emerged from a copse of trees, her cubs in single-file formation behind her. From that close, I saw the hairs standing up on her hump, her shoulders rippling, her mouth slightly agape showing off incisors that could cut through human flesh like it was thinly sliced prosciutto. She looked a little bigger than my refrigerator would if laid on its side.

As we backpedaled, trying unconvincingly to exude calm, she sniffed the air, swung her massive head in our direction, and fixed a hard, top-of-the-food-chain predator stare directly on us.

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Six days earlier, our September week of backpacking through Glacier commenced with the kind of scenery that justifies a badly abused adjective: awesome. Two hours after parking our car, Jerry, another friend, Geoff Sears, who was along for the trip’s first five days, and I walked up to Piegan Pass at over 7,500 feet and suddenly contracted a bad case of goofy grins. The pinnacled Garden Wall’s long barrier of cliffs rose before us like a 500-foot-high castle. Below it, emerald lakes speckled the valley we would descend. Clouds billowed dramatically over a jumble of sharply angled mountains extending to a distant horizon, in the direction we were headed.

Jerry joked with friendly sarcasm, “I can’t see why you wanted to take us here, Mike. It’s not like there’s much to see.”

Jerry and Geoff are in Glacier for the first time, but for both it’s been a dream trip years coming—because that’s what Glacier embodies for hikers, our highest aspirations. For my fifth visit here, I crafted a somewhat unorthodox itinerary that would normally require complicated driving acrobatics, but is made logistically effortless by the park’s free shuttle buses. It would have us touching down in the front country twice during the week. That’s not my usual backpacking M.O., but it offered certain advantages: We could target backcountry highlights that required one short, mid-trip shuttle down the Going-to-the-Sun Road; and on day five, Geoff could depart (he needed to get home) and Jerry and I could resupply.

First up: a 65-mile, five-day horseshoe-shaped circuit from Siyeh Bend on the Sun Road to Ptarmigan Tunnel, Stoney Indian Pass, Fifty Mountain, and Logan Pass. Then Geoff would travel home and Jerry and I resupply for a 25-mile overnight from Jackson Glacier Overlook on the Sun Road to Lake McDonald Lodge via Gunsight Pass and a side trip to Sperry Glacier.

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Standing in Piegan Pass, a profound sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me, though I’d never seen this spot before. Then it hit me. Glacier’s mountains remind me vividly of the Swiss Alps, where, as it happened, I had trekked just two months earlier: the deep valleys carved in that perfect half-pipe symmetry by prehistoric ice; the stark contrast between lush green below and soaring, rocky peaks above; the waterfalls leaping in suicidal freefalls off cliffs, and shawls of crack-riddled ice enwrapping mountain shoulders—water always molding earth. The Alps are more heavily glaciated and higher, with laudable amenities like huts, hotels, beer, and real food. But Glacier is raw, primal wilderness, with an array of wildlife long gone from most of the continent, thriving here in shocking abundance.

We hiked 13 miles that first day, walking along darkly forested Lake Josephine in early evening—right at grizzly dinnertime—calling out, “Hey bear!” to hidden ursine prowlers but only seeing three goats. And in a departure from the backpacking norm, we ate dinner in a restaurant across the road from the campground at Many Glacier—agreeing unanimously on the merits of digging into heaping plates of pasta and quaffing beers on the first night of a wilderness trip.

Get the right backpack for a trip like Glacier. See my picks for “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and the best ultralight backpacks.

At 7,200 feet on a headwall where the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail makes a couple of long switchbacks before slamming up hard against a cliff, the three of us lingered to admire the view down the valley we’d spent the morning walking up. Rays of sunshine dodged scudding clouds, casting shifting light and shadows over Ptarmigan Lake, the Ptarmigan Wall, and the ledges of Crowfeet Mountain, where earlier we’d spied five mountain goats through my monocular. In the distance, the hatchet blade of Mt. Wilbur jutted above the Swiftcurrent Valley.

Then we turned and walked through a mountain.

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Eighty years ago, workers spent a summer drilling and dynamiting through the Ptarmigan Wall, creating a 250-foot-long tunnel tall and wide enough to lead horses through, and blasting a trail into sheer cliffs on the wall’s north side. We walked through its cold darkness toward the spot of light at the opposite end, emerging abruptly to a completely new vista of mountains and lakes. We then followed the trail across black cliffs and a mountainside of burnt-red talus, eventually dropping more than 2,000 feet to the green shore of Elizabeth Lake in the Belly River Valley. By evening we made camp at the foot of finger-like Glenns Lake, whose still waters sharply mirrored Cosley Ridge bathed in warm alpenglow.

A clear night brought morning temps barely above freezing. After two hours without breaking a sweat hiking through frigid forest shaded by mountains, we finally hit sunshine traversing above Mokowanis Cascade, which tumbles for 300 feet or more over innumerable ledges. We climbed higher still, through two hanging valleys spliced by more waterfalls, following the trail’s improbable zigzagging up a headwall.

A couple resting beside their packs asked us, “Did you see the two bull moose sparring in that clearing back there?” We must have missed them by minutes.

After this trip in Glacier, hike the other nine of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

But there was no missing the grizzly footprint with distinct claw marks in the trail. The print sat beside a pile of bear poop that would impress anyone who’s ever known the discomfort of backcountry constipation.

We came upon it on our third afternoon, in the midst of a 2,200-foot, sun-baked slog up out of the Waterton Valley on our way to the campground at Fifty Mountain. That tedious climb brought us to a high, gently undulating plateau littered with enormous boulders, treeless and wide open. Cathedral Peak’s cliffs extended for four miles or more on our left, but in every other direction we looked out on storm-tossed waves of mountains crashing against far horizons.

“Well, if one comes after us up here, we’ll see him coming,” Jerry said, referring to the animal that’s always on the minds of backpackers in Glacier: the grizzly bear. But by the next day, our fourth, we’d be cracking jokes about not having seen a single bear yet—a joke that would ultimately be on us.

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The air temperature feels not much above freezing, pinching our faces as we hit the trail just after 8 a.m. on our second day of backpacking in Glacier National Park. The still, glassy water of Elizabeth Lake captures a razor-sharp, upside-down reflection of the jagged mountains flanking it; only the upper slopes of the peaks above Elizabeth’s western shore catch the early sunlight on this September morning. We pause occasionally on the strip of sandy beach along the lakeshore just to gawk at our surroundings.

Then we hear it.

A high-pitched, nasal whine builds into something like a shriek, the note suspended for several seconds before it’s abruptly cut off. It’s an elk somewhere in the forest, not far from us, bugling an invitation to prospective mates. Throughout our week, that sound will greet us repeatedly—but it will pale on the excitement meter compared with some of our other encounters with wild megafauna.

My friends Todd Arndt, Mark Fenton, Jeff Wilhelm and I have come here in the second week of September to backpack a north-south traverse of Glacier. Combining sections of the primary and alternate routes of the Continental Divide Trail, we will hike 94 miles through much of the finest backcountry in a park that CDT thru-hikers frequently identify as one of the two very best sections of the CDT (the other being the Wind River Range—both places gracing my list of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”).

We had also heard an elk bugling—possibly the same bull as this morning—last night while sitting around our campsite at the head of Elizabeth Lake, still buzzing over our first day in the wilderness of one of the last two parks (along with Yellowstone) in the Lower 48 that still hosts nearly the full complement of species that existed here before European settlement.

As we sat in camp, two women arrived, all smiles and laughter after hiking 20 miles from Many Glacier that day—the reverse of what we’re doing today. They told us they saw seven bears, grizzlies and blacks, including one griz from a distance of only about 20 yards. Fortunately, it gave them no more than a glance.

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Bears tend to dominate one’s thoughts in the backcountry of Glacier—for good reasons in an ecosystem dense with both kinds. Indeed, not long after hearing the elk bugle, as we’re hiking along Elizabeth’s shore, we spot a black bear sow with one cub trailing her on the talus high above us.

As that bugling elk illustrates—and as I’m reminded every time I hike here—part of the experience of any journey through Glacier consists of observing the evidence of the wildness all around you in this raw landscape. The elk you hear bugling without ever seeing it. The shockingly large pile of bear scat deposited right in the middle of the trail, as if the bear intended to give conspicuous notice that he lurks nearby and knows where you are even if you don’t know where he is. The fingerprints of glaciers that carved today’s deep, U-shaped valleys, but have retreated to the highest elevations to make their last stand before climate change erases them all.

In Glacier, the unseen narrates almost as much of the story as everything on display before your eyes.

In that respect, Glacier—because of its history, the evocative power in its name, and the certain fate of every one of its namesake rivers of ice that began forming thousands of years ago—symbolizes so much that we have done right and done wrong as a society. In the blink of an eye on the timeline of geologic history, we have simultaneously protected many soul-stirring landscapes like Glacier—established in 1910, barely more than a century ago, as America’s eighth national park—and through our aggressive burning of fossil fuels, we have dictated their steady demise.

As the four of us carry backpacks loaded with gear and food to walk for six days in the wilderness—each with a pepper spray canister holstered on our belts, as defense against an attacking grizzly bear—I wonder:

Can Glacier now become a symbol of hope?

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Redgap Pass

About an hour after crossing Redgap Pass at 7,520 feet on our second afternoon—following a long, stunning ascent from Elizabeth Lake, with views of the peaks and glaciers above the Belly River Valley; and after we stopped on the trail just beyond Redgap Pass to watch at least 10 bighorn sheep grazing and ambling around on rock ledges—Todd and I stop again.

More than a hundred yards ahead of us in this meadow, a broad-shouldered mass of brown fur shuffles through the low brush, disturbingly close to the trail we’re descending toward Poia Lake.

Mark and Jeff are not far ahead, but must have passed through here when this grizzly was farther from the trail.

The bear lifts his huge head and sniffs the air; we’re upwind, so he clearly knows we’re here. He shakes his head in a way that suggests he doesn’t like what he smells.

Then the griz turns and starts toward us.

Todd and I back farther away, maintaining a comfortable distance, but the bear appears much less interested in us than what he can find to eat in the meadow. Two or three times, he ambles in our direction and we back off farther. Finally, after more than 30 minutes of hoping the bear will leave the area, we decide to bushwhack a wide, off-trail arc around him, following the nearby creek bed downstream until we’re well past the griz and can bushwhack safely back to the trail. When we catch up to Jeff and Mark at Poia Lake, they say the griz was at least 75 feet off the trail and ignoring them when they walked past.

Just on our second day in Glacier, we’ve seen three bears and at least 10 bighorn sheep.

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We hike a 20-mile day to Many Glacier—not what we planned, but our only option, because rangers had informed us when we picked up our backcountry permit that the more-direct route from Elizabeth Lake to Many Glacier, via the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail, was temporarily closed due to high grizzly bear activity around Ptarmigan Lake and Iceberg Lake (also closed). That turned out to be our good luck, for more reasons than today’s wildlife sightings: I’ve backpacked the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail before, and while it’s spectacular (and quite worth doing), Redgap Pass, while harder, is even more so.

As we descend to Many Glacier, smoke that has crossed the Divide from a large wildfire on the west side of the park reduces the peaks to ghost-like silhouettes, and the sun to a red-orange orb. With the wind direction generally working in our favor, though, this will be the only time all week that we see much smoke. We hitch a ride from tourists to avoid walking about two miles of pavement to the campground—where we’ll spoil ourselves just a little bit.

After setting up camp at the backpacker campsites (reserved on our permit) in the campground at Many Glacier, we walk across the road to Nells Restaurant at the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn for a big meal of pizza for Todd and me, and chicken pot pie for Mark and Jeff.

Tomorrow, after a big breakfast at Nells, we’ll hike over 15 miles, diving fully back into the wilderness again. But for this one night, we’re all good with the positively Euro-indulgent pleasure of eating real food and drinking beer in the middle of a wilderness backpacking trip.

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Piegan Pass

The quiet seems as deep as this valley and as broad as this forest as we hike along the shore of Lake Josephine early on our third morning. That quiet amplifies the soft chuckling of the creek flowing from Josephine when we cross it, and the gentle splashing that prompts us to peer through the trees to see a moose feeding in the lake.

And the quiet sounds all the more suddenly and sharply pierced each time a neighborhood elk bugles somewhere nearby, as we begin the long climb on the CDT from Many Glacier to 7,560-foot Piegan Pass.

Having backpacked over Piegan Pass almost 10 years ago, I’ve been eagerly anticipating that today would be one of the trip’s highlights—and happily discover that this valley possesses all the power to awe that I remember. But my companions haven’t hiked this trail before. Their expressions and body language as we walk remind me just how much the trail from Many Glacier to Piegan Pass shocks the senses.

The serrated crest of the Garden Wall appears above the trees flanking the trail. Before long, we emerge from the forest to meadows bisected by Cataract Creek, craning our necks to take in the cliffs that shoot straight up hundreds of feet. The Garden Wall is literally that: a wall of stone jutting upward like a giant meat cleaver, vertiginous on both sides and stretching for several miles along the Continental Divide north of Logan Pass.Below Morning Eagle Falls, we cool—or more accurately, numb—our feet in the icy creek. A stone’s throw upstream from us, snowbanks drip meltwater directly into it.

The Garden Wall exemplifies the regal quality of Glacier’s landscape, mirrored all over the park. In the early 20^th century, naturalist and historian George Bird Grinnell—who spearheaded the effort to create the national park, where one of the best-known glaciers now bears his name—bestowed the nickname “the crown of the continent” on this part of the Rocky Mountains. Indeed, the pinnacled cliffs and jagged mountains resemble scores of royal crowns strewn across the land. Even the megafauna—bighorn sheep, elk, mountain goats, moose, and bears—look a bit like courtiers in a royal court.

The Blackfeet Indians, who have lived and hunted in and around these mountains for thousands of years, call them “the backbone of the world.” At over one million acres, mostly pristine wilderness, Glacier comprises the larger portion of the world’s first international peace park, established in 1932 with neighboring Waterton National Park across the border, and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.

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Everywhere we go, we see the footprints of the glaciers that sculpted this landscape for at least 7,000 years, but have largely disappeared from their namesake park. It’s not hard to imagine the miles-long tongues of cracked, moving ice that once filled these meadowed and forested valleys and the “hanging valleys” above them, and how different a place it was then. The distinctive, blade-like Garden Wall, in fact, was created by glaciers grinding away at the rock and earth on either side of it.

But if you really want to see how Glacier looked under thick blankets of ice, scores of photographs from the turn of the last century, easily found in online searches or viewed in books and displays in and around the park, show people standing beside towering walls of ice at the toe of glaciers—ice that melted away or receded uphill decades ago.

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In 1850, there were 150 glaciers in the park—so numerous and dominant on the landscape that it must have seemed obvious that this new national park could have no other name. Today, just 26 remain, all of them fractional remnants of their size a century and a half ago. Researchers in Glacier predict that the last of them will be gone within about a decade—all the more reason to explore the park’s backcountry as soon as you can. [The story of Glacier’s disappearing ice inspired my book about taking our young kids backpacking, sea kayaking, dayhiking, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and rock climbing in 11 national parks over the course of one year, including Glacier, being transformed by climate change.]

After eating lunch at Piegan Pass, we make a long descent on the CDT to the Going-to-the-Sun Road, cross it to visit Deadwood Falls, where Reynolds Creek slices a dramatic gorge through rock, and pitch our tents in the backcountry campground at Reynolds Creek by early evening. There, we meet Marisa and Rafael, a young couple from D.C. who are seeing Glacier for the first time on a three-day backpacking trip—no doubt experiencing the awe we feel, and perhaps learning something about how rapidly this iconic landscape is changing.

Read about how climate change is affecting the Olympics and other parks in my book Before They’re Gone—A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks.

Glacier Area Lodging and Restaurants

We spent the nights before and after our backpacking trip at the Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier, glacierparkcollection.com/lodging/glacier-park-lodge, and a night at the Marriott Springhill Suites in Kalispell, marriott.com/hotels/travel/fcash-springhill-suites-kalispell.

Favorite restaurants in East Glacier include the Two Medicine Grill (great breakfasts), the Whistle Stop (excellent huckleberry pie), and the Looking Glass.

Kalispell, outside the park’s west entrance, provides a good base for an adventurous visit to the Glacier region. Find info on lodging options, restaurants, and activities at DiscoverKalispell.com.

We’re just seconds beyond the sign at the start of the Gunsight Pass Trail that reads “Entering Grizzly Country” when Nate, who’s a month shy of his tenth birthday, begins aggressively making the case for why he should be armed.

“Why can’t I carry a pepper spray?” he asks me—again and again.

It’s an idyllic, late-summer afternoon in the Northern Rockies—the sun shining warmly, a gently cooling breeze rippling the air, not a white speck of moisture in the sky. We are heading out on a three-day family backpacking trip to Gunsight Pass in Montana’s Glacier National Park. One of the logistically easiest and shortest multi-day hikes in the park, the 20-mile traverse from Gunsight Pass Trailhead to Lake McDonald Lodge—both of which are on the Going-to-the-Sun Road and served by the park’s free shuttle bus—takes in some of Glacier’s most spectacular scenery, including views of one of its largest rivers of ice (all of which are steadily shrinking), scores of waterfalls, and a backcountry campsite at Lake Ellen Wilson that is one of the prettiest in the park.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get a permit for the full traverse; it’s popular and backpacker numbers are restricted to avoid overuse and preserve a sense of solitude. (Read my tips on how to get how to get a permit for this hike.) So instead, we’ll spend two nights at Gunsight Lake, dayhike to Gunsight Pass, and then backtrack to the Gunsight Pass Trailhead on our last day.

Having hiked the traverse before, I knew Nate and our seven-year-old daughter, Alex, easily have the stamina for the three six-mile days we’ll do. The much bigger concern for my wife, Penny, and me was the preoccupying idea of backpacking in grizzly-bear country with our young kids. In fact, a year ago, I had a close encounter with a sow griz and her two cubs on the Gunsight Pass Trail. Although we know that such encounters are rare, we’ll have to be diligent about making sure the kids don’t inadvertently bring a pocketful of Jolly Ranchers into the tent for the night.

Thinking along similar lines, my hyper-focused son is consumed by the conviction that he should be armed with one of the pepper-spray canisters holstered to the hipbelts of Penny’s and my backpacks. When not distracted by throwing sticks into the raging creek at Deadwood Falls, or watching for moose in the boggy, partly forested flats of the St. Mary River, he persistently returns to his argument that he is just as capable as his mother or me of calmly deploying pepper spray at a charging grizzly. I try, in vain, to convince him that an adult is better able to react to that inconceivably frightful circumstance—although I’m not really sure I believe that.

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Glacier National Park covers a million acres straddling the Continental Divide hard against the Canadian border. More than a hundred peaks here in the northernmost U.S. Rockies rise above 8,000 feet, the highest over 10,000 feet. Meat-cleaver wedges of billion-year-old rock line up in rows stretching to far horizons, blades pointed upward.

The Blackfeet Indians called these mountains “the backbone of the world.” The description fits a place where the land vaults up so dramatically from the very edge of the Plains—and where Triple Divide Peak is one of only two North American mountains that funnel waters to three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. George Bird Grinnell, a writer who began lobbying to create a national park here in the 1880s, called these mountains “the Crown of the Continent.” The Great Northern Railway, hoping to bring paying tourists in, dubbed the area “Little Switzerland.”

With just one road crossing the park—the Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 50-mile-long ribbon of pavement clinging to avalanche-prone mountainsides—Glacier is more than anything a backpacker’s park. More than 700 miles of trails crisscross it. While you can see quite a lot of world-class scenery on dayhikes, most of this vast, wild area is accessible only to people willing to carry on their backs everything they need to survive for days in the wilderness.

The Gunsight Pass Trail is a great choice for first-time Glacier backpackers and anyone who wants a short backcountry trip with easy transportation logistics. It’s also not crowded with dayhikers like trails around Many Glacier and Logan Pass—all good reasons for making it my kids’ first multi-day hike in Glacier.

Best of all, though, the views really are among the finest in the park.

On our first afternoon, we walk past an overlook of the Blackfoot Glacier, one of the park’s largest, which sprawls across the cirque at the head of the St. Mary River. A little while later, we stroll into camp at Gunsight Lake, a long, blue-green gem embraced by an arc of rugged mountains, including Mt. Jackson, one of just a half-dozen in the park that rise above 10,000 feet.

After Nate and Alex play by the lakeshore for a while, launching driftwood boats and bombing them with rocks, I accede to giving them a lesson in using the pepper spray—and letting Nate carry one canister, but only in camp, where there are at least 15 other backpackers spread among several sites under the pines, a substantial human presence to deter ursine visits. For the remainder of our time in this camp, tonight, tomorrow, and on our last morning, Nate will assume the role of the world’s smallest bodyguard, escorting Penny, Alex, and me around the campground with the canister hanging from a belt loop on his shorts, looking like a mortar shell against his skinny thigh.

Alex glances over her shoulder at me with a look that says, “Soooo, what now?”

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On our second morning, the four of us have stopped high up the Gunsight Pass Trail. Cliffs rise steeply up to a small glacier on our left, and drop off precipitously on our right a thousand feet down to the clear, emerald waters of Gunsight Lake. We’re dayhiking from our campsite on the lake to Gunsight Pass. And the critter obstructing us brings authenticity to the phrase “goat path.”

A young mountain goat, as white as fresh snow, with sharp, straight horns and coal-black eyes, stands in the trail, occasionally lifting its head from nibbling on plants to return Alex’s quizzical glance. I meet Alex’s look, smile, and shrug. We wait.

When the goat finally relinquishes the trail to us, scrambling nimbly down the cliff below us, we peer over the brink to see where it went. Alex mutters in awe, “I can’t believe it went down there.”

Plan your next great backpacking adventure in Glacier and other flagship parks using my expert e-guides.

Continuing upward, we look out over a deep cirque carved out by ancient ice that has mostly disappeared. Waterfalls too numerous to count pour hundreds of feet down cliffs. Snowfields and a lobe of the Harrison Glacier dapple the mountainsides above us.

Some three hours after leaving our campsite, we reach wind-hammered Gunsight Pass, 6,900 feet above sea level and three miles and 2,000 feet above Gunsight Lake. We sit and eat lunch on big, flat-topped rocks, perched on the rim of a vast stone bathtub—the high basin embracing Lake Ellen Wilson, where more waterfalls plunge over cliffs and their streams pour into the emerald lake.

It was just a couple of miles beyond this lake, at Lincoln Pass, where a friend and I ran into a grizzly sow and her cubs almost a year ago. We won’t walk that far today, but those bears and others are wandering around out there somewhere, perhaps even within the considerable expanse of sub-alpine meadows, boulder fields, and scattered copses of conifer trees that we can see from here. After our lunch break, we turn around to retrace the trail back to our camp on Gunsight Lake. Once there, the kids play more at the edge of the lake, Penny holes up in the tent with her book, and I lay on the sun-warmed stones of the beach.

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I wanted to bring Nate and Alex to this iconic park in part to see its glaciers before they all melt away completely, a fate that U.S. Geological Survey researchers here predict may occur by 2020—when my kids are barely young adults. It seems incomprehensible that climate change could so rapidly remove ice that has inhabited this landscape for at least 7,000 years. But scientists tell me with amazement how they have observed and recorded for two decades this park’s glaciers collapsing, retreating, shrinking ever faster.

With average temperatures climbing steadily higher, and the health of glacial ice so inextricably tied to temperature, there is no disagreement among scientists that this park will lose the very natural feature for which it was named. The far-reaching impacts of this transformation on streams, vegetation, and wildlife remain largely unpredictable.

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Of course, for our kids, other things will leave a more lasting impression than melting glaciers: playing on the shore of Gunsight Lake, seeing a mountain goat up close—and for Nate, feeling the cold power of a canister of Counter Assault pepper spray in his hands.

But I think they will also take away some subtle but ultimately more valuable gifts from Glacier National Park.

On our last morning, we pack up camp beneath battleship-gray skies. Just as we hit the trail to hike back to our car, the first raindrops start falling. We plod through four hours of steady rain that slowly soaks our boots and pants, giving my kids a valuable lesson in hardship that they endure with patience beyond their years. They even surprise me with how positive and unruffled they remain throughout our long, wet, raw walk—affirming my belief that, even at their age, they draw knowledge and self-confidence from our wilderness adventures that they will carry with them always.

NOTE: I write more about this trip and Glacier National Park’s climate story in my book, Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, from Beacon Press. See also my stories about a longer backpacking trip on Glacier’s Northern Loop and long dayhikes in Glacier.

A trip like this goes better with the right gear. See my picks for “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and “The 7 (Very) Best Backpacking Tents.”

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