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.

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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 may be risking an impassioned debate here, but I think there are very few mountain ranges in America with as many drop-dead, gorgeous high mountain lakes as Idaho’s Sawtooths. Yes, a few mountain ranges clearly outnumber the Sawtooths in that department, like the High Sierra, Cascades, and Wind River Range. But I believe the Sawtooths deserve similar recognition, and I’ve seen many of those watery jewels over more than 20 years of wandering around Idaho’s best-known hills. This gallery of photos of many of them may persuade you to agree with me—and to see them for yourself.

I don’t make this claim about Sawtooth Mountains lakes lightly. I’ve hiked and backpacked all over the country as a past Northwest Editor for Backpacker magazine for 10 years and even longer running this blog, and I’m a big fan of the High Sierra and the Winds, the Tetons, the Cascades (especially the North Cascades), the White Mountains (where I started hiking), and other mountain ranges. Anyone reading my story “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites” or looking at my photo gallery of favorite backcountry lakes will see I’ve camped by a lot of nice lakes.

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.

Some lakes in the Sawtooths, like Alice and Sawtooth lakes, are well known. Others are more remote and obscure; you may have never seen a photo of some of these. All are only reached by hiking or riding a horse for miles into the wilderness. Seeing these incredible places requires time and effort.

When you consider the beauty and the sheer numbers of clear, high mountain lakes tucked in granite basins ringed by soaring cliffs and jagged peaks, I just think Idaho’s Sawtooths are up there with the best. I rank the Sawtooths among the 10 best backpacking trips in America.

Click on the photo gallery to open it and use right and left arrow keys to scroll through it. Find links below the gallery to stories about backpacking in the Sawtooths at The Big Outside.

Click here now for my expert e-book to the best backpacking trip in Idaho’s Sawtooths!

If you think I’ve overlooked an outstanding lake in the Sawtooths, or if you believe you know of a range with prettier mountain lakes, please suggest it in the comments section below this story. I try to respond to all comments.

See “The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit,” “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths,” and all stories about backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains at The Big Outside. Most stories about trips at The Big Outside require a paid subscription to read in full, including my expert tips on how to plan and take those trips.

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking trip in Idaho’s Sawtooths and elsewhere. Want my help with yours? See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn more.

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Our group of three adults and six teenagers crossed the 9,200-foot pass on the Alice-Toxaway Divide, separating Alice and Twin lakes from Toxaway Lake, on our third straight bluebird August afternoon backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Before us, an arc of spires and jagged peaks wrapped around a pair of alpine lakes appropriately named Twin Lakes. And although I had hiked over this pass many times before, I stopped in my tracks and just stared at our vista. Perhaps most impressively, even the jaded teens with us found themselves awestruck, too.

Living in Idaho for over 25 years now, I’ve hiked most of the trails in the Sawtooths over the course of at least 20 trips there, and climbed a number of peaks. While there remain many climbs and off-trail areas I want to explore, I’ve gotten to know much of the range quite well. And having had the good fortune of dayhiking and backpacking in some of the prettiest mountain ranges in the country over the past three decades—including the 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog—I’ve become convinced that few rival the Sawtooths for their jagged granite peaks and skylines and abundance of lovely alpine lakes.

I never tire of exploring the Sawtooths.

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.

This article describes several favorite dayhikes and backpacking trips in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, and includes links to several stories about trips I have taken in the Sawtooths (most of which require a paid subscription to The Big Outside to read in full). See my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your trip in the Sawtooths or any other trip you read about at The Big Outside.

Click any photo below to read about that trip. Please tell me what you think of these hikes or share your own questions or suggested hikes in the comments section at the bottom of this story; I try to respond to all comments.

Dayhikes

Much of the best scenery in the Sawtooths lies far enough from roads to be hard to reach in a day, but there are highlights you can knock off in several hours—or at least between sunrise and sunset.

Sawtooth Lake

Very photogenic Sawtooth Lake is one of the most-visited corners of the Sawtooths; expect to see other hikers here on nice summer weekends and to compete for campsites with backpackers. At 8,430 feet, it’s about 8.5 miles round-trip and 1,700 vertical feet from the Iron Creek Trailhead. The trail up the Iron Creek Valley ascends past a long, pinnacled ridge, and you can make a short side trip en route to Alpine Lake, tucked in a granite bowl.

Get an early start because the glassy waters of Sawtooth Lake on a calm morning offer up an unforgettable mirror image of Mount Regan. Scramble the steep but non-technical west face of 9,861-foot Alpine Peak for the best perspective on the natural stone bathtub the lake sits in.

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Baron Divide

The pass known as Baron Divide, at over 9,000 feet along the high ridge separating the gorgeous Baron Lakes basin from the valley of Redfish Lake Creek, is a stout but doable dayhike from the Redfish Inlet transfer camp boat landing at the southwest corner of Redfish Lake. At some 14 miles round-trip, with about 2,700 feet of elevation gain and loss, it’s no light stroll. But the trails are good all the way, the grade rarely gets difficult, and the scenery is top-notch beginning with the boat shuttle across Redfish Lake.

At Redfish Lake Lodge, two miles off ID 75 about five miles south of Stanley, go to the marina and get the 10-minute boat shuttle across the lake. On the other side of the lake, follow trail signs up the Redfish Lake Creek Valley toward Alpine Lake and Cramer Lakes. About three miles up, at Flatrock Junction, turn north onto Trail 101 toward Alpine Lake and the Baron Lakes; this switchbacks that follow are arguably the hottest and toughest stretch of the hike, before you reenter forest for a while.

Eventually, the trail emerges from the forest, passes a pretty tarn, and reaches the alpine pass at Baron Divide, with sweeping views of the peaks to either side, including the serrated ridge of Monte Verita and Warbonnet Peak. Return the way you came.

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Thompson Peak

Thompson Peak, crown of the Sawtooth Range at 10,751 feet, can be tagged on a rugged, partly off-trail hike of about 13 miles and 4,200 vertical feet round-trip. A fun, easy, short, third-class scramble at the very top places you on a blocky summit with space for just a few people and head-spinning drop-offs on all sides. See more photos in my story “Roof of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Hiking Thompson Peak.”

From Redfish Trailhead, right before Redfish Lake Lodge, follow Trail 101 west to the Alpine Way Trail heading toward Marshall Lake. After climbing 1,800 vertical feet in just about four miles on the trail, before Marshall Lake, bear left (west) onto a well-beaten but unmarked footpath that’s usually blocked by a log; this unmaintained user trail climbs steeply into the cirque between Thompson and Williams peaks. The lake below Thompson’s headwall is a good enough destination by itself for a frigid and brief swim—it usually has blocks of ice floating in it well into July.

Continue up and scramble to the Thompson-Williams saddle either via its south end (easy when it’s dry rock, potentially dangerous when snow-covered) or the much steeper, usually dry, exposed fourth-class cliff at the north end of the saddle (find the line of least resistance ascending very exposed ledges angling up and left). Traverse the talus below Thompson’s west face (farther than you might think) to the gully separating Thompson from its 10,000-foot neighbor to the south, Mickey’s Spire. Then follow the steep, often loose, use footpath to the summit. Return the same way.

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Alice Lake

Among other lakes reachable in a day, I’d suggest Alice Lake at 8,598 feet, because it’s a gorgeous spot, there’s more scenic hiking above it, and the hike to Alice ascends a really pretty valley flanked by cliffs and spires. In early summer, the lower ford of the creek draining Alice Lake can be exciting or potentially dangerous (the next ford upstream is shorter and often has a log across it). You can avoid both fords by following a faint, sporadically cairned use path that begins where the maintained trail crosses the creek at the lower ford; the sometimes-faint use path stays on the north side of the creek and rejoins the maintained trail above the second (higher) ford.

From Tin Cup Trailhead at the northeast corner of Pettit Lake, it’s 5.3 miles and a bit over 1,600 feet to Alice Lake. It’s another mile with not much more climbing to Twin Lakes, and then a half-mile and about 400 feet up to the approximately 9,200-foot pass on the Alice-Toxaway Divide, with a killer view of the jagged peaks above Twin Lakes.

Backpacking Trips

The Sawtooths have few on-trail, multi-day loop hikes. Many multi-day hikes require short shuttles between trailheads (some of which can be done with a bike). My suggestions below assume moderate days of seven to nine miles a day, but I mention multiple campsite options to allow you to plan shorter or longer days.

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“The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains!”

Weekend Hike: Alice Lake-Toxaway Lake Loop

This 17-mile loop from the Tin Cup Trailhead on Pettit Lake is popular as an overnight or two-night trip for incredible views and campsites on stunning, high lakes. (This was my son’s first real backpacking trip, at age six.) There are stellar campsites at Alice Lake, Twin Lakes, and Toxaway Lake; you might decide between the first two locales just depending on what time you start the trek and whether other backpackers have beaten you to the sites at Alice Lake. Hike it clockwise because the stretch from Farley Lake back to Pettit Lake is the least interesting, sometimes hot, and dusty, and better to walk down than up.

Do you like hiking or running long loops in the mountains? This one follows good trails and fit hikers and runners can do it in a day—but in July or August, I suggest an early start for cooler temps. September is often ideal.

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

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See all stories about backpacking in the Sawtooths at The Big Outside, including “5 Reasons You Must Backpack Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains,” “Mountain Lakes of Idaho’s Sawtooths—A Photo Gallery,” “The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit,” “Sawtooth Jewels: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes,” and “Going After Goals: Backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.”

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Chances are that, by now, you’ve heard of Idaho’s Sawtooths—having typed that name into a search box may be the reason you’ve landed on this story. Maybe you’ve been intrigued at what you’ve heard or images you’ve seen from Idaho’s best-known mountain range. Perhaps you’ve even been there and the experience has only amplified your curiosity to see more of this range.

As someone who’s had the good fortune of having backpacked all over the country and in many other countries over the past three-plus decades, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog, I rank the Sawtooths among the 10 best backpacking trips in America.

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.

I’ve wandered around the Sawtooths at least a couple dozen times over more than two decades, including numerous backpacking trips, dayhikes, peak scrambles, rock climbing, and backcountry skiing. While there remain peaks on my list to climb, a few trails to hike, and many lakes to leap into (or just sit beside), the Sawtooths have become my backyard mountains. I feel at home there.

This story presents the five reasons I think every backpacker should take a multi-day hike through the Sawtooths—spotlighting the characteristics of a trip there that make this place unique. I believe this argument may persuade you to go (if, somehow, the photos don’t do it).

See my e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” to learn all you need to know to plan and pull off a five-day, 36-mile Sawtooths hike through the core of the Sawtooths, and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan every detail of a multi-day hike there.

Please share your thoughts or experiences there in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

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1. It’s Not That Hard

Having backpacked all over the country and in many other countries, I recognize how friendly the Sawtooths are to relatively inexperienced backpackers, starting with generally well-maintained and well-marked trails that rarely get very steep, having been constructed for pack animals like horses and llamas.

Elevations remain moderate. Most passes crossed by trails rise just over 9,000 feet, a height that most people acclimate to quickly. And as with many interior West mountain ranges, summer brings stable weather and blessedly few mosquitoes after July.

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2. These Peaks Will Kind of Blow You Away

For years after moving to Idaho in 1998, with each trip I took into a new corner of the Sawtooths, I’d discover a spot that I was convinced was prettier than anyplace I’d been previously in this range. That happened to me several times, until I’d covered a fair bit of the Sawtooths and settled on the general conclusion that these peaks and mountain lakes are as beautiful as almost any range I’ve been in—certainly in the American West.

The Sawtooths look like a little sibling of the High Sierra or Tetons for their serrated skylines and mountain lakes that compare in beauty (if not in numbers) with the Sierra and Wind River Range.

A total of 57 summits top 10,000 feet in the Sawtooth Mountains, and nearly 400 trout-filled alpine lakes, many sitting well over 8,000 feet, shimmer in high bowls sculpted by long-ago glaciers. The range lies protected within the 756,000-acre Sawtooth National Recreation Area, which encompasses the equally beautiful White Cloud Mountains across the Sawtooth/Salmon River Valley, and most of the range is designated wilderness.

In other words: There’s plenty of space to wander around.

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3. Yes, You Can Find Solitude

As happened in many—if not most—backcountry areas across the country, the pandemic summer of 2020 brought a big leap in the numbers of backpackers in the Sawtooths. Friends and readers of The Big Outside reported to me about seeing more people than expected or more than they’d seen on any previous trip there. To some extent, that has continued since.

Still, those reports and my personal experience point to a certain reality that’s long been true in many backcountry areas: Most backpacker use is heavily concentrated around weekends in August and at a few popular lakes within a day’s hike of popular trailheads. Hike midweek during the peak summer season or after Labor Day, or venture into lesser-known areas more than a day’s hike into the mountains, and you can often find a surprising degree of solitude.

Some readers who purchase my custom trip planning tell me they prefer to get away from the crowds—and are willing to compromise a bit on mountain splendor for solitude. But that’s not necessary in the Sawtooths, as one reader who I helped plan a trip there discovered. After it, he emailed me describing his shock at how few people he saw and posted this comment at my Custom Trip Planning page: “Just back from an amazing 5-day trip in the Sawtooth Mountains. Michael took the time to understand my priorities, goals, and comfort level and crafted a route that was clearly tailored uniquely to me. Most important, Michael’s itinerary was significantly different from—and better than—anything I would have come up with on my own.”

See my “12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking.”

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4. No Red Tape

Unlike in national parks and more popular national forest wildernesses (in the High Sierra and elsewhere), no permit reservation is required for backcountry camping in the Sawtooths. You show up, fill out a permit at a self-service trailhead kiosk, and hit the trail.

That’s very appealing for backpackers who don’t always plan their trips months in advance in order to apply for a permit reservation; or who may have done that but struck out getting a permit somewhere else; or who find themselves changing plans due to wildfires—a regular summer occurrence these days—or another reason.

And the Sawtooths represent a pretty darn good consolation prize if your first trip fell through.

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

5. There’s a Lot to See

A network of almost 350 miles of trails presents myriad opportunities for exploring the Sawtooth Wilderness on backpacking trips ranging from easy to ambitious—from the relatively accessible trails we hiked on the two trips described in this story, to more remote footpaths deeper in the wilderness, such as the 57-mile hike a friend and I took that I wrote about in this story.

See all stories about backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains at The Big Outside, including these:

“The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit”
“Jewels of the Sawtooths: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes”
“The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths”
“Going After Goals: Backpacking Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains”
“Roof of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Hiking Thompson Peak”

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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When can you claim to know a mountain range well? Maybe it’s once you have spent enough time—certainly measured in years, and probably decades—that you have explored beyond the most accessible and popular spots to the obscure, unknown corners. Perhaps it’s when you have hiked most of its trails. Just possibly, it’s when you unfold a map and it takes several minutes to tick off for someone all the places you have visited. That’s a good start, anyway.

I’ve been exploring Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains for more than 25 years—backpacking and dayhiking, climbing peaks, backcountry skiing—and have fallen in love with these rugged, crenulated peaks. As someone who’s had the good fortune of having backpacked all over the country and the world over the past three-plus decades, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog, I rank the Sawtooths among the top 10 best backpacking trips in America.

I think you’ll see why in this photo gallery.

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Protected as federal wilderness and the best-known piece of the sprawling wilderness areas of central Idaho—south of the nearly 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the second-largest in the Lower 48, and west of the 275,000 acres of newer wilderness in the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains—the Sawtooths resemble a cross between the High Sierra and the Tetons.

Dozens of summits rise above 10,000 feet. Innumerable granite spires and pinnacles loom above valleys and cirques where hundreds of alpine lakes ripple in the wind; the Sawtooths are outdone by few mountain ranges in the number and beauty of alpine lakes (see some of the best Sawtooth lakes in this story).

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While these peaks harbor some classic, technical rock climbs, many summits can be reached on third- and fourth-class scrambles, including the highest in the range, 10,751-foot Thompson Peak.

Besides Thompson, I’ve climbed a number of them, including most of the iconic summits visible from the Sawtooth Valley: Heyburn, Horstman, McGown, Williams, among others—some feasible in a day, all of them great adventures in a range where it’s not unusual to have a high summit all to yourself.

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

Put Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains on your list of places to see this summer.

See all of my stories about Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains at The Big Outside, including these:

“The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit”
“Jewels of the Sawtooths: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes”
“The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths”
“Going After Goals: Backpacking Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains”
“5 Reasons You Must Backpack Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains”

See also my e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan every detail of a multi-day hike there.

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We reach an unnamed pass at 8,450 feet early on a September evening that could hardly be nicer, with temperatures in the low 60s and a soft whisper of breeze in the air. I’m hardly breaking a sweat; I love hiking at this time of day. Below us, the green valley of Johnson Creek falls away into deepening shadows below a skyline of granite spires glowing golden in the low-angle sunshine.

A feeling of anticipation fills me, a low-grade excitement over finally getting to a goal I’ve had on my to-do list for years. My friend Jeff Wilhelm and I are backpacking a 57-mile route into the deep interior of central Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains—into the most remote and probably the least-visited part of Idaho’s best-known mountain range that can be reached by trail. I’ve been backpacking and climbing in the Sawtooths numerous times, and have eyed this big, mysterious middle of the map for a while. But I have never made it in here before, and this trip feels long overdue.

If my example is indicative, this may be the last corner of the Sawtooths that most backpackers and climbers even consider exploring. The fact that it has taken me so long to get here also reminds me that the years slip past like water through our fingers, and goals can slip away, too, if we don’t go after them.

Dusk darkens the trees and ground as we decide to call it a day in the valley of Johnson Creek, after almost 13 miles and some 3,600 feet of uphill. We eat dinner by the light of headlamps, and then crawl into our bags. Sleep comes easily when you have a long-sought-after goal finally in your sights.

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-guides to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

Getting to Know Idaho’s Sawtooths

“Do you have the trail?” I call to Jeff as we’re wandering around an old burned area where Trail 494 has disappeared on our second morning.

“Over here,” he calls back, and soon we’re back on a good, narrow single-track that’s easy to follow, but clearly not heavily used. Rather than bare dirt packed nearly to sidewalk hardness, or a fine dust from the pounding of stock animals, this path is carpeted with grass, sticks, and pine needles. Just a rocky, little-used trail winding through open, piney woods. Wildflowers and low plants grow thickly on both sides, some of them still green and others turned red with autumn color, starkly contrasted against blackened tree trunks. Two backpackers coming down from Pats Lake tell us they saw 10-inch cutthroat trout swimming near the lakeshore, and they ate trout for dinner and breakfast.

Since moving to Idaho in 1998, I’ve explored much of the Sawtooth Mountains. Similar to Wyoming’s Teton Range in area and character if not quite in height, the Sawtooths have more than 50 peaks over 10,000 feet and hundreds of alpine lakes. Like the Tetons, the eastern escarpment of the range shoots up abruptly, with the summits rising 4,000 feet above the Sawtooth Valley, the bucolic headwaters of the Salmon River.

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On those earliest backpacking trips, I had no real idea what to expect; you don’t see pictures of the Sawtooths in outdoors magazines all the time, as you do, say, the Tetons or High Sierra. The first time visiting spots like the Baron Lakes and Alice Lake, or the 9,000-foot passes between Toxaway Lake and the Cramer Lakes, this raw country of infinite jagged spires and icy waters left me staring slack-jawed. I thought I had discovered wilderness gold. Every time I was convinced I had seen the most lovely corner of the Sawtooths, I proved myself wrong again the next time I went backpacking, climbing, or backcountry skiing here.

And most unbelievable of all: Except for one or two popular corners, there’s hardly anybody out here.

So I kept going deeper, scrambling and climbing to summits. Thompson Peak, the range’s highest at 10,751 feet, was an early goal; and the tiny block of stone at its apex, surrounded by sheer drop-offs, gave a thrilling finish to that ascent. Thompson’s neighbor, Williams Peak, only about 100 feet shorter, seemed too close to just pass up that first time I scrambled up Thompson, so I turned that day into a two-fer. The crazily steep scree leading to the ridge crest of Williams—I had to hug the very bottom edge of a cliff to avoid tumbling downhill in a rockslide of scree—and following the crumbling, knife-edge ridge to the summit kept me hyper-focused.

The more I saw of the Sawtooths, the hungrier I got to explore even farther. One buddy and I made a whirlwind, 47-mile, overnight hike from Iron Creek Trailhead past Sawtooth Lake, Baron Lakes, and Cramer Lakes, exiting via Imogene and Hell Roaring lakes—an amazing trip, despite finishing with throbbing soles (less due to the distance than both of us having the wrong shoes). He and I also, on another overnighter, backpacked from Goat Lake off-trail up the valley separating Williams and Merritt Peaks and tagged a trio of 10,000-footers: Thompson Peak and its neighbors, Mickey’s Spire and Mount Carter. On another trip, a friend and I rock climbed the Elephant’s Perch and Warbonnet Peak—the latter a pinnacle that comes to a wildly airy pinpoint summit high above a lake-filled valley not reached by any maintained trail—and scrambled Braxon Peak, all in three jam-packed days.

I was getting a little obsessive-compulsive. But I blame the Sawtooths for inspiring my addictive behavior.

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

I’ve been fortunate, partly thanks to my work writing for Backpacker magazine, to hike in many of the most spectacular natural places in the West and around the world. But there’s nothing like getting to know one place really well—to the point where you can stand on a summit and rattle off the names of dozens of peaks in view, or you possess a mental map of numerous, idyllic campsites. New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where I started hiking 30 years ago, were my first “home” peaks. I’ve tagged most of their summits, some of them numerous times, and walked many trails there so many times that they are imprinted on my memory. The Sawtooths have become the second mountain range I know that intimately.

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

Jeff and I climb steadily uphill past Pats Lake to Arrowhead Lake, at 8,770 feet, a crystal-clear alpine pond with a spit of granite arcing out into it, a long boardwalk of rock rising several feet above the water. We see some of those fat trout swimming below the surface. A little while later, from the unnamed pass east of Arrowhead, around 9,200 feet, we drop our packs and hike an open ridge much of the way up 9,802-foot Blacknose Mountain, until cliffs bar us from continuing.

From there, under cottony, fair-weather clouds, we look north and east out over much of the Sawtooths. But two peaks in the ocean of pointy tops catch my eye—the two closest to us, North and South Raker. A pair of slender, stone fingers nearly 10,000 feet high, stabbing into the sky, I’ve seen them from other Sawtooth summits miles away and thought, “Wow! What are those?” Now, finally, I’m standing almost close enough to touch them.

We return to our packs and descend east on Trail 494, passing flowers blooming at almost 9,000 feet on Sept. 15; the snow here may have only melted out weeks ago. Pikas chirp and marmots whistle at us. We walk along the shores of small, sub-alpine lakes with blue-green water so clear that we can distinctly make out rocks and dead tree trunks that may be 15 or 20 feet underwater.

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Setting and Pursuing Goals

Some goals are simple. For me, that includes keeping a list of wild places I want to see. I’m no long sure how many years ago I started my list (probably 20 or more) or how many trip ideas are on it (easily at least 200). But I can tell you the precise word count of the document containing the list, which includes notes on each idea: 13,338 words as of this writing. I could conceivably tick off every trip on the list if I live to around 110 and stay healthy—except that I keep adding more ideas to it.

A glass-half-empty person might call my list unattainable. I like to see it as a wealth of choices.

More challenging than building that list, though, it actually getting to the places on it, a goal that can prove remarkably elusive in spite of how satisfying and rejuvenating it consistently is to take these adventures. Inertia can erect an insurmountable wall, but that’s not the only potential obstacle—a point illustrated by the fact that this is actually my third attempt to backpack into this part of the Sawtooths.

The first time, hiking solo, I inadvertently set out on the opening day of elk season. The Queens River trailhead parking lot overflowed with pickups and horse trailers. I didn’t understand why so many of those hunters seemed to be glaring inexplicably at me until a friendly one asked why I was out there, then explained, “Everyone thinks you’re Fish and Game.” I prefer to believe none of them were actually fingering a trigger while considering whether I was there to checks their tags. The second time, by myself again, I got turned around by a September snowstorm—at exactly the same of year as Jeff and I are hiking now.

See all of my stories about the Sawtooths, including my stories “The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit,” “Photo Gallery: Mountain Lakes of Idaho’s Sawtooths,” and “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths.”

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Hiking up a forested section of Trail 101 in the Redfish Creek Valley of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, as I’m following a short distance behind a trio of loudly jabbering, 15-year-old boys—my son, Nate, and his buddies Kade and Iggy, whom Nate has invited on their first backpacking trip—we weave through an area where boulders the size of construction vehicles flank the trail. Iggy interrupts his own nearly unbroken monologue over various civilization-related topics, looks around and mutters, “Wow, this is awesome.” He pulls out his phone and shoots a video of the boulders.

That brief moment reinforces for me a truth I’ve learned over the years: The best way to introduce kids of all ages to the outdoors is to raise your own kids to love the outdoors, and let them organically spread the good word among their friends.

When Nate had suggested to me just weeks earlier that we take his friends backpacking, I knew immediately where to go: the core of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, where we’d cross passes over 9,000 feet with expansive views of a sea of jagged peaks, and camp each night beside beautiful mountain lakes ideal for swimming and fishing. More than 20 years of exploring all over the Sawtooths on numerous backpacking trips, long dayhikes, and climbing have convinced me that the area between Redfish Lake and Pettit Lake harbors the best backpacking in Idaho’s premier mountain range.

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-guides to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.

As someone who’s had the good fortune of having backpacked all over the country and in many other countries as a past field editor for Backpacker magazine and now for many years running this blog, I also recognize how friendly the Sawtooths are to relatively inexperienced backpackers, with moderate elevations (most on-trail passes are just over 9,000 feet), stable summer weather, no permit hoops to jump through, few mosquitoes after July, and a network of good, well-marked trails that’s extensive enough to plan backpacking trips ranging from easy to ambitious.

Plus, the Sawtooths are a spectacular mountain range—looking like a little sibling of the High Sierra or Tetons for their serrated skylines and mountain lakes that compare in beauty (if not in numbers) with the Sierra and Wind River Range. (See my e-guide “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” to learn all you need to know to plan and pull off a five-day, 36-mile Sawtooths hike through the area covered in this story—which I consider one of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”)

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At a pace set by the boys—with time afforded to breaks, amusing each other with their antics fording a shallow creek, and their non-stop conversation liberally peppered with terms like “dope” and “dude”—we reach the Cramer Lakes, some four hours and more than seven miles up the valley from where we started our hike today. We find an established campsite beside the middle of the three Cramer Lakes, looking across the calm water at a foaming, braided waterfall perhaps 20 feet tall tumbling loudly into the lake. The boys pitch their tent and then take a swim in the chilly lake.

After dark, I can hear the boys in their tent laughing and chattering late into the night. I leave the rainfly off my tent, gazing up at the usual emergence of a clearly defined Milky Way and thousands of sparkling pinpoints of light above the Sawtooths, which form the heart of the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, the first gold-tier International Dark Sky Reserve in America.

See the best of the Sawtooths using my expert e-guide to the best backpacking trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains!

Baron Lakes

In the morning, I awaken shortly before a blue-sky sunrise slowly pours over the jagged peaks above the Cramer Lakes, with golden highlights backlighting the tips of the spires and ridges high above us.

I don’t wake the boys, letting them dictate when we will pack up and move on. Impressively, they’re up before 9 a.m.—soon after direct sunlight starts heating up their tent—and getting their breakfast. Kade limps over to me barefooted and asks, “Can you tell me what this is on my foot?”

I look at it. On the ball of his foot, right behind his big toe, he has a puncture wound. I recall seeing him return from the boys’ evening swim barefoot; he’d walked probably 500 yards without shoes, over rocks and forest ground. (I’m quietly glad Nate wore his shoes.) So I pull out my first-aid kit, clean the wound and tape over it to protect it from dirt and bacteria.

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While doing this, I share with Kade the true story of when I was on a backcountry skiing yurt trip with a group of friends and I got an infected finger. Fortunately, two friends with me were physicians and the yurt was stocked with a full first-aid kit, including a sterile syringe, scalpel, and local anesthetic. My friends performed minor surgery on my finger to drain pus from it, warning me that an infection left untreated could result in me losing the finger. I tell Kade to keep his puncture wound clean, and I suspect my tale has convinced him to wear shoes in the wilderness.

We leave camp by late morning for the eight-mile hike to Baron Lakes, including a nearly 2,000-vertical-foot climb to a pass at over 9,000 feet on the Baron Divide. By mid-afternoon, we reach the pass and drop our packs to soak in the view. I remember the awestruck feeling I had the first time I backpacked to the Baron Lakes, not long after moving to Idaho. Staring up at the long ridge of spires and pinnacles linking Monte Verita and Warbonnet Peak, I thought I must have stumbled upon the prettiest spot in the Sawtooths.

While I still think it’s one of the prettiest, I also recall a series of trips in these mountains, thinking with each new one that I had, once again, found the most spectacular corner of the Sawtooths. I gave up that quest when I realized I would keep thinking that about every new spot here that I explored.

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The boys and I make the quick descent on Trail 101 to the Upper Baron Lake, finding a couple of nice tentsites a short walk from the lakeshore, an incredible perch overlooking Baron Lake—the middle and largest of the three lakes—and the peaks ringing it. Immediately, we head down to the upper lake’s shoreline, locating the perfect spot to jump off a ledge a few feet above the lake’s surface into the shockingly chilly water, swimming quickly to the rocky shore to warm up in the sun and repeat. The boys make several more leaps into the lake after I’ve had enough.

Early the next morning, as I watch the dawn light creep down the faces of the cliffs and spires above Baron Lake, Nate walks over to me. He’s up at dawn—unusually early for my teenage son—and we admire the view together. Then he grabs his camera and heads for the shore of the upper lake, telling me later, “I got some awesome shots there. The water was just like glass, a perfect reflection of the mountains, and the sunlight was just coming in with this great light. I threw a rock in the lake and watched the ripples go all the way across to the other side.”

Even in the age of smartphones, the natural world provides the best entertainment.

Then, true to form and age, he retreats to his tent to sleep for a couple more hours, before we pack up and hike out the eight miles back to Redfish Lake.

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Cramer Divide to Edna Lake

Fast forward two summers and another two-generation backpacking trip in the Sawtooths: a four-day, roughly 27-mile hike from Redfish Lake to Pettit Lake—again in the area with what I consider the best backpacking in this range. This time, I’m with my wife, Penny, Nate, now 17, and our daughter, Alex, 15, as well as two more buddies of Nate’s—Sam and Elias—and family friends Gary Davis with his daughters, Mae and Adele, who are close in age to Nate and Alex and good friends with them.

On our second morning, our group of adults and teenagers spreads out while hiking uphill from the Cramer Lakes, eventually trickling in pods of two and three up to the pass over 9,000 feet on the Cramer Divide. A chain of 10,000-foot peaks marches away from us, an arc of big, toothy rocks embracing the cirque of the Cramer Lakes, including one of the highest summits in the Sawtooths, 10,716-foot Cramer Peak (just 35 feet lower than the highest in the Sawtooths, Thompson Peak, a super dayhike described in this story).

A total of 57 summits top 10,000 feet in the Sawtooth Mountains, and nearly 400 alpine lakes, many sitting well over 8,000 feet, shimmer in high bowls sculpted by long-ago glaciers. The range lies protected within the 756,000-acre Sawtooth National Recreation Area, which encompasses the equally beautiful White Cloud Mountains across the Sawtooth/Salmon River Valley, and most of the range is designated wilderness.

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A network of almost 350 miles of trails presents myriad opportunities for exploring the Sawtooth Wilderness, from the relatively accessible trails we hiked on the two trips described in this story, to more remote footpaths deeper in the wilderness, such as the 57-mile hike a friend and I took that I wrote about in this story.

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See my e-guide “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains” and my stories “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths” and “The Roof of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Hiking Thompson Peak,” and all of my stories about Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains at The Big Outside.

See also my story about the 286-mile-long Idaho Wilderness Trail, which passes through the Sawtooths.

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We sit on the bank of Pettit Lake Creek and remove our boots and socks to ford it. It’s the third week in June, and winter is just winding down in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. The creek barrels downhill, barking and bursting with snowmelt. My friends Chip and Jan Roser are already partway across, moving carefully over the rocky bed. At the opposite bank, Chip turns around and shouts to us, “It’s freezing.”

It’s certainly very close to freezing, anyway—this creek was snow just a little while ago. In fact, if this water was only a few degrees colder, we could walk across its surface without getting wet.

Nate, my 13-year-old son, steps into the creek, and immediately—almost instinctively—turns around and steps back up onto dry land, his eyes wide. A shiver rips through his body and rattles the words that squeak from his mouth as if each word is a complete sentence: “It’s. Really. Cold.” His voice and eyes telegraph a clear message: He doesn’t want to step back into that water.

I just nod, giving him a moment to contemplate on his own the even less-appealing idea that our overnight hike to Alice Lake—one of the prettiest and most beloved jewels of the Sawtooths—won’t happen without us getting to the other side of this frigid, 20-foot-wide stream. It was Nate who suggested we backpack to Alice Lake, for reasons that go back half of his short lifetime.

I watch his face reveal his thoughts as his expression shifts from shock to dread, resignation, and then determination, all within about a minute. Then I tell him, “You can do this. We’ll get across it quickly.” Chip comes back over to take Nate’s pack for him, and the three of us, using poles for balance, start across. It is foot-numbing, brain-freezing cold. At midstream, the water rises above my knees and up Nate’s thighs. I remind him to step carefully and not rush in this pushy current. “Oh my god, it’s freezing,” he says, gasping the words.

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And then we’re across. Nate all but leaps onto dry ground, bends over with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily, and shakes the chill from his body like a dog shaking off water, laughing at how painfully cold that was. Pain is funny after you’ve survived it.

We’ve come here to backpack overnight to Alice Lake, and possibly hike above Alice to Twin Lakes and the 9,200-foot pass separating this valley from that of Toxaway Lake, because Nate wanted to return to the scene of an event from seven years ago. When he was six, he and I backpacked the 18-mile Alice Lake-Toxaway Lake loop in late summer, taking three days—our second “boy trip“ together, the name Nate gave years ago to our annual father-son adventures.

Now, he recalls that first, big backpacking trip together only in fragmented and foggy pieces of a six-year-old boy’s memory, like the reassembled shards of a shattered mirror reflecting a broken, partial image. A frigid creek ford did not pose enough of an obstacle to keep him from wanting to revisit that special place in memory.

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Alice Lake

Beyond the ford of Pettit Lake Creek, our uphill hike to Alice Lake turns less exciting, though not devoid of smaller challenges. At around 8,000 feet, still below Alice, we encounter nearly continuous snow cover in the forest. Between short, sun-warmed segments of open trail, we walk long stretches over densely consolidated but melting, mushy snow two or three feet deep, stepping over the knee-deep postholes of previous hikers. We follow the trail around a pond reflecting the sharp arrowhead of 9,901-foot El Capitan jutting into the sky.

By early evening, a few hours after leaving the trailhead, we reach the lake and find two patches of open ground for our tents, where direct sunlight slashing through gaps in the tree canopy has melted away the snow.

At almost 8,600 feet, Alice Lake, about three-quarters of a mile long, remains mostly frozen today—officially the first day of summer, although the mountains appear oblivious to the calendar. But open water at our end offers a flawless reflection of a row of jagged, snowy mountains. Cotton-ball clouds dapple a sky as deeply blue as the ocean. The water is so clear that rocks on the lake bottom look as sharp and as close as words on the page of a book in your hands.

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It’s a view that makes for great photos—and perhaps helps jog the memory of a teenage boy from a time when he was a small boy.

I remember pieces of that first trip here with Nate, like the unrestrained, convulsive laughter that erupted from him each time he hoisted a rock as large as he could lift overhead and slam-dunked it into Alice Lake; he couldn’t get tired of the baritone splash it created, as if it surprised him each time. We’d stopped at Alice’s shore expressly for the purpose of bombing the water with rocks, after camping the night before a bit shy of the lake. As a thunderstorm rapidly approached on the first afternoon of that long-ago trip, I had hurriedly erected the tent moments before the bruised and blackened sky tore open. Torrential rain and loud, tent-rattling gusts, accompanied by the percussion of thunder, pounded our thin, nylon walls so loudly that my little boy slithered his sleeping bag up very close to mine.

Tonight, we get friendlier weather than that night below Alice Lake seven years ago: It’s clear and windy but not cold. The four of us relax around the campsite, Nate joining in our adult conversations, as I recall he and I engaging in a serious debate, seven years ago, over which dinosaurs would emerge victorious in head-to-head battles. It being the summer solstice, the sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 p.m., when the wind calms and the temperature drops quickly.

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Alice Lake-Toxaway Lake Divide

Early the next morning, Chip and I strike out on a short hike as Nate and Jan sleep in; my son still appreciates his sleep as much as he did as a first-grader, and Jan may just be smarter than us. We head up the trail toward the Alice Lake-Toxaway Lake Divide, the 9,200-foot pass between these two valleys. The sun, though still low, shines warmly from a cloudless, cerulean sky. The overnight temp dropped into the high 30s, firming up the snow, making for easy walking. A couple of times, we lose the trail, hidden beneath the snow cover, but eventually regain it and reach the pass.

Around us unfolds a mountain landscape barely beginning to emerge from winter on this summer solstice. White covers almost all that we can see. The Twin Lakes, just 300 feet higher than Alice, remain completely locked in ice. When we made plans for this weekend, we’d thought we might hike 10,651-foot Snowyside Peak above the pass, fifth highest among more than 40 peaks that rise above 10,000 feet in the Sawtooths. But that will wait for another time. We make a quick descent back to camp to have breakfast with Nate and Jan.

By late morning, the four of us shoulder our backpacks for the hike out. Falling behind Chip and Jan, Nate and I find a logjam below Alice Lake that we walk across easily to avoid one boots-off, feet-numbing ford of the creek that we see other backpackers making. Even better, down lower, we will find a user trail along the northwest side of Pettit Lake Creek that allows us to avoid the frigid crossing that started this trip.

But before we get down that far, as we’re hiking through pine forest about 30 minutes below Alice Lake, below the snow line, I stop beside a small clearing amid the trees just off the trail—an established campsite. And I immediately realize what I’m looking at. “This is it,” I tell Nate. “This is where we camped that first night.”

He instantly knows what I’m talking about: our boy trip when he was six. I’m sure he’d have walked right past this spot without remembering it. But he agrees I’m correct, and strolls around the big patch of packed dirt, smiling and chattering on about how special that trip was, as I imagine him searching his memory for elusive fragments of those few days half his lifetime ago.

Then Nate tells me: “I love our boy trips together.” I agree enthusiastically, even as I know that it will be many years before Nate understands how much I enjoy these trips.

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