You want to explore the best backpacking in America’s desert Southwest, but you’re not sure where to begin, or how some of these trips you’ve read about compare for scenery and difficulty. You’ve heard about the need to carry huge loads of water, and environmental challenges like dangerous heat, rugged terrain, flash floods and even (gulp) quicksand. Or you want to take your kids and make sure you pick an appropriate trip for them. Or you’ve taken one or two backpacking trips there and now you’re hungry for another one and seeking ideas for where to go next.

Well, I gotcha covered. The seven trips described in this story comprise what might be called a Southwest Backpacking Starter Package. They are all beginner- and family-friendly in terms of trail or route quality, access, and navigability, and some have good water availability. But most importantly, regardless of their relative ease logistically, they all deliver the goods on the kind of adventure and scenery you go to the Southwest hoping to find.

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 draw this list from more than three decades of backpacking throughout the Southwest, including the 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and much longer running this blog. I present these seven trips in no particular order of priority; in reality, competition for a backcountry permit will dictate when you’re able to take the most-popular ones, such as those in the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Canyonlands—and those are trips you need to plan months in advance to get a permit reservation for the prime seasons of spring and fall.

Learn more in my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

See my expert e-books to several classic backpacking trips, including “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Narrows in Zion National Park” and “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon” and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any of these adventures or any trip you read about at The Big Outside; you’ll see hundreds of comments on that page from readers of this blog who have received my custom trip planning.

Like many stories at The Big Outside, this one is partly free for anyone to read, but seeing the full list of trips described below is an exclusive benefit for subscribers. Please consider subscribing to gain access to all stories at this blog and support my work on it.

Please share your comments, questions, or tips about any of these trips or another you believe belongs on this list in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

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The Grand Canyon’s Corridor Trails

So many writers (including me) and other people have written and said so much about the Grand Canyon that it’s hard to find words that sound unique and inspiring to describe it. You won’t encounter that problem when actually going there, though—every hike is unique and inspiring.

But the very aspects of the GC that make it such a unique place—its severe topography and aridity—also ramp up the difficulty of any multi-day hike into the canyon.

That’s precisely why the park manages its “corridor” trails—the Bright Angel and South and North Kaibab trails—to accommodate backpackers (and dayhikers) will little to no experience hiking there.

Those well-maintained trails have established campgrounds and relatively frequent, reliable water sources, and offer a variety of route options, from an easy (by canyon standards) overnight trip to backpacking a full, rim-to-rim traverse of the canyon.

See all stories about hiking across the Grand Canyon and backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside, including “How to Hike the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim in a Day,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in the Grand Canyon,” and “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do,” plus my story about another relatively beginner-friendly GC hike, the 25-miler from Hermits Rest to Bright Angel Trailhead.

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The Narrows in Zion

No surprise 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, the Narrows of the North Fork of the Virgin River in Zion squeezes down to just 20 to 30 feet across in places.

On this 16-mile, two-day hike, you’ll walk in the river most of the time—with the water coming up to thighs and hips in places—marveling at the constantly changing, towering walls, and oddities like a waterfall pouring from solid rock, creating an oasis of greenery clinging to a cliff.

I don’t want to understate the challenge—and it may not be a good choice for complete novices or young kids. Despite it being a very gradual descent for its entire distance, the Narrows can feel surprisingly strenuous because you’re walking much of the time on riverbed cobbles and in water.

The water and air temperature vary seasonally, and it can feel cool or downright cold, which saps energy over several hours. And there’s certainly flash-flood danger—don’t go without a forecast for sunny skies. But the park also closes the Narrows at times of flood hazard.

Still, this is one classic hike to get to whenever you can.

See my story “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows” (which includes tips on planning this trip, though not nearly as much detail as my e-book, linked above), and all stories about hiking and backpacking in southern Utah at The Big Outside.

Get my e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.”
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The Needles District in Canyonlands

Multi-colored candlesticks of Cedar sandstone stand 300 feet tall, appearing ready to topple over with bulbous crowns wider than their base. Waves of rock ripple into the distance, looking like a petrified, burnt-red ocean. Stratified cliffs stretch for miles.

The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park holds the kind of geological formations that fascinate both kids and adults. It also has over 60 miles of trails zigzagging over a high plateau spliced by canyons.

But unlike big, deep canyons, most trails here don’t involve much elevation gain and loss. While water is scarce, you don’t have to hike great distances to reach backcountry campsites and explore. And established trails to Chesler Park, Big Spring, Squaw, and Lost canyons, and the Peekaboo Trail are easy to follow.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all stories about Canyonlands National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Coyote Gulch, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

On a three-day, roughly 15-mile backpacking trip through southern Utah’s Coyote Gulch with young teen and ‘tweener kids, my family and another hiked across ancient dunes hardened to rock; squeezed through a claustrophobically tight, 100-foot-long slot called Crack-in-the-Wall (not as hard as it sounds and quite fun); and stood atop a cliff overlooking a vast landscape of redrock towers and cliffs (photo at top of story), including Stevens Arch, measuring some 220 feet across and 160 feet tall.

And that was just in the first hour.

With its short distance, a reliable, perennial stream, and lack of flash-flood hazard, Coyote Gulch ranks as one of the Southwest’s most beginner-and family-friendly backpacking trips.

But that description, while true, almost diminishes the raw beauty of a hike that features a natural bridge, two of the region’s most distinctive natural arches—and one deeply overhung cliff with amazing echo acoustics.

In many ways, Coyote delivers a complete canyon-hiking experience—without the common hardships and hazards.

See my story “Playing the Memory Game in Southern Utah’s Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon.”

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Zion’s Kolob Canyons and West Rim Trail

Zion may lack the extensive trail network found in parks like Grand Canyon, Glacier, or Yosemite, but it does harbor a classic backpacking trip widely recognized as one of America’s best—The Narrows—and other trails that compete with it for I-can’t-believe-my-eyes panoramas.

Sheer red walls towering above the vibrant, green forest, plus easy hiking and the perennial La Verkin Creek made the Kolob Canyons an enjoyable overnight hike for my family when our kids were nine and six.

Our overnight on the West Rim Trail on the same trip was a bit harder—and we (the parents) had to carry extra water—but it was within our kids’ abilities; and the views from the West Rim of Zion Canyon and the maze of canyons and white-walled mesas dicing up the Zion backcountry look like something from another planet.

Road access to both areas of Zion, and local shuttle services, allow for short overnight hikes or longer outings that are ideal for beginners.

The more ambitious can make a north-south traverse from the Lee Pass Trailhead in the Kolob Canyons to Zion Canyon, about 40 miles, depending on how many side hikes one takes (such as the incomparable Zion must-do, Angels Landing).

See all stories about Zion National Park at The Big Outside, including “Pilgrimage Across Zion: Traversing a Land of Otherworldly Scenery” and “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park.”

Hike all of “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

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From natural arches, hoodoos, and hanging gardens to balanced rocks and towering mesas, slot canyons and vast chasms, the desert Southwest holds in its dry, searing, lonely open spaces some of America’s most fascinating and inspiring geology. The writer “Cactus Ed” Abbey no doubt had this region in mind when he said there “are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.” Much of it sits protected within southern Utah’s five national parks: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef.

The good news? Many of the best sights can be reached on dayhikes of anywhere from a couple hours to a full day.

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 list below of the best dayhikes in southern Utah’s national parks draws from numerous trips I’ve made to each of these parks over the past three decades, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. Use my list as your compass, and I guarantee you will knock off the best hikes in these parks.

Like many stories at this blog, part of this one is free for anyone to read, but reading it in full and seeing the full list of hikes described below is an exclusive benefit of a paid subscription to The Big Outside.

I’d love to read your thoughts about my list—and your suggestions for dayhikes that belong on it. Please share them in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments, and as I continue to explore more trails, I will regularly update this story.

Angels Landing and West Rim Trail, Zion National Park

Angels Landing unquestionably belongs on any list of the best dayhikes in Utah. The five-mile, nearly 1,500-foot round-trip hike of Angels Landing culminates in one of the airiest and most thrilling half-mile stretches (actually, 0.4 mile) of trail in the entire National Park System. You scale a steep, knife-edge ridge crest of rock, using steps carved out of sandstone and chain handrails in spots. And the 360-degree panorama from the summit takes in all of Zion Canyon.

Two tips: If you can hike a strong pace, start in very early morning or wait until mid-afternoon (when the lower section of trail falls into shade) to avoid the crowds and the heat of midday. And after summiting Angels, continue up the West Rim Trail for another mile or two before turning back—you will ditch the crowds and explore a sublimely beautiful area of giant beehive towers and white walls streaked in red and orange.

Due to the hike’s enormous popularity, Zion National Park holds a seasonal lottery four times per year at recreation.gov for permits to dayhike Angels Landing. Key lottery dates for Zion’s two peak hiking seasons, spring and fall, are Feb. 13-25 for hiking permits from March 1 through May 31, held at recreation.gov/permits/4675310; for hiking dates from Sept. 1 through Nov. 30, the lottery dates in 2025 were July 1-20 and held at recreation.gov/permits/4675325, but the lottery dates for fall 2026 have not been announced yet. The permit is only required for hiking the spur trail up Angels Landing; anyone can hike as far as Scout Lookout without a permit.

A separate lottery for dayhiking permits is held daily before 3 p.m. Mountain Time the day before you want to hike it. Learn more and find the link for a day-before permit at nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/angels-landing-hiking-permits.htm.

See my stories “Hiking Angels Landing: What You Need to Know” and “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park.”

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Navajo-Queens Garden and Peek-a-Boo Loops, Bryce Canyon National Park

If the view of Bryce’s stone forest of multi-colored hoodoos is breathtaking from roadside overlooks, hiking in their labyrinthine midst is mesmerizing. Combine the popular and short Navajo Loop/Queens Garden Loop—which features one of the park’s best-known formations, Thor’s Hammer—with the Peek-a-Boo Loop (also shown in lead photo at top of story), and you will lose the crowds while walking through a maze of multi-colored limestone, sandstone, and mudstone towers.

The hike, mostly on good trails that are easy to follow, weaves among tall hoodoos, passes through doorways cut through walls of rock, and wraps through amphitheaters of wildly colored, slender spires that resemble giant, melting candles. The six-mile loop, with a total elevation gain and loss of about 1,600 feet, begins and ends at Sunset Point.

See “The Two Best Hikes in Bryce Canyon National Park,” and all stories about Utah national parks at The Big Outside.

Hike all of “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Navajo Knobs Trail and Hickman Bridge, Capitol Reef National Park

While other hikes on this list are likely on your radar, Capitol Reef’s Navajo Knobs Trail may not be—and it absolutely should. This may sound like hyperbole, but there are few dayhikes in the entire National Park System, never mind in Utah’s parks, that compare, step for step, with the consistently mind-blowing Navajo Knobs Trail (lead photo at top of story).

A 9.4-mile, out-and-back hike with 1,620 feet of uphill and downhill, it starts at the same trailhead as the immensely popular Hickman Bridge Trail, winding upward to the Rim Overlook at 2.3 miles from the trailhead, with a sweeping view of the cliffs and the Waterpocket Fold from 1,000 feet above the Fremont River Gorge. The lightly traveled trail then meanders along the canyon rim, below enormous cliffs and towers in a variety of shapes and sizes, with continuously expanding panoramas of Capitol Reef, ending with some easy scrambling to the top of one of the pinnacles known as the Navajo Knobs.

The Navajo Knobs Trail presents delightful surprises around every turn and a unique perspective on the fascinating topography of Capitol Reef National Park. The short and easy Hickman Bridge Trail, less than two miles out-and-back with 400 feet of up and down, loops around the natural bridge, which spans 133 feet—a terrific hike for a young family.

See “The Best Hikes in Capitol Reef National Park.”

Planning your next big adventure? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

Chesler Park, Canyonlands National Park

Hiking to Chesler Park in the Needles District of Canyonlands has the quality of approaching the Emerald City in the land of Oz. Multi-colored, 300-foot-tall towers of Cedar Mesa sandstone form a castle-like rampart, looming ever larger as you approach Chesler. The trail then leads steeply uphill through a break in the row of pinnacles—the doorway into Chesler Park, a horseshoe of sandstone spires arcing around a patch of desert more than a mile across.

From ledges between the spires of Chesler, you get views of the park’s pinnacles and the sprawling badlands outside its walls, where giant, white-capped mushrooms of stone sprout from the earth, and more red spires rise in the distance. It’s roughly 10 miles out-and-back hike to Chesler without probing into it. But if you have the time and stamina, hike the path almost three miles around the park to the Joint Trail, which passes through a very narrow, sheer-walled slot in solid rock.

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

Want more? See “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes”
and “Extreme Hiking: America’s Best Hard Dayhikes.”

Delicate Arch at Sunset, Arches National Park

The trail to what is probably Utah’s most famous natural arch is certainly a well-traveled path. But here’s the smart hiker’s strategy: Do it in the evening, timing your arrival at Delicate for shortly before sunset. The final stretch of the trail traverses the face of a small slickrock cliff before suddenly depositing you on the rim of an amphitheater of solid rock, looking across the broad bowl at Delicate Arch, with the La Sal Mountains, snow-covered in spring, visible through its keyhole. Then hold your jaw in place while watching as the low-angle sunlight seems to electrify the sandstone’s burnt color.

Just three miles round-trip with minimal elevation gain, it’s an easy stroll, even returning by headlamp; and that time of day is far more pleasant than trudging it during the morning or afternoon heat. Tip: Bring a headlamp and jacket and linger for a while after sunset, until most other hikers have departed, and you’ll enjoy a quieter, enchanting walk under a sky riddled with stars.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all of my stories about Arches National Park.

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The Riverside Walk and the Narrows, Zion National Park

From the Temple of Sinawava, at the upper end of Zion Canyon, you’ll walk the flat and very scenic, wheelchair-accessible, mile-long Riverside Trail, paralleling the North Fork of the Virgin River beneath red cliffs and shady cottonwood trees whose leaves turn golden in fall. At the end of that trail, you can either turn back or enter the typically ankle- to calf-deep river and follow it upstream to explore the Narrows, a canyon up to a thousand feet deep, with walls that close in enough to cut off direct sunlight in places, where waterfalls pour from rock walls, nurturing hanging gardens.

At Orderville Canyon, a narrow side canyon about 2.5 miles from the trailhead (on the right when walking upstream), you enter the roughly two-mile-long stretch of the Narrows known as Wall Street, where the river often spans the deeply shaded canyon wall to wall. Wall Street ends just before Big Spring, a lush and large hanging garden about five miles up, beyond which hiking is prohibited without a backcountry permit.

One of the most magnificent and unique hikes in the national parks and enormously popular, the lower Narrows teems with hundreds and sometimes thousands of dayhikers on hot days of late spring and summer, when the river is low and warmer.

See “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park.”

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Devils Garden, Arches National Park

Much of the mass popularity of Arches owes to the ease of viewing many of its signature features on short to very short hikes and roadside walks. That’s exactly why Devils Garden is the best hike in the park (at least among hikes that follow established trails). Besides being really scenic—you can view seven arches, including the park’s largest, 306-foot-long Landscape Arch—it’s much more adventurous.

The hiking is flat and easy for nearly one mile to Landscape Arch (almost two miles round-trip); beyond it, though, you’ll discover part of the magic of Devils Garden: immersing yourself in the landscape off the trail. You will scamper up and down steep sandstone fins and out onto exposed overlooks, and you can even scramble up into Partition Arch. Hike to all seven arches in the Devils Garden area, and you’ll cover about eight miles by the time you return to the Devils Garden Trailhead, at the end of the park road through Arches.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all stories about Arches National Park at The Big Outside.

See my 5-level difficulty rating system in my story
“How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

Cohab Canyon and Frying Pan Trail, Capitol Reef National Park

Of southern Utah’s five national parks, Capitol Reef plays the Cinderella role as the unappreciated beauty—which hikers who love the place consider a fortuitous break. I’ve explored much of this park’s lonely backcountry, and it’s worth all of the time and effort it demands. But to sample Capitol Reef’s Utah-caliber scenery on a relatively easy hike of two to three hours, head up the Cohab Canyon Trail, through a defile of walls sculpted with countless “windows.” From the clifftop ledges at the North Fruita Overlook and South Fruita Overlook, reached by hiking several minutes on spur trails, you’ll get breathtaking views from about 400 feet above the valley of the Fremont River.

Take a short, out-and-back detour onto the Frying Pan Trail: Within about 20 minutes of leaving Cohab Canyon, you’re on top of the nearly 100-mile-long Waterpocket Fold, soaking in a mind-boggling landscape of creamy-white, burgundy, and blazing-orange domes and cliffs. The Cohab Canyon Trail extends just 1.7 miles between UT 24 near the Hickman Bridge Trailhead and its other trailhead across the park’s Scenic Road from Fruita Campground; shuttle vehicles or a bike to hike it end-to-end, or hike out and back from either trailhead.

I describe the outstanding 11-mile hike combining Cohab Canyon and Frying Pan Trail in my story “The Best Hikes in Capitol Reef National Park.” See also “Playing the Memory Game in Southern Utah’s Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon.”

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America’s most stunning landscapes are protected within our 63 national parks, and some of the very finest scenery within our national heritage can be reached on dayhikes. Some of these hikes you may not have done yet or heard of. Others are famous, but there’s a reason for that: They are mind-blowingly gorgeous, so they stand out even in parks with multiple, five-star footpaths. You take these hikes for a one-of-a-kind experience.

Based on more than three decades of exploring most major U.S. national parks—including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog—and numerous trips to popular parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Grand Teton, Zion, and others, I’ve assembled this list of the best dayhikes in our parks. Many can be done by novice hikers and kids (and my kids have done many of them, at various ages), while others are burlier adventures.

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.

While you don’t usually set out on some these hikes expecting solitude, you can find it by doing them early or late in the day or outside of peak season; I offer tips below on the best times to do some of these hikes.

Use this as your tick list of great national park dayhikes to knock off, and I guarantee you’ll experience the best miles of trail our National Park System has to offer. By the way, this story actually describes 26 hikes—yea, there’s a bonus hike. 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 hikes is an exclusive benefit for paid subscribers to The Big Outside.

If I’ve missed an outstanding, favorite hike of yours, please suggest it in the comments section below to give me ideas for future trips. I regularly update and expand this list whenever I knock off a new trail that belongs here, and I try to respond to all comments.

South Kaibab Trail, Grand Canyon

You can’t go wrong on any dayhike in the Grand Canyon, but the South Kaibab is widely considered the premier trail in the Big Ditch. Following the crest of a narrow ridge that descends all the way to the Colorado River, it delivers expansive canyon views beginning minutes after leaving the trailhead.

It’s seven miles and 4,780 vertical feet one-way from the South Rim to the Colorado River—a one-day round-trip appropriate only for extremely fit hikers with desert-hiking experience, who are carrying enough food and water for a big day (there’s no water along the trail). Many people attempting a rim-to-river-to-rim dayhike descend the South Kaibab and ascend the less-steep Bright Angel Trail (9.5 miles and almost 4,500 feet uphill). But you can turn back at any point, choosing the length and difficulty of your hike—keeping in mind that going back up requires much more time and effort than going down. Start at first light and you’ll not only share the trail with far fewer people, you’ll be looking out over the Grand Canyon as the prettiest light of the day spills across it.

See all stories about the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail and all stories about the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

Do the canyon right. Get my expert e-book to dayhiking rim to rim
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Upper Yosemite Falls, Yosemite

Besides its towering granite walls, Yosemite Valley is famous for waterfalls that plummet hundreds or thousands of feet. The tallest, Upper Yosemite Falls, drops a sheer 1,400 feet (2,425 feet including the middle cascades and Lower Yosemite Falls, making the total drop the world’s sixth tallest). Near its brink, you’ll traverse a catwalk chiseled out of a granite wall to a ledge (with a safety rail) where you can peer down at the freefalling water and out over Yosemite Valley, nearly 3,000 feet below.

The round-trip hike to the top of Upper Yosemite Falls is 7.2 miles and 2,700 feet, but you can turn back at any point, such as at Columbia Rock (a mile and 1,000 feet uphill from the trailhead), which has a broad view of Yosemite Valley; or a half-mile farther, near the base of the upper falls, where you can stand in the rain of its intense mist.

See “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite” and “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls,” and all stories about Yosemite at The Big Outside.

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Highline Trail, Glacier

From 6,646-foot Logan Pass, the high point on Glacier’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, the Highline Trail traverses north across rolling, alpine terrain above treeline, with uninterrupted views of the park’s jagged peaks and soaring cliffs. It’s common to see bighorn sheep and mountain goats along the trail, and occasionally sight a black bear or even a grizzly (bring binoculars).

Hike in daylight as a bear-safety precaution, but start early morning, before most hikers, for the best chances of seeing wildlife. Distance options include turning around at any point or hiking 11.8 miles to The Loop on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which, like Logan Pass, is a stop on the park’s free shuttle bus. Or hike the 7.6 miles from Logan Pass to Granite Park, spend the night at the Granite Park Chalet (make a reservation months in advance); and the next day, either backtrack to Logan Pass or continue over Swiftcurrent Pass and descend to Many Glacier, another 7.6-mile day.

See “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park,” “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park,” and all stories about Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Angels Landing and West Rim Trail, Zion

The 2.5-mile, 1,500-foot (one-way) ascent of Angels Landing culminates in one of the airiest and most thrilling half-mile stretches (actually, 0.4 mile) of trail in the entire National Park System: You scale a steep ridge crest of solid rock, on a path at times just a few feet wide, with steps carved out of sandstone and chain handrails in spots (see lead photo at top of story). Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Angels Landing really has no peers.

Two tips: If you can hike a strong pace, start early morning or late afternoon to avoid the crowds and the heat of midday. And after summiting Angels, continue up the West Rim Trail for another mile or two; you’ll not only lose the crowds, you will enjoy increasingly dramatic views of Zion Canyon and venture into a quieter, sublimely beautiful area of giant beehive towers and white walls streaked in red and orange. The trail eventually climbs through exposed switchbacks to the West Rim, roughly five miles and 2,000 feet from The Grotto Trailhead where the hike begins.

Due to the enormous popularity of Angels Landing, Zion National Park has implemented a permit system for dayhiking Angels. Find out more at nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/angels-landing-hiking-permits.htm.

See “Hiking Angels Landing: What You Need to Know,” “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park,” “The 15 Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks,” and all stories about Zion at The Big Outside.

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North Rim Trail, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone

With more than 10,000 geothermal features, including hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles, and at least 300 geysers—two-thirds of the planet’s known geysers—Yellowstone is a land of marvels. Plus, you have a virtual guarantee of seeing more bison and elk than you can count and possibly other wildlife like wolves, bald eagles, trumpeter swans, and grizzly and black bears.

But of all the trails in the park, I’ll posit that the North Rim Trail, hundreds of feet above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, is the most spectacular. Traversing the rim for 3.2 miles from Inspiration Point to the overlook of 109-foot Upper Yellowstone Falls, the trail passes several dramatic overlooks of the canyon’s crumbling, golden walls. Don’t pass up the side trip down the steep switchbacks of the half-mile-long Brink of the Lower Falls Trail, which, as advertised, leads to the very lip of 308-foot Lower Yellowstone Falls.

See “The Ultimate Family Tour of Yellowstone,” “The 10 Best Hikes in Yellowstone,” which includes the North Rim Trail, and all stories about Yellowstone at The Big Outside.

Want more? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “Extreme Hiking: America’s Best Hard Dayhikes.”

Cascade Pass and Sahale Arm, North Cascades

North Cascades is one of the wildest, most rugged and spectacular, and least-visited parks—and after several trips, one of my favorites. With 9,000 feet of severe relief between the highest, jagged summits and deepest, rainforest valleys, more than 300 glaciers, and year-round snow coverage, the range has earned the nickname the “American Alps.”

But with 93 percent of its nearly 700,000 acres designated as wilderness, much of this park can only be seen by people willing to hike long distances over multiple days. Lucky for dayhikers, the 7.4-mile, 1,800-foot round-trip hike to Cascade Pass delivers views usually reserved for backpackers and climbers. Continue past it up wildflower-strewn Sahale Arm for steadily expanding views of a sea of pinnacles, ice, and snow. It’s another 4.4 miles and 2,300 feet to the trail’s end at Sahale Glacier Camp, but turn around at any time.

See my story “Exploring the ‘American Alps:’ The North Cascades,” and all stories about the North Cascades region at The Big Outside.

See Sahale Glacier Camp in North Cascades in my story
“Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites.”

Garnet Canyon, Grand Teton

The Tetons are another mountain range where some of the best views are enjoyed only by hiking many miles or tying into a rope. But Garnet Canyon, where soaring granite walls form a horseshoe beneath the Grand, Middle, and South Tetons and neighboring peaks, offers arguably the best views in the park that you can reach on a moderate dayhike.

From the Lupine Meadows Trailhead, it’s about four-and-a-half miles with more than 2,200 feet of vertical to the grassy area known as The Meadows, where there are campsites by a creek. The last stretch to The Meadows crosses an area of massive boulders beyond the end of the maintained Garnet Canyon Trail, but the views are just as good before the boulders.

Hiking to Amphitheater Lake, ringed by cliffs and forest high on Disappointment Peak and reached by a trail that forks off the path to Garnet Canyon, adds four miles out-and-back.

See my stories “Great Hike: Garnet Canyon, Grand Teton National Park” and “10 Great Big Dayhikes in the Tetons,” and all stories about Grand Teton National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Navajo-Queens Garden and Peek-a-Boo Loops, Bryce Canyon

Descend into Bryce Canyon on the Navajo Loop/Queens Garden Loop and you’ll walk through a maze of the multi-colored, limestone, sandstone, and mudstone spires called “hoodoos,” which resemble giant, melting candles, including one of the park’s best-known formations, Thor’s Hammer. But continue beyond that popular and short hike onto the Peek-a-Boo Loop, and you will lose the crowds—and discover the scenic heart of Bryce Canyon, hiking below row after row of towers in shades of flourescent red and orange, like the aptly named Wall of Windows.

The hike, mostly on good trails that are easy to follow, weaves among tall hoodoos, passes through doorways blasted through walls of rock, and wraps through amphitheaters of wildly colored, slender spires—a delightful, half-day hike that constantly changes character. The six-mile loop, with a cumulative elevation gain and loss of about 1,600 feet, begins and ends at Sunset Point.

See “The Two Best Hikes in Bryce Canyon National Park,” and all stories about Utah national parks at The Big Outside.

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Half Dome, Yosemite

One of America’s most iconic and sought-after hikes, the trek to Half Dome’s 8,800-foot summit—a tough 16 miles round-trip from Happy Isles Trailhead in Yosemite Valley, with 4,800 feet of elevation gain and loss—reaches its literal and emotional apex at the several hundred vertical feet of cables the park installs on the steep slab leading to the vast summit plateau. At the top, many hikers venture to the ledge known as The Visor that overhangs Half Dome’s famous Northwest Face, posing for photos on that granite gangplank thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley. Nothing compares with this hike.

Ascend the steeper Mist Trail past 317-foot Vernal Fall and 594-foot Nevada Fall, and after climbing Half Dome, descend the John Muir Trail—which has a classic view back toward Nevada Fall, the granite dome Liberty Cap, and the back side of Half Dome. Tip: Start an hour before sunrise to get ahead of most other hikers on this popular route.

See “Hiking Half Dome: How to Do It Right and Get a Permit,” “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite” and “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls” for details on hiking the much shorter and easier, classic loop of the Mist Trail and John Muir Trail to Vernal and Nevada Falls.

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

Navajo Knobs Trail, Capitol Reef

There are few dayhikes in the entire National Park System that compare with the Navajo Knobs Trail. There, I’ve said it. At 9.4 miles out-and-back hike with 1,620 feet of elevation gain and loss, it’s just moderately difficult, yet sees little hiker traffic beyond its split from the trail to Hickman Natural Bridge—but really stunning every step of the way. It first climbs to an overlook of Hickman Natural Bridge and then winds upward and along the top of cliffs that offer sweeping views from 1,000 feet above the Fremont River Valley of the rumpled topography of the Waterpocket Fold and the Henry Mountains in the distance.

The trail continues meandering along the rim, below soaring cliffs and towers with continuously expanding panoramas of Capitol Reef and distinctive formations like Pectols Pyramid, The Castle, and Fern’s Nipple. At its far end, you’ll do some easy scrambling to the tiny summit of one of the pinnacles named the Navajo Knobs, worth the effort for the prospect it offers of the varied and fascinating geology and topography of Capitol Reef National Park.

See “The Best Hikes in Capitol Reef National Park” and all stories about Capitol Reef at The Big Outside.

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Clingmans Dome and Appalachian Trail, Great Smoky Mountains

Set aside the fact that over 12 million people annually visit the Great Smokies—America’s most popular park—and thousands hike the half-mile-long, paved walkway to the observation tower atop 6,643-foot Clingmans Dome, the park’s highest point. Still, the 360-degree panorama of the overlapping, forested ridges of the Southern Appalachians will steal your breath away (if the steep hike up didn’t).

Then head west on the Appalachian Trail—the 2.2 miles one-way to the Goshen Prong Trail junction is far enough—for a much quieter experience of walking the rocky, up-and-down crest of one of the East’s tallest mountain ranges, passing numerous overlooks of the rugged peaks and valleys on the North Carolina and Tennessee sides of the park. Double back to the Clingmans Dome parking lot and hike 3.6-mile out-and-back (for a total distance of nine miles) on the Forney Ridge Trail to 5,920-foot Andrews Bald, the highest grassy bald in the Smokies, where the views span a broad expanse of North Carolina’s mountains; azalea and rhododendron bloom spectacularly from mid-June to early July.

See more photos and info in my story “In the Garden of Eden: Backpacking the Great Smoky Mountains,” about a trip that included Clingmans Dome, the Appalachian Trail, and Andrews Bald, and see all stories about hiking and backpacking in the North Carolina mountains at The Big Outside.

Third Beach to Strawberry Point, Olympic

Stone pinnacles called sea stacks rise up to some 200 feet out of the pounding Pacific Ocean. Sea otters, seals, and whales swim offshore and bald eagles fly overhead. Mussels, sea stars, and sea anemones carpet boulders in tide pools. In one of Earth’s largest virgin temperate rainforests, Sitka spruce and western red cedar grow to 150 feet tall, with diameters of 10 or 15 feet, and Douglas fir and western hemlock soar well over 200 feet.

The 73 miles of coast in Olympic National Park comprise the longest strip of wilderness seashore in the contiguous United States, remote and mostly accessible only to backpackers. But dayhikers can sample it on the relatively flat, 10-mile, out-and-back dayhike from Third Beach Trailhead on La Push Road to Strawberry Point, one of the spots with a cluster of offshore sea stacks. Up for 14 miles round-trip? Continue to Toleak Point, where at low tide you can scramble out onto some sea stacks.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast,” and all stories about Olympic National Park at The Big Outside.

The Pacific Northwest is a wet place.
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Delicate Arch at Sunset, Arches

Just three miles out-and-back with less than 500 feet of elevation gain, the well-traveled path to what is probably Utah’s most famous and most-photographed natural arch is best done in the evening, timing your arrival at Delicate Arch for before sunset. Although still popular as a sunset hike, it’s more pleasant than trudging it during the heat of the day, and the sunset light seems to electrify the sandstone’s burnt color.

One of the pleasures of the hike is how the final stretch of the trail traverses the side of a small slickrock cliff before suddenly popping you out on the rim of an amphitheater of solid rock, looking across the big bowl at Delicate Arch, with the La Sal Mountains, snow-covered in spring, visible through its keyhole. Tip: Bring a headlamp and jacket and linger until well after sunset, when most other hikers have already started back, and you’ll enjoy a quieter walk under a sky riddled with stars.

See “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” “The 15 Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks,” and all stories about Arches National Park at The Big Outside.

Score a popular permit using my
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Skyline Trail, Mount Rainier

The 5.5-mile, 1,500-foot Skyline Trail loop from Paradise, on the southern flank of Mount Rainier, delivers everything you go to this park to see: in-your-face views of The Mountain and the cracked face of the Nisqually Glacier; thick carpets of lupine, mountain heather, and other alpine wildflowers; waterfalls, and marmots perched on trailside boulders.

You might also see climbers on their way up to or returning from Camp Muir, the base camp for ascents of the standard Disappointment Cleaver route up Rainier. Have lunch at Panorama Point, at nearly 7,000 feet, with a sweeping view of the Tatoosh Range and sister Cascade Range volcanoes like Adams, St. Helens, and Hood. At the footbridge over Myrtle Falls, follow the short spur trail descending to a better view of the waterfall, There are a variety of interconnected trails above Paradise to create shorter or longer loops. Tip: Often buried in snow until early August, this hike is prettiest when the wildflowers are in full bloom, around mid-August.

See “The Best Hikes in Mount Rainier National Park” and all stories about Mount Rainier National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Dawson-Pitamakan Passes Loop, Glacier

The rare trails that run for miles high above the treetops, with jaw-dropping panoramas of jagged, icy peaks stretching to the horizon, bring hikers about as close as we get to the feeling of being an eagle soaring through the mountains. This loop from the Two Medicine North Shore Trailhead over Dawson and Pitamakan passes—both of which reach nearly 7,600 feet—does just that.

For more than five miles between the passes, this hike offers 360-degree panoramas of the peaks in Glacier’s remote heart, as well as deep, green valleys carved into classic U shapes by ancient glaciers, and shockingly blue alpine lakes. Watch for bighorn sheep and mountain goats. Shorten the 17.6-mile loop (with 2,500 vertical feet of elevation gain and loss) to 14.8 miles by catching an early boat shuttle across Two Medicine Lake (see glacierparkboats.com); do that at the hike’s outset in order to get off the alpine traverse, which is exposed to severe weather, earlier in the day. Shortest option: Dayhike 9.4 miles (with the boat shuttle) out-and-back to Dawson Pass—although you’ll miss most of the alpine traverse that makes this dayhike so special.

See “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park,” “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park,” and my stories “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” and “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” for more photos of the Dawson Pass Trail between Dawson and Pitamakan passes, and all stories about Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

Plan your next great backpacking trip in Glacier and other parks using my expert e-books.

Anhinga Trail, Everglades

Nothing prepares you for your first immersion in the unbridled wildness of the Everglades—and the Anhinga Trail may be the best introduction to one of the planet’s greatest biological preserves. Less than a mile long and flat—easy enough and a wonderful experience for young kids, and accessible to people in wheelchairs—the trail meanders between footpath and boardwalk through a sawgrass marsh, where you will see an uncanny number of large, exotic birds like herons, egrets, and anhingas.

Most shockingly, you will stand possibly within reach of alligators—but make sure it’s only from the safety of an elevated boardwalk: Before I set out on the Anhinga Trail, I saw a gator on the lawn outside the Royal Palm Visitor Center, where the hike begins, that hissed menacingly enough at tourists approaching it with cameras to send them scattering. Don’t do that.

See my story “Like No Other Place: Paddling the Everglades.”

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Lake Solitude, Grand Teton

Full disclosure: Unless you take this dayhike outside the peak summer season or start early, don’t expect Lake Solitude to deliver on the promise in its name: On a nice summer day, this hike sees scores of hikers. But they spread out so it mostly doesn’t feel crowded—and there are good reasons so many people make this considerable trek: Vividly blue Lake Solitude nestles in a basin ringed by tall cliffs in the very heart of the Tetons, and the views down the North Fork of Cascade Canyon are among the best in the entire park.

At just over 15 miles and 2,300 feet out-and-back from the boat landing on the west side of Jenny Lake, this stroll up Cascade Canyon and its North Fork is challenging but certainly within the abilities of many fit hikers. Tip: Catch the first boat shuttle across Jenny Lake to get a jump on the crowds and possibly enjoy a bit of actual solitude at the lake; you might even see wildlife like moose along the trail (as I have three times in Cascade Canyon and the North Fork).

See “10 Great Big Dayhikes in the Tetons” and all stories about Grand Teton National Park at The Big Outside.

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Are you a backpacker? You may like my stories “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips” and “12 Expert Tips for Planning a Wilderness Backpacking Trip.”

See a menu of all stories about national park adventures at The Big Outside.

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Are you looking for great trip ideas for your bucket list? Well, you’ve clicked to the right place. This freshly updated story spotlights some of the most iconic wildlands in the U.S., including Glacier (photo above), Yosemite, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Sequoia national parks, southern Utah’s national parks and monuments, two wilderness areas, and two international adventures that may not be on your radar—all of them worthy of your bucket list.

All of them are also trips that you must start planning now or very soon to take them this year—including rapidly approaching backcountry permit-reservation dates for many national parks.

The 10 trips described below all stand out in personal memory among the countless trips I’ve enjoyed over the past three decades, including the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. They all have links to stories at The Big Outside with many more images and info, including my expert tips on planning and taking each trip. (Those stories require a paid subscription to The Big Outside to read in full.)

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 update this list regularly to feed you fresh and timely ideas—and to help your bucket list, like mine, continually refresh as you steadily tick off new trips.

I can help you plan any of these trips—see my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how and to read hundreds of comments from people like you whom I’ve helped plan an unforgettable adventure. See also my E-Books page for my expert e-books to many of America’s best backpacking trips, and my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

I’d love to read any thoughts, personal experiences, or suggestions you want to share in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Southern Utah is Huge. Get Busy

Okay, you know of and maybe have dayhiked or backpacked in some of Utah’s Big 5 national parks: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and perhaps even lesser-known Capitol Reef—which together protect landscapes that almost defy description and a density and breadth of parks and other wild lands that’s arguably unmatched in the country. You almost certainly haven’t finished with them yet.

But have you backpacked gems like Paria Canyon, Coyote Gulch, or Owl and Fish canyons? Or taken more obscure and challenging backpacking trips like Dark Canyon, the Death Hollow Loop in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, or the Maze District of Canyonlands? Or even taken classic adventures like backpacking Zion’s Narrows, Kolob Canyons or West Rim Trail or floating the Green River through Canyonlands? Not to mention the countless great dayhikes of all distances, like the beloved slot canyons Peek-a-Boo Gulch and Spooky Gulch.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve returned to southern Utah—it’s dozens—but I’m far from done there. You’ve probably only scraped the surface of this region. Treat southern Utah as a lifetime commitment and every new adventure will amaze you. Spring and fall are the prime seasons and some of these trips require reserving permits months in advance.

See “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest,” “The 15 Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks,” all stories about hiking and backpacking in southern Utah at The Big Outside.

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Get Lonely in the North Cascades

On at least three major lists of the least-visited national parks, North Cascades ranks in the top five (and most of the top 10 are in Alaska). For backpackers who prefer to have a beautiful wild place almost to themselves, that’s a good thing.

A sprawling swath of glacier-clad mountains and thickly forested valleys, North Cascades has long been one of my favorite parks—and it has one of the best backcountry campsites I’ve ever slept in.

On my most-recent trip there, a friend and walked 80 miles through the heart of the North Cascades National Park Complex just as the huckleberries ripened and the larch trees blazed yellow with fall color in the last week of September. Our grand tour from Easy Pass Trailhead to Bridge Creek Trailhead took us through virgin forests of giant cedars, hemlocks, and Douglas firs, and over four passes, including Park Creek Pass, where you turn a 360 overlooking waterfalls and glaciers pouring off cliffs and jagged, snowy peaks amid a sea of mountains.

North Cascades National Park holds an Early-Access lottery for permit reservations from March 2-13, 2026—enter it especially if you’re seeking any popular backcountry camps in the park—and opens general permit reservations on April 29.

See my story “Primal Wild: Backpacking 80 Miles Through the North Cascades,” which has my tips on how to plan and take this trip, including shorter variations of the route, and all stories about North Cascades National Park at The Big Outside.

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Backpack Incomparable Glacier National Park

Little wonder that Glacier ranks among the favorite national parks of backpackers: No place in the Lower 48 really compares with it. From its rivers of ice (which are disappearing rapidly due to climate change) pouring off craggy mountains and sheer cliffs that soar high above lushly green valleys, and over 760 lakes offering mirror reflections of it all, to megafauna like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and grizzly and black bears, these million acres in the rugged Northern Rockies simply deliver an experience you can’t find in any park outside Alaska.

I’ve backpacked multiple times all over Glacier, most recently in September 2023 (lead photo at top of story), when two friends and I hiked for a week mostly on the Continental Divide Trail through the park—unquestionably one of the entire CDT’s best sections. The park’s more than 700 miles of trails enable trips of varying distances, from beginner-friendly to serious, remote adventures in deep wilderness.

My e-books describing two long and magnificent treks through Glacier, “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park,” detail all you need to know to plan and execute those trips safely. They also describe shorter variations on those routes.

And, of course, I can give you a customized plan for a backpacking trip of any length in Glacier; click here to learn how.

Glacier holds two early-access lotteries, on March 1 for large groups of nine to 12 people and on March 15 for standard groups of one to eight people, for a date and time between March 21 and April 30 when they can reserve a permit ahead of reservations opening to the general public on May 1. Glacier makes 70 percent of backcountry campsites available for reservations and 30 percent of campsites available for walk-in permits.

See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

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Backpack the Wonderland Trail Around Mount Rainier

Backpacking the Wonderland Trail around glacier-clad, 14,410-foot Mount Rainier, one repeatedly sees “The Mountain” (as Washingtonians know it) fill the horizon—a sight that can stop you in your boots. If it’s fair to say that no multi-day hike in the contiguous United States is quite like the Wonderland Trail—and it is—that’s partly because there’s no mountain in the Lower 48 like Rainier.

But the WT isn’t just about views of Rainier. It also features some of the most beautiful wildflower meadows you will ever walk through, crystalline creeks and raging rivers gray with “glacial flour,” countless waterfalls and cascades, and sightings of mountain goats, marmots, deer, and black bears.

The full Wonderland loop around Rainier is a seriously strenuous, 93-mile trip, with over 44,000 cumulative vertical feet of elevation gain and loss. But because it can be accessed from several trailheads, you can choose between thru-hiking all of it—which takes up to nine to 10 days—or backpacking shorter trips of varying lengths on sections of the trail.

And choices like where to begin the loop and which direction to hike 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.”

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 “American Gem: Backpacking Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” about a 77-mile hike two friends and I took on much of the Wonderland (a route described as one of the alternate itineraries in my e-book).

Got an all-time favorite campsite? I have 25 of them.
See “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites.”

Take Yosemite’s Best Dayhikes and Backpacking Trips

Half Dome, the John Muir Trail, Tenaya Lake, Mount Hoffmann, the Mist Trail, Upper Yosemite Falls, Tuolumne Meadows, and the Cathedral Range and Cathedral Lakes—these names are nearly as famous as the park that harbors them: Yosemite.

But in numerous trips backpacking, dayhiking, and climbing there over the years, I’ve discovered that other corners of Yosemite are equally spectacular if not as well known, including the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, Clouds Rest, Red Peak Pass, Matterhorn Peak and Matterhorn Canyon, Burro Pass, Mule Pass, Benson Lake, and Dewey Point, among many.

This flagship park’s finest backpacking trips and dayhikes offer a variety of experiences that will awe you no matter how much time you have or how many times you’ve been there. For backpacking, plan to apply for a wilderness permit 24 weeks (168 days) in advance of the week you want to start hiking.

If you want to backpack Yosemite this summer, the time to apply for a wilderness permit is now.

See “Backpacking Yosemite: What You Need to Know,” “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite” and all of this blog’s stories about backpacking in Yosemite, plus my expert e-books to three stellar, multi-day hikes in Yosemite, including “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite.”

See also “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite,” “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls,” and all stories about Yosemite National Park at The Big Outside.

I know Yosemite’s unique wilderness permit system very well and I’ve helped many readers plan a backpacking trip in Yosemite—including helping some obtain a permit after they had failed applying on their own. Go to my Custom Trip Planning page to see how I can do that for you.

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

Explore the Wind River Range

Come up with a list of the best backpacking trips in America that do not require you to reserve a permit months in advance, and rank them in order of scenic magnificence, and Wyoming’s Wind River Range would have to reside near or at the top of that list. The Winds are also one of the few mountain ranges in the contiguous United States where—if you put in the effort to get beyond the very few popular trailheads—you can hike for days below 13,000-foot peaks and count more alpine lakes than people.

Among the most recent of several trips I’ve made to the Winds, my wife, a friend, and I backpacked a five-day, roughly 43-mile loop from one of the less-busy trailheads on the west side of the range, following some of the most scenic trails I’ve walked in the Winds to high passes and gorgeous lakes around every turn. On a four-day hike, a friend and I camped near a lake every night and crossed four passes, including a sort of “back door” entrance into the amazing Cirque of the Towers, and I left there thinking we’d just done the best multi-day hike in the Winds.

And just last September, on a solo, six-day hike mostly on the Continental Divide Trail through the Winds, I went entire days without seeing other backpackers and walked past too many heart-stopping lakes to count. Watch for my upcoming story about that trip.

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

I’ve helped many readers plan a wonderful backpacking trip, ideal for them, in the Wind River Range. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any trip you read about at this blog and see hundreds of comments from readers who’ve received my trip planning.

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

Trek Through Italy’s Dolomite Mountains

Located in the northeastern Italian Alps, with one national park, several regional parks, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Dolomites thrust a dizzying array of spires and serrated peaks into the sky, gleaming like polished jewels in bright sunshine and virtually pulsing with the salmon hue of evening alpenglow. They strike a sharp contrast with the deep, steep-sided, verdantly green valleys and meadows. On a weeklong, hut-to-hut trek through one of the world’s most spectacular and storied mountain ranges, my family hiked a 39-mile (62-kilometer) section of the roughly 112-mile (180-kilometer) Alta Via 2, or “The Way of the Legends.”

An alpine footpath famous for scenery that puts it in legitimate contention for the title of the most beautiful trail in the world, the AV 2 is also known for comfortable mountain huts with excellent food—and a reputation for being the most remote and difficult of the several multi-day alte vie, or “high paths,” that crisscross the Dolomites. On one of the all-time best adventures I’ve ever taken, we discovered that it was all of those things and more.

See my story “The World’s Most Beautiful Trail: Trekking the Alta Via 2 in Italy’s Dolomites.”

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking or hiking trip.
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See the Glorious Southern Sierra in Sequoia National Park

With some of the highest mountains in the Lower 48 and a constellation of backcountry lakes, California’s southern High Sierra rank among the prettiest backpacking destinations in America. And Sequoia National Park hosts one of the biggest chunks of contiguous wilderness in the Lower 48—a pristine and incredibly photogenic land of razor peaks and alpine lakes so clear you could stand on the shore and read a book lying open on the lake bottom.

On a six-day, 40-mile backpacking trip in Sequoia, my family hiked through a quiet backcountry grove of giant Sequoias and over 10,000-foot and 11,000-foot passes at the foot of 12,000-foot, granite peaks. We camped at two lakes that earned spots on my list of 25 favorite backcountry campsites.

While many backpackers heading for the High Sierra point their compass at Yosemite and the John Muir Trail—creating enormous demand for those backcountry permits—far fewer set their sights on areas of Sequoia like where my family backpacked. That means it’s an easier permit to get, and the scenery rivals anywhere in the Sierra.

Apply for a permit up to six months in advance for a trip during the park’s quota period of late May through mid-September.

See my story “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” about my family’s six-day, 40-mile loop hike there, and all stories about Sequoia National Park at The Big Outside.

Click here now to plan your next great backpacking adventure using my expert e-books.

Wander Into Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains

I have been hiking, backpacking, and climbing in Idaho’s Sawtooths—the wilderness in my back yard (or pretty close)—for almost 30 years. I’ve walked nearly every trail and some outstanding off-trail routes, from the most accessible lakes and mountain passes to the remote interior of the range, visiting numerous, incredibly picturesque alpine lakes that undoubtedly see few visitors. I’ve long thought that the Sawtooths look like they could be the love child of the High Sierra and the Tetons.

I returned there again in August 2025 for a four-day hike that began with walking through a lovely lakes basin I had not seen before. That trip featured several more wonderful and remote lakes (including the above photo), and on which we crossed four high passes and summited one 10,000-foot peak. Watch for my upcoming story about that trip.

Looking for a beautiful Sawtooths adventure that’s a moderate distance? The multi-day hike I’d recommend is a four- to five-day, roughly 36-mile route in the scenic heart of the range.

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

I’ve helped many readers plan a wonderful backpacking trip, ideal for them, anywhere in the Sawtooths. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you, too.

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

Trek Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park

Picture this: an Arctic-looking landscape vibrantly colorful with shrubs, mosses, wildflowers, and lichen blanketing glacial-erratic boulders. Cliffs and mountains that look like they were chopped from the earth with an axe. Thick, crack-riddled glaciers pouring like pancake batter that needs more water off starkly barren peaks rising to more than 8,000 feet. Braided rivers meandering down mostly treeless valleys, and reindeer roaming wild. Summit views of a sea of snowy, glacier-clad peaks rolling away to far horizons.

That describes my family’s weeklong, roughly 60-mile/97-kilometer, hut-to-hut trek through Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park—whose name means the “Home of the Giants.”

Our adventure combined pristine wilderness with the most luxurious huts I’ve ever stayed in—some featuring private rooms, hot showers, and restaurant-caliber meals—a trail network that allows for flexibility in route options, and optional side hikes to summits with mind-blowing views of mountains buried in snow and ice, including the highest peak in Norway. Some of us also hiked a spectacular ridge traverse known as “the most famous hike in Norway,” which I’d normally receive as a warning sign, but in this case, it’s a rigorous hike that I’d return to in a second.

Read “Walking Among Giants: A Three-Generation Hut Trek in Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park.”

Find more ideas and inspiration in my All Trips List, which has a menu of all stories at this blog, and in “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and “The 10 Best Family Outdoor Adventure Trips.”

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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.

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Backpackers planning a trip in popular national parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Glacier, Zion, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Great Smoky Mountains, and others have one experience in common: A high percentage of them fail in their attempt to reserve a backcountry permit—and many probably don’t fully understand why. This story will answer your questions about how and when to reserve a backcountry permit in many parks—most of which have their own, unique reservation process and dates to make a reservation. And this story will share my expert tips on maximizing your chances of success.

Countless backpacking trips over more than three decades—during which I was the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine for 10 years and have now run this blog for even longer—have taught me many tricks for landing coveted permits in flagship parks, which receive far more requests than they can fill. The strategies and knowledge of these permit processes outlined below will help you land a hard-to-get national park backcountry permit—just as they have worked countless times for me.

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Just in the past several years, using these strategies, I’ve gotten permits for backpacking trips on three hugely popular trails, the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier, a long section of the John Muir Trail, and the Teton Crest Trail (a trip I’ve taken multiple times), as well as in Yellowstone, Glacier three times (this trip and this one, with one canceled due to wildfires), the Maze District of Canyonlands (and before that, the Needles District), North Cascades, two popular trips in Canadian Rockies national parks (this one and this one), Yosemite three times (this trip, this one and this one), and Grand Canyon six times (for trips in 2025, 2024, 2022, 2019, 2018, and 2015)—and I’ve had just two unsuccessful reservation attempts, a previous one for the Wonderland Trail (under the park’s old permit system; the new one is better, although still extremely competitive) and one for Glacier in 2021 that was rejected for reasons I anticipated and explain in tip no. 3 (below).

And if you want to take a trip in one of those popular parks this year, the time for reserving permits is now or coming up soon.

A friendly warning: Don’t backpack without a permit. Backcountry rangers might issue you a citation for camping without a permit, which could involve a fine and a court appearance. The more immediate problem with lacking a permit for where you’re trying to camp is that all established campsites there could be occupied, leaving you no option but camping illegally in a potentially uncomfortable spot and causing damage to a sensitive area. That’s not cool and it’s not fun.

When you’re frustrated over being denied a permit for the hike you really wanted to take, keep this in mind: The permit system in parks imposes quotas on the number of backpackers in order to protect the landscape from overuse and give all of us an uncrowded, better wilderness experience. Compare the experience in many parks with places you’ve been that have no permit system and are overcrowded and visibly over-used, and you’ll realize: Permits are a good thing.

Plus, if you take a little time to understand how permit processes work, they become less daunting and you may have more success with them—and enjoy adventures of a lifetime.

Please share what you think of my tips or your own tips or questions in the comments section at the bottom of this story and please share this story with anyone who might benefit from it. I try to respond to all comments and questions. Click on any photo or link below to read about that park or trip.

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#1 Do Your Homework

Research your route in advance. Know where you want to go and how far you intend to hike each day. Keep in mind that your party’s speed will be determined by the slowest person, and factors like the terrain’s ruggedness, total elevation gain and loss on your route, and whether it’s at high elevations. (See the expert tips in my story “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”) Plan daily distances and pick campsites that make sense for your group, to minimize the likelihood of not reaching one and camping illegally.

See my stories “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips” and “How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking.”

See also my expert e-books to backpacking trips in several popular national parks for detailed hiking itineraries, expert planning advice, on-the-ground knowledge, and tips specific to getting a permit in those parks.

Don’t have the time or expertise to plan it yourself? Want to make sure your trip is as good as it can be? Visit my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your next great adventure and see hundreds of comments from readers like you who’ve received my custom trip planning.

Insider Tip

I have called or emailed backcountry rangers with questions many times, even at popular parks, and received prompt responses. If you’ve done your research and know the park—and have good experience, especially in that park—I have found that a backcountry ranger will more readily point you toward route options that they might not suggest to a novice. Don’t hesitate to talk about your experience.

#2 Know When to Apply

Check the park’s website (or, for most national parks, recreation.gov) months in advance of the trip dates you’re planning to learn about the timing and procedure for reserving a backcountry permit, which varies from park to park.

In some parks, to have any chance of reserving a permit, you must be ready at the very minute that reservations open—especially for popular hikes in parks that attract a lot of backpackers (like most parks and trails mentioned in this story).

Fortunately, most parks have now abandoned antiquated apply-only-in-person and apply-by-fax-machine permit systems and moved to online permit reservations operated through recreation.gov, a positive step forward in an era when demand for backcountry permits is skyrocketing in many places.

Still, while many are easy to navigate, a few are unnecessarily chaotic and frustrating for users in ways that seem clearly avoidable, given the numerous examples within the National Park System of successful park permit systems that work smoothly. The NPS is making progress but could still do much better.

Insider Tip

Use a shotgun: Try for permit reservations in multiple parks for a range of potential dates, hoping that at least one is successful. You can always cancel any you can’t use and usually get virtually all of the cost refunded. In parks that conduct early-access permit lotteries, have everyone in your group enter the lottery.

When to Reserve a Backcountry Permit in These Major Parks

•    In Grand Teton, for trips between May 1 and Oct. 31, permit reservations can be made at recreation.gov/permits/249986 starting at 8 a.m. Mountain Time on Jan. 7, 2026, and up to two days before your trip start date. But popular backcountry camping zones, like those along the Teton Crest Trail, get booked up very quickly after reservations open—often within minutes in a process that can be chaotic. The park allows one-third of available permits to be reserved in advance, leaving two-thirds available first-come, for walk-in backpackers, no more than one day before your trip begins. See my expert e-books to the Teton Crest Trail and the best short backpacking trip in the Tetons, and my Custom Trip Planning page to see how I can help you plan that trip, as well as my stories “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail” and “How to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail Without a Permit.” There is a $20 non-refundable fee if you obtain a permit plus $7 per person per night. Find more information at nps.gov/grte/planyourvisit/bcres.htm.

•    In Yosemite, wilderness permit reservations are issued based on trailhead quotas, with special rules for backpacking the John Muir Trail. Sixty percent of permit reservations are available by lottery at recreation.gov/permits/445859 beginning at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time on the Sunday up to 24 weeks (168 days) in advance of the date you want to start hiking, with the lottery for each specific window of dates closing at 11:59 p.m. the following Saturday. For example, to start a trip between Aug. 9-15, 2026, enter the lottery between Feb. 15 and Feb. 21. The remaining 40 percent of permits are made available at recreation.gov at 7 a.m. Pacific Time up to seven days in advance of a trip start date. The non-refundable permit fee is $10 for each lottery entered or a walk-in permit plus $5 per person if you get a permit. Permits issued by other national parks or forests in the Sierra for trips extending into Yosemite—for example, a John Muir Trail permit (see info below)—are valid in Yosemite for the permit dates. See my expert e-books to three stellar, multi-day hikes in Yosemite, including “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite,” and my stories “How to Get a Yosemite or High Sierra Wilderness Permit” and “How to Get a Last-Minute Yosemite Wilderness Permit Now.” Find more info at nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/wildpermits.htm.

Start planning now to take one of “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips.”

•    To thru-hike the John Muir Trail southbound, enter the Yosemite National Park lottery at recreation.gov/permits/445859 up to 24 weeks in advance of the date you want to start hiking, with the lottery for each specific window of dates closing at 11:59 p.m. the following Saturday. For example, to start a trip between Aug. 9-15, 2026, enter the lottery between Feb. 15 and Feb. 21. See nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/jmt.htm. Permits for hiking northbound, starting at Whitney Portal, are reserved through a lottery system at recreation.gov; enter it between Feb. 1 and March 1, with results announced March 15. To start a JMT section hike (or any hike) in the Inyo National Forest between May 1 and Nov. 1, apply at recreation.gov at 7 a.m. Pacific Time six months in advance, or up to two weeks in advance for a walk-up permit. See my stories “How to Get a John Muir Trail Wilderness Permit in 2026” and “10 Great John Muir Trail Section Hikes” and all stories about backpacking the JMT at The Big Outside. Visit my Custom Trip Planning page to see how I can help you plan a successful and unforgettable JMT thru-hike or section hike or any other trip (as I’ve done for many other readers).

•    Since the beginning of 2024, Grand Canyon has issued about 80 percent of backcountry permits through a monthly, early-access lottery at recreation.gov/permits/4675337. Apply for the lottery anytime during a two-week period that ends on the first of the month four months in advance of the month you’d like to hike—for example, between Nov. 16 and Dec. 1 for a trip anytime in April and between May 16 and June 1 for October. The lottery awards up to 750 applicants a date and time between the 4^th and 17^th of the following month when they can attempt to reserve a backcountry permit. The park expects that most of those 750 applicants will get a permit. The fee is $10 per permit plus $15 per person or stock animal per night. The park holds about 20 percent of backcountry campsites for walk-in permits and issues a limited number of permits for the popular Bright Angel and North and South Kaibab corridor trails; that often involves waiting at least a day. See much more detail in “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in the Grand Canyon” and my e-books “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon” and “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.” Find more info at nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/backcountry-permit.htm.

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•    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 securing 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 will have an equal chance of being selected. Successful large-group lottery entrants will receive an email from park wilderness permit staff on March 3 with instructions for making their permit reservation for one of just five permit reservations the park issues annually for large groups. Standard group lottery winners will get an email on March 17 with a date and time between March 21 and April 30, 2025, when they can apply for one permit reservation (or anytime after their time slot). 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 during the backpacking season and limits daily hiking distance to 16 miles on reserved permits. There is a non-refundable $10 fee for a lottery application plus $7 per person per night that’s refundable if canceled more than seven days prior to the trip start date. See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park” and my expert e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park.” Find more information at nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/backcountry-reservations.htm.

•   In Zion, backpacking permit reservations can be made at recreation.gov/permits/4675338 for trips in Zion’s wilderness, except for overnight trips through Zion’s Narrows, for which reservations are made at recreation.gov/permits/4675339, both on this schedule: March 5 at 10 a.m. Mountain Time for trips between April 1 and June 30; June 5 at 10 a.m. for July 1 to Sept. 30; Sept. 5 at 10 a.m. for Oct. 1 to Dec. 31; and Dec. 5 at 10 a.m. for Jan. 1 to March 31. Half of the backcountry campsites in Zion can be reserved—and usually get filled within minutes after becoming available—and half are available for walk-in permits, obtained in person no more than one day in advance. Max group size is 12. There is a non-refundable $20 fee for a permit and a refundable cost of $7 per person per night. See my story about backpacking the Narrows and my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking The Narrows in Zion National Park.” Find more information at nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/backpackinginfo.htm.

Want my highly detailed, personally customized planning for any trip on this list?
Click here for expert advice you won’t get anywhere else.

•    For Sequoia and Kings Canyon, reserve a permit at recreation.gov/permits/445857 starting at 7 a.m. Pacific Time up to six months in advance for a trip taking place during the trailhead quota period, which for 2026, is May 22 to Sept. 26. Permits are issued based on trailhead quotas and can be made up to one week in advance—although availability for popular trailheads gets booked up quickly. The park keeps a portion of each trailhead quota available for backpackers seeking a first-come permit (without a reservation) no more than a day in advance. There’s a non-refundable fee of $15 plus $5 per person (refundable if canceled) for each confirmed permit. Permits issued by other national parks or forests in the Sierra for trips extending into Sequoia or Kings Canyon—for example, a John Muir Trail or Mount Whitney permit—are valid in these parks for the permit dates. See “How to Get a Yosemite or High Sierra Wilderness Permit.”

•  Mount Rainier issues permit reservations at recreation.gov/permits/4675317 for two-thirds of backcountry campsites for trips from May 1 through Oct. 11, 2026, up to two days before a trip starts. The park holds an optional Early Access Lottery for preferential time slots to reserve a permit, greatly improving chances of getting a permit for the Wonderland Trail and popular climbing routes. Enter the lottery anytime between when it opens at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 10, 2026, through when it closes at 7 p.m. Pacific on March 3, 2026. Lottery participants will be notified of results on March 14 and winners will receive a date and time on or after March 21 to make a multi-night permit reservation competing against a limited number of other applicants. General reservations for all permit applicants open at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on April 25. The maximum party size is five people and three tents for standard campsites and parties of six to 12 must use designated group camps. There is a non-refundable, $6 fee for an early-access lottery application or permit reservation and a fee of $10 per person per night for a permit reservation. One-third of available permits are issued first-come, in person at a park wilderness center, up to one day before starting a trip. See “How to Get a Permit to Backpack Rainier’s Wonderland Trail.” Find more information at nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/wilderness-permit.htm and and more about the Early Access Lottery at recreationonestopprod.servicenowservices.com.

Pack Smartly. See “An Essentials-Only Backpacking Gear Checklist.”

•    Yellowstone accepts reservations for backcountry permits during the peak backpacking season, May 15 through Oct. 31, at recreation.gov/permits/4675323. For the best chance of getting a permit for a popular backpacking trip like Bechler Canyon, enter the Early Access Lottery, which runs from 8 a.m. Mountain Time on March 1 through 11:59 p.m. on March 20. Lottery participants are notified of results on March 25 and winners will receive a date and time between April 1-24 when they can reserve a multi-night backcountry itinerary competing against a limited number of other applicants. General reservations open at 8 a.m. Mountain Time on April 26. There’s a $10, non-refundable fee for entering the Early Access Lottery and a non-refundable $10 fee for a reservation (not charged if you’ve already paid the lottery fee), plus a refundable backcountry camping fee of $5 per person per night. About 75 percent of designated backcountry campsites can be reserved and the remaining sites are available for walk-up permits issued from May through October at park backcountry offices no more than two days in advance of a trip. Maximum group size ranges from four to 12 people at backcountry campsites. See nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/backcountryhiking.htm and the park’s Backcountry Trip Planner at yellowstone.co/pdfs/bctripplanner.pdf.

•    In Great Smoky Mountains, permit reservations can be made starting at midnight Eastern Time up to 30 days in advance of a trip’s start date at smokiespermits.nps.gov. There is a non-refundable fee of $8 per person per night with a maximum of $40 per person and seven nights. Maximum party size is eight, but some sites have a lower total capacity. Find more information and the permit reservation form at smokiespermits.nps.gov. Reservations and permits can also be obtained in person at the Backcountry Office at Sugarlands Visitor Center.  See the park website’s Backcountry Camping—Backpacking page at nps.gov/grsm/planyourvisit/backcountry-camping.htm.

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

•    For Canyonlands, including backpacking in the Needles District, Island in the Sky District, and Maze District and multi-day float trips on the Green River, permit reservations open at recreation.gov/permits/4675315 at 8 a.m. Mountain Time on Nov. 10 for a trip beginning between March 10 and June 9, on Feb. 10 for a trip between June 10 and Sept. 9, on May 10 for a trip between Sept. 10 and Dec. 9, and Aug. 10 for a trip between Dec. 10 and March 9 in the Island or Maze or from Feb. 13 to March 9 in the Needles. Reservations close three days before a trip start date, but you can get a permit in person closer to your start date at locations in the park and in Moab listed at recreation.gov/permits/4675315. Backpacking party size limits are seven in the Needles and Island in the Sky districts and five in The Maze. There’s a non-refundable $36 permit fee plus a refundable fee of $5 per person per night. Find more information at nps.gov/cany/planyourvisit/backcountrypermits.htm.

•    Rocky Mountain opens permit reservations at 8 a.m. Mountain Time on March 1 at recreation.gov/permits/4675320 for camping in the backcountry between May 1 and Oct. 31, for a maximum of seven nights. Reservations are accepted up to three days prior to a trip. Permits are issued based on quotas for designated individual backcountry campsites that accommodate parties up to seven people or group sites for parties of eight to 12 people. Unlike other parks, Rocky doesn’t hold a fixed percentage of backcountry sites for walk-ins; instead, most backcountry permits are reservable, and only a limited number of permits will be available at recreation.gov/permits/4675320 during the peak summer season. The total reservation fee is $36. Find more information at nps.gov/romo/planyourvisit/wild_guide.htm.

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• At Olympic, permit reservations can be made at recreation.gov/permits/4098362 starting at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on April 15 for trips from May 15 through Oct. 15, except in areas under seasonal closures: Backpacking permits are issued for Glacier Meadows/Elk Lake, Grand Valley, Royal Basin, Lake Constance, Upper Lena Lake, and Flapjack Lakes only from June 15 to Oct. 15, and for the Seven Lakes Basin/High Divide area only from July 15 to Oct. 15. Group size limits are 12 people and lower in some camp areas. Permits listed as walk-up can only be obtained by contacting the Wilderness Information Center. The permit fee is $6 per reservation plus a refundable $8 per person age 16 and older per night. Find more information at nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/wilderness-reservations.htm and nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/upload/OLYM-Wilderness-Trip-Planner.jpg

• North Cascades accepts permit reservations at recreation.gov/permits/4675322 for backcountry camping from May 16 through Oct. 11 for up to 60 percent of backcountry campsites, while permits for the other 40 percent of backcountry campsites are issued walk-in/first-come no more than one day in advance. For the best chances of getting a permit that includes popular camps, enter the Early-Access Lottery anytime between March 2, 2026, and 9 p.m. Pacific Time on March 13, for the chance to win a timeslot between March 24 and 9 p.m. Pacific Time on April 21 to make a permit reservation. General reservations open April 29 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time. The maximum party size for camps varies between four and up 12 people in group sites. There’s a non-refundable $6 fee for the Early-Access Lottery and a refundable $10 fee per person age 16 and older for a permit. Find more information at nps.gov/noca/planyourvisit/permits.htm and in the Wilderness Trip Planner at nps.gov/noca/planyourvisit/wilderness-trip-planner.htm.

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

•  In Everglades, backcountry permit reservations can be made year-round 90 days in advance of your trip’s start date at recreation.gov/permits/4675314, beginning daily at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. There is a non-refundable $21 reservation fee plus $2 per person per night in the backcountry. The park no longer issues walk-up permits. Quotas exist for each wilderness campsite for number of groups and number of people per site. Find more information at nps.gov/ever/planyourvisit/wildernesscamp.htm.

Insider Tip

For parks like Grand Teton, Olympic, Zion, Rocky Mountain, and Canyonlands that open permit reservations at a specific date and time (i.e., they do not have an early-access lottery or rolling reservations), start your reservation the very minute they begin accepting them. Set up an account in advance at the host website, like recreation.gov, and familiarize yourself with it.

#3 Have Alternative Itineraries and Dates Ready

If you want to take a popular trip during its peak season, having flexibility with your dates and itinerary is the single most-effective strategy for maximizing your chances of getting a permit.

Since most large, marquis wilderness parks now use recreation.gov or a similar online system that shows backcountry camping availability and processes your reservation in real time, this requires entering the process with a range of possible start dates and routes in mind so that you’re ready to adjust quickly if your first choice isn’t available. That may be as simple as starting a day earlier or later for the same route, reversing your route’s direction, starting midweek instead of on a weekend, or choosing an entirely different route.

With a park like Yosemite that conducts a weekly rolling lottery for weeklong date periods rather than processing your reservation in real time, you can improve your chances by indicating that you can start on any date during that week and providing alternative itineraries.

As I mentioned at the top of this story, my permit application for a 2021 trip in Glacier was rejected—and I’m sure it was mainly because I applied for just one specific itinerary that I wanted and our dates were not flexible, which greatly reduced my chances of succeeding. The rejection email the park sent me noted that they received over 2,500 backcountry permit applications just on the first day that it opened, March 15. That was under Glacier’s previous permit system; the park now uses recreation.gov.

Insider Tip

If you’re determined to backpack in a park, make any permit reservation, even if it’s slightly or entirely different from your desired route. When you pick up your permit, ask about altering your itinerary; other campsites may be available due to cancellations and sites held for walk-ins. Ask a backcountry ranger for suggestions.

#4 Focus on Less Well-Known Areas of Popular Parks

This piece of time-tested advice is also the first of my “12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking”—which is worth reading for the appeal of solitude as well as the clear overlap between that goal and the objective of getting a backcountry permit.

And you might be shocked at how much permit demand is concentrated in just a handful of enormously popular trails in national parks that backpackers all want to explore, including, just to name a few, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mount Rainier.

You might also be pleasantly surprised to find how much incredibly scenic hiking is found in less well-known areas of those parks—and how much solitude you can find.

A few examples:

• In Yosemite, about 10 percent of the park’s hundreds of miles of trails—the John Muir Trail from Happy Isles to Donohue Pass and the Sierra High Camps loop—accounts for about 80 percent of all trail use. The Little Yosemite Valley backcountry campground alone accounts for almost 20 percent. Thus, the other 20 percent of all trail use gets distributed over 90 percent of Yosemite’s trails.
• In the Grand Canyon, about 75 percent of applicants seeking a permit for backpacking the three popular corridor trails, Bright Angel and South and North Kaibab, in spring or fall will fail to get a permit. Put differently, there’s about four times more demand for the three backcountry campgrounds on the corridor trails than there is availability.
• In Mount Rainier, close to half of permit seekers want to backpack the Wonderland Trail. The park has campsite capacity to grant about 900 permits annually for the entire Wonderland, while historically three times as many people have sought a permit for the full Wonderland (and that number is likely growing). But those 900 permits represent less than 25 percent of the approximately 4,000 backpacking permits issued annually.
• In Great Smoky Mountains, shelters along the Appalachian Trail are far and away the most popular—and that’s the park’s busiest trail—but backcountry campsites elsewhere in the park are much easier to reserve.

But many backcountry areas even in popular parks see far less demand for permits, such as northern Yosemite and a hike I consider Yosemite’s best-kept secret backpacking trip; numerous trails in Glacier including sections of the Continental Divide Trail; the Grand Canyon’s Escalante Route, Gems Route, Royal Arch Loop, and Clear Creek Trail and Utah Flats Route; Mount Rainier’s Northern Loop; the Maze District in Canyonlands; and a gorgeous swath of the High Sierra in Sequoia National Park, among numerous examples. I even enjoyed solitude on most of a solo, 34-mile loop in the Great Smoky Mountains—during the October peak foliage season.

Go where others don’t.
See “Big Scenery, No Crowds: 12 Top Backpacking Trips For Solitude.”

#5 Think Small

Keeping your party small—at two to four people or even solo—can increase your odds of landing a permit in parks where permit quotas are based on the number of campers in an area each night or departing from each trailhead daily.

Glacier’s backcountry campsites are sized for a party of four people; in a park where it’s already very hard to get a permit, larger parties face much higher hurdles to getting one than a group of four or fewer. In Mount Rainier and the Maze District of Canyonlands, standard parties are limited to five people. In Yosemite, permits are issued according to a maximum quota of hikers starting at each trailhead in the park—and it’s common for quotas at popular trailheads to winnow down to just one, two or three spots available on some dates.

Most parks limit the number of people allowed on one standard permit, often to six to eight; otherwise, it’s considered a group permit, and there may be fewer campsites for large groups.

Insider Tip

While it’s hard to get a permit to dayhike Yosemite’s Half Dome, it’s probably less difficult to add Half Dome to your backpacking permit because many more people attempt to reserve dayhiking permits than backcountry permits. See “Where to Backpack First Time in Yosemite.”

#6 Camp Outside the Park

National parks often border on other public lands, like national forests, where there’s typically no limit on the number of backpackers—which may give you campsite options when sites or camping areas within park boundaries are full on your trip dates. For instance, Alaska Basin, along the Teton Crest Trail, is not within Grand Teton National Park; so if you can’t get a permit to spend a night on Death Canyon Shelf in the park (a gorgeous spot and one of my all-time favorite backcountry campsites), Alaska Basin is a very nice alternative and may fit neatly into an itinerary for which you have the other camping zones you need inside park boundaries.

At other parks, like Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon, you can start your trip in a national forest wilderness area—which, in the High Sierra, are just as spectacular as the parks—and permits issued by those national forests are valid for continuing a multi-day hike into either park. That may increase your chances of getting a permit to backpack in the park. Keep in mind that advance permit reservations are needed in many of those national forests, too, often made months ahead of your trip dates.

See my stories “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail” and “How to Get a Yosemite or High Sierra Wilderness Permit.”

Hike all of “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

#7 Try For a Walk-In Permit

If all else fails, show up at the park at least a couple of hours before the backcountry office opens and try to get a front spot in line for a walk-in, or first-come permit. Parks hold a percentage of permits for walk-in backpackers, issuing those usually no more than a day in advance. The percentage of permits set aside for walk-in backpackers varies greatly between parks. As examples, Grand Teton keeps two-thirds of available campsites for walk-ins, in Yosemite it’s 40 percent, and in Glacier it’s 30 percent of campsites.

Insider Tip

Start a trip from a less-popular trailhead and you might be able to land campsites in more-popular areas later in your trip.

The difficulty of landing a first-come permit varies during the peak hiking seasons. Since Grand Teton sets aside two-thirds of available permits for walk-in backpackers, chances are relatively good, especially if you’re flexible about your itinerary and accept what’s available—and any Tetons hike is great. At Zion, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Denali, and Everglades, you might not score a permit to start that same day, but Grand Canyon has a wait list—get on it.

If you don’t get one of the available permits the first day you show up, you will have to return each morning until you do.

Yosemite makes 40 percent of permits available up to seven days in advance of a trip start date—and that’s the correct way to get a walk-in permit there. The park warns at nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/wildpermits.htm: “Do not arrive at Yosemite expecting to get a walk-up wilderness permit. While any unreserved permits will be available in person at wilderness centers on the start date of the trip, few, if any, unused permits will be available.”

See my story “How to Get a Last-Minute, National Park Backcountry Permit.”

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#8 Go Outside Peak Season

I’ve always been amazed at how few backpackers there are in the Tetons in September, when, while it could snow, you can more often enjoy perfect weather. In Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon, at lower elevations in Olympic and North Cascades, and sometimes at Mount Rainier and Rocky Mountain, good hiking weather can extend into October. At Sequoia-Kings Canyon, the quota season for permits ends on the Saturday between Sept. 23 and 29; if you have a good forecast after those dates, you can get a last-minute permit.

I backpacked Zion’s hugely popular Narrows and dayhiked The Subway (which requires a permit that’s hard to get) in early November in very pleasant weather (albeit short days) and low water (a plus); I saw a good forecast and grabbed a permit because there was availability at that time of year, when just a week or two earlier all permits were undoubtedly reserved. Good weather and hiking conditions can also last into late autumn and return by late spring in Great Smoky Mountains.

In mountain parks, the most popular season extends from early or mid-July to mid-September or later. In desert parks like Grand Canyon and Zion, it’s April, May, September, and October. Although summers are too hot for backpacking, watching for a good forecast and going in early spring or late fall means you will have a much easier time getting a permit.

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#9 Go to a Less-Popular Park

Okay, this tip and the next one don’t help you land a permit for a popular hike—but they do offer excellent alternatives if you fail to get that desired permit. National parks that are off the radar of most backpackers are never a disappointment. At two of my favorite Western parks, North Cascades and Capitol Reef, walk-in permits are relatively easy to obtain (although North Cascades does accept reservations for popular areas).

See some of Yosemite’s best scenery on any of “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite.”

#10 Dayhike It

When all efforts to secure a permit to camp in the backcountry fail, ask yourself: Is it possible to dayhike all or part of my route or another trail in the same area?

It’s often easier to hike a long distance in one day than it is to carry a heavy backpack a shorter distance. Choose well-maintained, well-graded trails and keep your pack light, and if you have the stamina for it and can average even a reasonable two mph pace over a 10-hour day, you can cover 20 miles.

If I were to add an eleventh tip, it would be this: When your first attempt fails, find another trip to do that year instead, and try again the next year. Wherever you go, the effort to plan and pull off that adventure will pay off.

See the All Trips List and All National Park Trips page at The Big Outside.

See also all stories with my expert tips, including “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips,” “How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking,” “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

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We all love the majesty of mountains. But the vividly colored, sometimes bizarre, often incomprehensible geology of the Southwest canyon country enchants and inspires us in ways that words can only begin to describe. And while you will find very worthy dayhikes and even roadside eye candy in classic parks like Grand Canyon, Zion, and Canyonlands, you really have to put on a backpack and probe more deeply into those parks—and other canyon-country gems you may not know much about—to get a full sense of the scale, details, and hidden mysteries of these mystical landscapes.

Drawing from more than three decades of chasing the best backpacking trips in the Southwest—including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog—I’ve put together this list of my picks for the 12 very best multi-day hikes in America’s Southwest canyon country, from its acknowledged gems to trips you may not have heard of. While I’ve listed the trips in a specific order, I don’t intend that as a quality ranking. They all deserve five stars.

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 and photos below all 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 detailed tips on planning each one yourself and when to apply for a backcountry permit, which is generally months in advance of a spring or fall trip.

See also “The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First,” my expert e-books to some of the trips described below, and my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any of these adventures, variations of them, or any trip you read about at The Big Outside.

I’d love to read your thoughts about my list—and your suggestions for trips that belong on it. Please share them in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

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Rim to Rim Across the Grand Canyon

Most multi-day hikes, including some of the best, feature stretches of hours at a time that are ordinary. Not the Grand Canyon. With huge physical relief and so little vegetation to obstruct views in this desert environment—except for brief stretches of forest at the South and North rims—there’s never a dull moment as you traverse a cross-section of a chasm stretching 277 miles long and averaging a mile deep and 10 miles across (as the crow flies—hiking distances on winding trails are much greater). It’s undoubtedly one of the most unique and spectacular treks in the world.

Although most trails here are quite rugged—and some routes on the map are not even maintained—the three so-called “corridor” trails, while strenuous, are maintained, don’t present the kind of scary exposure or difficult scrambling found on other trails, and have more frequent water availability. The typically three-day hike crossing from rim to rim (one-way, can be done in either direction) via the South Kaibab and North Kaibab trails is 21 miles with over 10,600 feet of cumulative ascent and descent; via the Bright Angel and North Kaibab, it’s 23.5 miles with over 10,100 feet of cumulative ascent and descent.

See my stories “Fit to be Tired: Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim in a Day,” “A Grand Ambition, or April Fools? Dayhiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim,” and all stories about South Rim backpacking trips at The Big Outside.

Do this trip right. Get my expert e-book to backpacking the Grand Canyon rim to rim
or my expert e-book to dayhiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim.

The Narrows, Zion National Park

One of the most uniquely magnificent and coveted hikes in the National Park System, The Narrows of the North Fork of the Virgin River in Zion squeeze down to the width of a hobbit’s living room in places, with walls of golden, crimson, and cream-colored sandstone that rise as much as a thousand feet tall. 

On this 16-mile, top-to-bottom hike—typically done in two days—you’ll walk in the shallow river most of the time and see very little direct sunlight, marveling at the constantly changing canyon and natural oddities like a waterfall pouring from cracks in solid rock, creating a hanging garden.

Enormously popular, the lower end of the Narrows teems with hundreds and sometimes thousands of dayhikers on hot days of late spring through early fall, when the river is warm and low. Many of those people don’t walk more than a mile or two upriver, while some go as far as Big Spring, at mile five, the farthest point dayhikers can venture without a wilderness permit. The hauntingly quiet upper Narrows can feel remarkably lonely.

Not surprisingly, this unrivaled adventure ranks among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and “My 25 Most Scenic Days of Hiking Ever,” and our campsite in The Narrows graces my list of 25 favorite backcountry campsites.

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

Click here now to get my expert e-book
“The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Narrows in Zion National Park.”

The Needles District, Canyonlands National Park

Stratified cliffs stretch for miles. Stone towers, with bulbous crowns bigger around than the column on which they sit, seem ever at the verge of toppling over. Multi-colored candlesticks of Cedar Mesa sandstone, in more hues than Crayola has yet replicated, loom 300 feet tall, forming castle-like ramparts.

Trails marked by zigzagging lines of stone cairns lead across waves of slickrock slabs, up narrow water runnels and calf-pumping ramps. In the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, trails ignore the axiom of Euclidian geometry that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Hikers there navigate a maze without walls.

The Needles District encompasses a high plateau split by canyons. Erosional forces working over unfathomable gulfs of time formed this arid and tortured landscape; but it looks more like the work of giant children squeezing mud from their fists. That network of trails creates multiple options for short, relatively easy, but strikingly scenic backpacking trips and dayhikes through The Needles.

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

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Paria Canyon and Buckskin Gulch

For much of the first three days of the five-day descent of Paria Canyon, you pass through its twisting narrows, where walls of searing, orange-red sandstone shoot up for hundreds of feet, so close together at times that a person can cross from one side to the other in a dozen strides.

Sunshine often ignites the upper walls and reflects warm light downward, painting every wave of rock in a subtly different hue. You’re often walking in the shallow river, and pockets of quicksand add an adventurous element to this trek.

The 38-mile hike down Paria Canyon has become famous among backpackers for its towering walls painted wildly with desert varnish, massive red rock amphitheaters and arches, hanging gardens where the few springs in the canyon gush from rock, and sandy benches for camping, shaded by cottonwood trees.

It’s done alone or combined with its 16-mile-long tributary slot canyon, Buckskin Gulch—where the walls, in spots, are barely wider than a person.

See my stories “Not a Dull Moment: Backpacking Buckskin Gulch and Paria Canyon” and “The Quicksand Chronicles: Backpacking Paria Canyon.”

Want my help planning any trip on this list?
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Coyote Gulch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

On a two-family, roughly 15-mile backpacking trip through Coyote Gulch, we hiked across ancient, petrified dunes; squeezed through a less-than-shoulder-width, 100-foot-long slot called Crack-in-the-Wall (which was fun and not as hard as it sounds); and stood at a cliff top overlooking a desert landscape of redrock towers and cliffs, including Stevens Arch, measuring some 220 feet across and 160 feet tall. And that was just in the first hour.

One of the Southwest’s easier backpacking trips—because of its short distance, lack of a narrows creating flash-flood potential, and the presence of a perennial stream (read: you don’t have to carry several pounds of water)—Coyote Gulch features a natural bridge, two of the region’s most distinctive natural arches, and one deeply overhanging wall some 200 feet tall with amazing echo acoustics.

Coyote’s sheer walls at times loom close and you walk in the creek; elsewhere, the upper canyon walls spread a quarter-mile apart and rise up to 900 feet overhead. In a sense, Coyote delivers a complete—and beginner-friendly—canyon-hiking experience.

See my story “Playing the Memory Game in Southern Utah’s Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon.”

Coyote Gulch is one of “The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First.”

The Grand Canyon’s ‘Best Backpacking Trip’

Whoa, you’re thinking—the “best backpacking trip in the entire Grand Canyon??” That was my initial reaction when a longtime backcountry ranger in the canyon whom I know, who’s hiked every mile of trail in the park, described this 74-mile route from the South Kaibab Trailhead to Lipan Point to me using those words. I mean, every hike in this place is amazing, right?

Click here now for my expert e-book to the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon.

Then I backpacked it and found myself agreeing with him.

Besides the fact that the South Kaibab is one of the absolute best hikes in the entire National Park System, this route—which has shorter alternatives—follows one of the of the prettiest and most adventurous “trails” (if it can be called that) in the canyon, the Escalante Route, and incorporates the little-traveled and beautiful Beamer Trail, as well as another rim-to-river footpath, the Tanner Trail.

There’s some tricky route-finding and exposed scrambling, and water sources are sporadic—this high-level adventure is better for experienced and fit backpackers, ideally with a previous GC or other Southwest backpacking trips under their belts.

But you’ll enjoy some of the best backcountry campsites you’ve ever spent a night in, including beaches on the Colorado River (with the prospect of mooching real food from a river party).

See “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do,” and all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

Score a popular permit using my
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Aravaipa Canyon

Just 12 miles long from its west trailhead to its east one, southern Arizona’s Aravaipa Canyon captures enough water flowing out of the Galiuro Mountains to sustain a vibrant, perennial stream and an oddity in the Grand Canyon state: a desert oasis, where cottonwood trees taller and more abundant than you’ll see in most Southwest canyons line both creek banks.

The lush greenery contrasts starkly against redrock walls that rise as much as 700 feet above the creek. But high up the canyon walls and the often-dry side canyons, the environment shifts abruptly to that of the surrounding, vast Sonoran Desert, with saguaro occupying the numerous cliff ledges like thousands of spectators in a strangely steep-sided, long, narrow, and winding stadium.

With no maintained trail in the canyon, backpackers follow whatever user trails get beaten into the sandy ground—or, more often than not hike directly in Aravaipa Creek, splashing through water that ranges from not too cold to chilly and rarely up to calf-deep. The max stay permitted is two nights and most backpackers set up a base camp and dayhike to explore this unique and truly lovely canyon.

See my story “Backpacking the Desert Oasis of Aravaipa Canyon.”

On the same Southwest trip that we backpacked in Aravaipa Canyon in early April, three of us from that group also backpacked one of the finest three-day sections of the Arizona Trail, Passage 16, during a wildflower superbloom. See my story about that surprisingly beautiful hike.

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

Owl and Fish Canyons, Bears Ears National Monument

The loop through Owl and Fish canyons, in southeastern Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, begins and ends with rugged hiking and scrambling to enter and exit both canyons: You will use your hands at times going up and down, including the final, 12-foot corner in a cliff to reach the rim of Fish Canyon (aided by a fixed rope dangling down the cliff). The upper sections of both canyons present very steep terrain and, especially in Owl Canyon, debris from flash floods like knots of crushed vegetation and boulders bigger than a car to navigate around.

This hike isn’t for anyone who’s uncomfortable with mild to moderate exposure. But these canyons evoke better-known places in southern Utah, with tall, red cliffs, towers, the striking amphitheater surrounding Nevills Arch (see lead photo at top of story), rippled slickrock, pour-offs and seasonal waterfalls, flowering cacti, cottonwoods, and a surprising abundance of seasonal, clear water in parts of both canyons.

Just 15 to 17 miles, hiked in two to three days, Owl and Fish canyons offer incredible scenery (and night skies), solitude, and a permit that’s easier to get than for better-known Southwest backpacking trips. That’s a rare find.

See my story “Backpacking Southern Utah’s Owl and Fish Canyons” and all stories about backpacking in Utah at The Big Outside.

Plan your next great backpacking adventure using my expert e-books.
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Traversing Zion National Park

Other Southwestern parks have natural arches, spires, and ancient cliff dwellings, but none really matches Zion’s grandeur: the giant walls of white and blood-red rock, with striations rippling across vast spans of sandstone.

While the park is best known for the 2,000-foot-tall cliffs of Zion Canyon and the justifiably popular dayhike up Angels Landing (which I consider one of the best dayhikes in the entire National Park System), backpacking a nearly 50-mile, north-south traverse takes you on a grand tour of this flagship park. And it can be broken into sections for shorter, beginner-friendly trips.

From Lee Pass Trailhead in the Kolob Canyons, where burgundy cliffs rise above verdantly green stream bottoms, you’ll pass between the black-streaked, red walls of Hop Valley, and follow the West Rim Trail—considered by some Zion aficionados the park’s best—high above a maze of deep, white-walled canyons.

After descending a sidewalk-wide footpath blasted out of cliffs, the traverse passes Angels Landing—a must-do side trip—before crossing Zion Canyon and taking the East Rim Trail past Weeping Rock, through Echo Canyon, and past the white beehive cliffs of the park’s east side.

See all stories about Zion National Park at The Big Outside, including “Pilgrimage Across Zion: Traversing a Land of Otherworldly Scenery” and “Mid-Life Crisis: Hiking 50 Miles Across Zion in a Day.”

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

Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop, Grand Canyon

Yes, this top-10 list has three hikes in the Big Ditch—and it could justifiably have more. There is no place like the Grand Canyon, period. But of all the backpacking trips I have taken there, the most unique, varied, and magical just may be this rugged and remote, 25-mile loop off the North Rim.

Long on the radar of in-the-know backpackers and river-rafting parties taking side hikes, the Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop has an unusual abundance of a rare element in much of the canyon: water.

The two perennial creeks and one river (not counting the Colorado River, which this hike follows for a few miles) pour over some of the Grand Canyon’s loveliest waterfalls (see the photo near the top of this story), course through sculpted narrows, and nurture oases of trees and vegetation.

Descending a vertical mile to the Colorado River and then climbing back up again, on often-rugged trails, with seasons limited by road access and heat often challenging to put it mildly, this hike is no walk in the park—which is why many backpackers take four days or more to complete it. But it packs in all the qualities you go to the Grand Canyon for.

See my feature story “Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop,” “10 Epic Grand Canyon Backpacking Trips You Must Do,” and all all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

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

Death Hollow Loop, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

From crossing a high, sand and slickrock plateau on the Boulder Mail Trail, to descending the sometimes narrow and always dramatic canyon of Death Hollow, and finally ascending the upper canyon of the Escalante River between soaring, overhanging walls of red, brown, and cream-colored rock painted with desert varnish, the 22-mile Death Hollow Loop northeast of the town of Escalante delivers a primer on the rugged and adventurous character of a host of desert Southwest landscapes.

The Boulder Mail Trail’s circuitous route over waves of rippling Navajo Sandstone repeatedly rises and falls steeply—but nothing compares to the overlook of Death Hollow just before the trail plunges into it. Death Hollow poses flash-flood risk and, in the best conditions, involves walking in cold water ranging from below the ankles to mid-thigh or deeper—when you successfully skirt the deepest pools—with challenging obstacles and possibly wind blowing up or down the canyon to compound the water’s chill. Then there’s the poison ivy, which is, well, hard to exaggerate about.

But hit this route in good weather and safe water levels and you will be blown away by it.

See my story “Backpacking Utah’s Mind-Blowing Death Hollow Loop.”

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The Maze District, Canyonlands National Park

Descending the trail off Maze Overlook, we followed a wildly circuitous trail across slickrock, marked by cairns but otherwise unobvious and not visible on the ground, winding below redrock cliffs and towers, past mounds of shattered boulders resembling ancient ruins, and along the sloping rims of giant bowls of rippled stone. In several spots, we removed and lowered our packs to scramble through tight crevices or downclimb a ladder of shallow footsteps chiseled into a sandstone cliff face.

That was on the second morning of our five-day backpacking trip into the Maze—and it came after we had lingered long over the panorama at the brink of the white cliffs of Maze Overlook, above the vast, chaotic sweep of sandstone fins, towers, and canyons that could only be called the Maze. A very rugged, remote, and hard-to-reach corner of the Southwest, with few water sources that can dry up seasonally, the Maze is undoubtedly one of the hardest trips on this list—for many reasons.

But the adventurous character of its routes, jaw-dropping vistas and canyons, ancient pictographs, and deep solitude make it a holy grail for serious Southwest explorers.

See my story “Farther Than It Looks—Backpacking the Canyonlands Maze.”.

See all stories about hiking and backpacking in Southern Utah and national park 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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As a parent of two young adults who’s taken them outdoors since before they can remember, I’ll share with you the biggest and in some ways most surprising lesson I’ve learned from these trips: Our outdoor adventures have been the best times we’ve had together as a family—and not just because the places are so special. The greatest benefit of these trips is that they have given us innumerable days with only each other and nature for entertainment—no electronic devices or other distractions that construct virtual walls within families in everyday life.

For my family, our experiences together outdoors make up most of our richest and favorite memories. They have brought us closer together.

That’s a gift we’ve given ourselves as a family, one that I’ve cherished every minute of (well, most of the minutes, anyway). I also know our kids will appreciate it more and more as they get older—and perhaps they will pass this gift on to children of their own someday.

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.

No matter where you go or what you do with your kids, you can reap that reward. But if you want to share with your family the very best experiences and places in nature, well, I have a pretty darn awesome list for you.

For this story, I’ve picked out the 10 very best adventures my family has taken and I’ve written about at The Big Outside—which also rank among the most beautiful and inspiring trips I’ve taken over more than three decades as an outdoors writer, including many years running this blog and previously as a field editor for Backpacker magazine.

This tick list includes seven national parks, three world-class paddling adventures, three trips that should be on every backpacker’s to-do list, America’s most scenic and fascinating volcano hike, and cross-country skiing or hiking among the greatest concentration of active geysers in the world.

Not surprisingly, all of these trips are extremely popular and require planning and making reservations months in advance.

The writeups below all link to my full feature story about each trip at The Big Outside, which include more images and detailed tips on planning each one yourself (and which require a paid subscription to read in full).

You may also want to peruse my list of 10 all-time favorite adventures, domestic and international—there are definitely trips that could be on either list.

I’d love to read your comments about any of these trips or the entire list, and other readers and I would appreciate any advice you have on any of these trips. Share your thoughts in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Here’s wishing you many years of forging lasting memories together as a family.

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1. Three Generations, One Big Volcano: Hiking Mount St. Helens

I’ll make you this guarantee: Mount St. Helens is one of the coolest dayhikes in America, period. Hikers on the standard route, Monitor Ridge, soon emerge from shady rainforest onto a stark, gray and black moonscape of volcanic rocks, pumice, and ash, with infinite views of the Cascade Range, including other snow-capped volcanoes like Hood, Adams, and Rainier.

It’s also a tough hike at 10 miles round-trip and 4,500 vertical feet up and down, most of it on rugged terrain that varies from loose stones and dirt to ash that’s like hiking a giant sand dune. We had a special component to our trip up and down the mountain: a three-generation family group with a 66-year spread between the youngest, my 10-year-old daughter, and the oldest, my 76-year-old mother. When I scored last-minute permits to hike the mountain, I wasn’t sure everyone could make it. Then, hours into the ascent, events seemed to take an ominous turn.

Read my story “Three Generations, One Big Volcano: Hiking Mount St. Helens” to find out how it all turned out.

Mount St. Helens was one of “My Most Scenic Days of Hiking Ever.”

2. The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls

Stand at the brink of a thunderous waterfall that drops a sheer 1,400 feet over a cliff. Hike a trail in the heavy shower of mist raining from a clear, blue sky. Dayhike through one of the most iconic landscapes in America—Yosemite Valley.

The Valley’s towering cliffs and waterfalls will awe any adult and even the most cynical teenager. But for kids, there are also the thrills of walking through the mist from a giant waterfall, and moments like traversing the narrow catwalk blasted out of granite on the final steps to the top of Upper Yosemite Falls. Hiking in Yosemite should be a must for every avid hiker.

See my stories “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls” and “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite” and all stories about hiking in Yosemite National Park at The Big Outside.

Plan your next great backpacking adventure in Grand Teton, Yosemite,
and other flagship parks using my expert e-books.

3. Tackling America’s Best Easy, Multi-Day Float Trip

For 52 miles through Stillwater Canyon in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, the Green River slowly unfurls beneath a constant backdrop of giant redrock cliffs and spires. Off the water, you camp on sandy beaches and slickrock benches, hike to centuries-old Puebloan rock art and cliff dwellings, and maybe even spot bighorn sheep scrambling around on precipitous rock faces.

An easy trip for beginners and families—our party of 17 ranged in age from four to 80 and included eight kids—floating the Green River stood, for years, as my family’s gold standard for river trips (eventually replaced, when our kids got older, by the last trip on this list).

See my story “Still Waters Run Deep: Floating the Green River in Canyonlands” and all stories about river trips at The Big Outside.

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4. Trekking the Tour du Mont Blanc in the Alps

My list would be incomplete without one of the biggest, most beautiful and fun adventures my family has ever taken. And you’ll find the Tour du Mont Blanc (also the lead photo at top of story) on just about any list of the world’s greatest trails. The main reason is the sheer majesty of this roughly 105-mile/170-kilometer walking path around the “Monarch of the Alps,” 15,771-foot/4,807-meter Mont Blanc. Passing through three Alpine nations—France, Italy, and Switzerland—and over several mountain passes reaching nearly 9,000 feet, it delivers almost constant views of glaciers, pointy peaks and “augilles,” and the snowy dome of Mont Blanc.

Making this trip all the more special was the fact that we had three generations of my extended family represented, including my 80-year-old mother.

Read my story “Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc at an 80-Year-Old Snail’s Pace.”

Get my expert e-book “The Perfect Plan for Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc.”

5. Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast

For our kids, who were nine and seven, this three-day backpacking trip on the wilderness coastline of Washington’s Olympic National Park ranked as a favorite for all the expected reasons that children love a wild ocean shore: playing for hours in water, exploring the variety of sea life in tide pools, and picking, awestruck, through the myriad flotsam from civilization like old, salt-worn buoys (my son took one home).

For adults, the scores of offshore sea stacks, giant trees, and natural beauty make the Olympic coast one of America’s classic backpacking trips.

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.”

6. Dropping Into the Grand Canyon

Sure, any trip in the Big Ditch is worthy of a top 10 list—you could fill a top 10 list just with Grand Canyon hikes. But in this rugged terrain and unforgiving environment, choosing the right backpacking route becomes critical; most trails are rough, many trailheads remote.

This four-day, 29-mile hike combines two of the most spectacular and accessible trails coming off the South Rim—the Grandview and South Kaibab—with an easier, less-busy stretch of the Tonto Trail that delivers constant, big views.

See my story “Backpacking the Grand Canyon Grandview Point to the South Kaibab” and all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

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7. Like No Other Place: Paddling the Everglades

Seeing scores of large, exotic birds like brown pelicans, roseate spoonbills, white ibises, and black anhingas. Canoeing among remote islands to camp on a wilderness beach you have all to yourself. Watching a dolphin surface just off your canoe’s bow and swim a wide circle around you. Paddling a flatwater river shared with alligators (kept at a safe distance).

It’s hard to overstate how exciting and fun this park is for adults and children. And the trip my family took when our kids were ten and almost eight was one of the most beginner-friendly in the Everglades.

See my story “Like No Other Place: Paddling the Everglades.”

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

8. Backpacking Zion, a Land of Otherworldly Scenery

Many hikers content themselves with exploring the trails of Zion Canyon and the popular dayhike up Angels Landing—all worthwhile. But backpack into the backcountry and you discover a sprawling landscape that’s unique even in the Southwest.

Cliffs of pure white and blood-red sandstone soar hundreds of feet overhead, rock ripples like water, and you walk along a high rim looking down on a labyrinth of slot canyons and isolated mesas. This trip’s moderate difficulty and multiple itinerary options make it ideal for families and beginner backpackers.

See “Backpacking Through the Otherworldly Scenery of Zion,” “Hiking Angels Landing: What You Need to Know,” “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park,” and “The Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks” at The Big Outside.

Score a popular permit using my
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

9. Exploring Yellowstone

Visiting the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, should be a requirement of American citizenship (and I would gladly contribute to a fund to make it affordable for every family). Besides the opportunity to see a range of wildlife that nearly mirrors what North America looked like before Columbus, you can watch geysers erupt and see natural hot springs, whistling fumaroles, bubbling mud pots, and some beautiful waterfalls.

I’ve visited many times, with my kids and before I had a family, in every season. It’s wonderful for everyone, at any stage in life, partly because so many of its highlight features can be seen on short walks. And to me, cross-country skiing the almost flat, 2.5 miles of trail through Yellowstone’s Upper Geyser Basin, past one-fourth of the active geysers in the world (and the greatest concentration of them), is one of the most fascinating experiences in the National Park System.

See my stories “The Ultimate Family Tour of Yellowstone,” “The Best Hikes in Yellowstone,” “Cross-Country Skiing Yellowstone,” and all stories about Yellowstone at The Big Outside.

Gear up smartly for your trips.
See the best-in-category reviews and expert buying tips at my Gear Reviews page.

10. Rafting Idaho’s Incomparable Middle Fork Salmon River

For a complete package of sheer thrills, five-star scenery, immersion in a vast wilderness, beautiful campsites, repeated episodes of children shrieking with joy, and an experience guaranteed to be a family favorite that you’ll want to repeat—not to mention eating like every day was Thanksgiving—few trips we’ve taken as a family compare to our guided float down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River.

Flowing like an artery through the heart of the second-largest federal wilderness in the continental United States, the nearly 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the Middle Fork is widely considered second only to the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in terms of raw beauty. My family might argue it’s better—and we’ve take three Middle Fork trips.

See my stories “Reunions of the Heart on Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River” and “Big Water, Big Wilderness: Rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River,” and all stories about river trips at The Big Outside.

See my All Trips List, all stories featuring my expert outdoors tips, and all stories about family adventures at The Big Outside.

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With our first steps on the descent from Maze Overlook into the labyrinth of mostly dry desert canyons that comprise one of the greatest geological oddities in the National Park System—the Maze in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park—we had to remove and pass our backpacks over a ledge drop of several feet. But that was nothing compared to what lay ahead. Following a wildly circuitous trail marked by cairns but otherwise unobvious and not visible on the slickrock, we passed below redrock cliffs and towers, traversed the sloping rims of giant bowls of rippled stone, and several more times passed our packs to scramble through tight crevices and downclimb a ladder of shallow footsteps chiseled into a sandstone cliff face.

Taking nearly three hours to descend just a mile and 500 vertical feet, we reached the sandy bottom of the South Fork of Horse Canyon—and began searching for the one natural spring that we hoped would sustain us for the next three days.

Three friends and I took a five-day backpacking trip into the Maze in the first week of March, when we had warm sunshine much of the time and temps in the 40s and 50s most days, with nights in the teens and 20s. But most critically, we found water in a place where the few sources can go dry by later in spring.

And the date to apply for a permit to backpack there in spring is Nov. 10.

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 trip presented us with surprises nearly every day. Mornings delivered beautiful sunrises setting fire to redrock cliffs and ice in our water bottles. Almost every night, the brilliant streak of the Milky Way spilled across the ink-black sky, a sight so clear and bright it felt almost alarming.

From a base camp for two nights near the first spring we found, surrounded by towering walls of desert varnish, we dayhiked a nine-mile loop that would prove more adventurous and scenic than I think any of us expected—even after the descent from Maze Overlook.

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Following the Chimney Route past the Harvest Scene pictographs, we walked down a canyon that grew steeper and more rugged as we followed a cairned route zigzagging up ledges on a canyon wall. In spots, rocks stacked by trail builders act as step ladders, enabling us to clamber over the smooth lip of a high ledge or a pour over carved by water. That route brought us to the slender tower of Chimney Rock, which looks like hardened, dark-brown mud.

From Chimney Rock, we followed the Pete’s Mesa Route along a high, broad ridge, with a constant panorama of towers and side canyons choked with fallen rocks tumbling away to either side of us. The route eventually rolled abruptly off the tableland and we scrambled down short, vertical drops, using more step ladders of stacked rocks, reaching the bottom of another tight, anonymous side canyon and walking down it and back to our tents.

We saw one other person that entire day and only a handful of people in five days.

The gallery below features some of my photos from backpacking the Maze District in Canyonlands. Scroll below the gallery for the link to my story about this trip, which includes my expert tips on how to take it yourself, including how to obtain a backcountry permit.

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

See my feature story about this trip “Farther Than It Looks—Backpacking the Canyonlands Maze,” which, like many stories about trips at The Big Outside, includes my detailed tips on planning it yourself and requires a paid membership to read in full.

See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan this trip or any you read about at this blog.

See all stories about Canyonlands National Park at The Big Outside.

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America’s 63 national parks preserve over 52 million acres of uniquely beautiful and genuinely awe-inspiring places in nature, and the payoff for our country’s foresight in protecting them is a lifetime’s worth of unforgettable experiences—many of them entirely feasible, safe, and really fun for families with kids of all ages. Best of all, you’ll find that sharing these adventures will create your best times together as a family, as they have for mine.

And here’s an insider tip: These adventures aren’t just for families. Adults with a wide range of outdoors experience—including little to none—will find these trips thrilling, fascinating, and inspirational.

This story describes 12 of the very best adventures my family has taken, many of them personal favorites from among the countless trips I’ve taken over three decades as an outdoors writer, 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.

Each trip description below offers a suggested minimum age—which will certainly vary based on every child’s (and parent’s) personal experience and comfort level—and links to a full feature story at The Big Outside, which share more images (and those stories require a paid subscription to read in full, including my detailed tips on planning each trip).

Not surprisingly, all of these trips require planning and making reservations months in advance. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan any trip you read about at this blog.

Please share your experiences, questions, and advice on any of these trips, or suggest your own favorite national park family adventures in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Stand in the Shadow of a Giant Sequoia

Any Age

If you’re going to be a tree hugger, you might as well go big. The giant sequoias of Sequoia National Park can live more than 3,000 years, grow as tall as a 26-story building, and have a base diameter of 36 feet. The General Sherman Tree is the largest in the world at 52,508 cubic feet (1,487 cubic meters), 275 feet tall, and estimated to weigh 2.7 million pounds. The General Grant Tree is the second largest at 46,608 cubic feet (1,320 cubic meters). Try hugging them.

The Giant Forest in Sequoia contains half of the Earth’s largest trees, more than 8,000 sequoias. You can stand under scores of them, including the General Sherman Tree, on a hike of an hour or less. From Wolverton Road, off the Generals Highway, a half-mile trail leads to the General Sherman Tree. The 0.7-mile Big Trees Trail begins at the Giant Forest Museum.

Is your family ready for a bigger adventure? Read about my family’s 40-mile backpacking trip in Sequoia, where we had a wilderness giant sequoia grove all to ourselves, plus see photos of the General Sherman Tree and Grant Grove in my story “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park.” And see all stories about Sequoia National Park at The Big Outside.

Make every adventure better with my “10 Tips For Keeping Kids Happy and Safe Outdoors”
and “5 Tips for Hiking With Young Kids from an Outdoors Dad.”

Feel the Magic of Yellowstone

Any Age

Since Americans first began exploring the Yellowstone region, people have stood in awe of its marvels: megafauna like elk, bison, and grizzly bears, spectacular waterfalls, and more than 10,000 geothermal features, including hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles, and at least 300 geysers—two-thirds of the planet’s known total.

We first took our kids to Yellowstone when they were four and two years old, and although they don’t remember that visit, they delighted in the animals and thermal features—and they could enjoy them because so many of Yellowstone’s highlights can be seen on short walks or hikes that are easy enough to do with very young kids.

Some of my favorite spots, like Grand Prismatic Spring, the park’s largest, in the Midway Geyser Basin, require only a short stroll on a boardwalk. An easy walking tour of Mammoth Hot Springs, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, and even the Upper Geyser Basin (which includes Old Faithful) can be done in an hour or two.

See my stories “The Ultimate Family Tour of Yellowstone,” “The 10 Best Hikes in Yellowstone,” “Cross-Country Skiing Yellowstone,” and all stories about Yellowstone National Park at The Big Outside.

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Float the Green River Through Canyonlands National Park

Ages 4 and Up

Our son was six and our daughter barely four when we took a five-day, five-family float trip mostly on the Green River in southern Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. From the put-in at Mineral Bottom through 52 miles of Stillwater Canyon on the Green and then four miles more on the Colorado River to the takeout at Spanish Bottom, the river slowly unfurls beneath a constant backdrop of soaring redrock cliffs and spires.

Our flotilla of rafts, two kayaks, and a canoe quickly morphed into a slowly drifting party of water-gun fights and occasional swims to cool off, interspersed with frequent moments of gazing at brilliantly red canyon walls rising hundreds of feet above us. Off the water, we took side hikes to high overlooks of the canyon and centuries-old Puebloan rock art and cliff dwellings and camped on sandy beaches and slickrock benches. You might even spot bighorn sheep scrambling around on the canyon’s precipitous rock faces.

The flat water is ideal for beginners, campsites are spacious and lovely, and the scenery is out of this world from put-in to takeout. Rentals of boats and river gear, plus shuttles to the put-in and from the takeout (via a very scenic motorboat tour) are available from local outfitters in nearby Moab.

See my story “Still Waters Run Deep: Tackling America’s Best Multi-Day Float Trip on the Green River” and all stories about floating the Green River at The Big Outside.

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Climb Into Natural Arches

Ages 5 and Up

Arches National Park in southeastern Utah has many geologic wonders to recommend it, but from a kid’s perspective, one of the coolest experiences is scrambling up underneath an arch like Double Arch in the park’s Windows Section or Partition Arch in Devils Garden—the first a short walk, the second a hike of two to three hours round-trip.

For short, easy walks to several arches, feasible with young kids, start in the Windows Section, where you can get up close and personal with Double Arch, Turret Arch, and South Window. For a longer but relatively flat hike of up to a half-day (although you can shorten it), explore Devils Garden, including Pine Tree, Navajo, and Partition arches, and the park’s longest, Landscape Arch.

Skyline Arch, which is a short hike but sits by itself and thus attracts fewer people, sits high on the wall of a narrow canyon, and you can scramble up the canyon’s opposite wall for a bird’s-eye view of the arch. If you have a full day, take a ranger-guided tour of the Fiery Furnace, a maze of narrow canyons.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all stories about Arches National Park at The Big Outside.

Which puffy should you buy? See “The 12 Best Down Jackets”
and “How You Can Tell How Warm a Down Jacket Is.”

Hike Zion’s Breathtaking Trails

Ages 6 and Up

Even among America’s flagship national parks—gems like Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone—Zion stands out for having several dayhikes that would make the top 10 list of many avid hikers. Angels Landing, The Narrows, the West Rim Trail, Hidden Canyon, and Observation Point, to name just a handful that begin right in Zion Canyon, feature scenery that actually does justice to the adjective “breathtaking.” No other place really compares to Zion.

If your family is ready for a multi-day backpacking trip, Zion offers some of the best in the national parks, including an overnight hike in the Narrows and trips of two to four days in the Kolob Canyons and on the West Rim Trail or combining those two areas of the park on a beautiful traverse. And among technical dayhikes that require appropriate gear and skills like rappelling and navigating and wading slot canyons with cold pools of water, few compare with Zion’s Subway.

These hikes and others range widely in distance, difficulty, and gut-churning excitement quotient, and comfort level doesn’t always correlate directly with age. Stop in the park visitor center for information about these hikes, including current conditions; rangers can let you know when to avoid some of them.

See my stories “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park,” “Hiking Angels Landing: What You Need to Know,” “Pilgrimage Across Zion: Traversing a Land of Otherworldly Scenery,” “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows,” my expert e-book to backpacking Zion’s Narrows, and all stories about Zion National Park at The Big Outside.

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.”

Stand Beneath Yosemite’s Waterfalls and Summit Half Dome

Ages 7 and Up

Yosemite Valley and its surrounding high country was an early inspiration for creating a system of national parks—and the source of that inspiration becomes clearer when you explore beyond the Valley’s busy roads, hiking to its justifiably world-famous waterfalls and the summit of one of Yosemite’s iconic landmarks, Half Dome.

Dayhike the 7.2-mile, 2,700-vertical-foot Upper Yosemite Falls Trail to the brink of that waterfall, which plunges a sheer 1,400 feet through the air; or hike only about an hour to 90 minutes up that trail to a spot close enough to the base of the waterfall to feel the light rain of its mist.

The 6.3-mile, 2,000-vertical-foot loop on the Mist Trail and John Muir Trail takes you through the raining mist of 317-foot-tall Vernal Fall—which can be drenching in late spring—and both below and above the thunderous plume of nearly 600-foot-tall Nevada Fall.

Fit hikers—including older kids—with strong endurance can continue past Nevada Fall to dayhike up the exposed cable route to the summit of Half Dome, a 16-mile, 4,800-foot round trip that requires a permit. Adventurous families can venture beyond dayhiking distance, with myriad choices for five-star backpacking trips of virtually any length and difficulty.

See my stories “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite,” “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls,” “Hiking Half Dome: How to Do It Right and Get a Permit,” “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite,” and all stories about Yosemite National Park at The Big Outside.

See also my e-books to three amazing backpacking trips in Yosemite.

I’ve helped many readers plan unforgettable adventures in Yosemite and elsewhere.
Want my help with yours? Find out more here.

Ascend Into the Tetons

Ages 7 and Up

Regular readers of this blog know that the Tetons are one of my favorite mountain ranges—I’ve made more than 20 trips dayhiking, backpacking, climbing, and backcountry skiing there—and I rank the Teton Crest Trail among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

But the TCT is an ambitious and moderately strenuous hike of at least four days for most adults. The first Teton backpacking trip I took my kids on, when they were eight and six, was a three-day hike of Grand Teton’s nearly 20-mile Paintbrush-Cascade Canyons Loop.

Probably the most popular backpacking route in the park because of its relatively short distance, easy access, and stellar scenery, it takes you through two of the park’s most stunning canyons and over one of the highest mountain passes reached by a trail in the park, 10,700-foot Paintbrush Divide (which can be difficult to cross, due to snow, until August). Campsites in Upper Paintbrush Canyon have views of soaring, striated canyon walls, and in the North Fork of Cascade Canyon you will drink in a stunning view of the Grand Teton framed by canyon walls—still one of my favorite backcountry campsites ever.

See all stories about backpacking Grand Teton National Park at The Big Outside, including “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” my story about backpacking the TCT with my family, and “How to Get a Permit to Backpack the Teton Crest Trail,” with tips relevant to applying for a permit for any trip in the park.

Click here now to get my e-book to the best short backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park. Click here to see all of my e-books.

Immerse Yourself in the Wild Everglades

Ages 7 and Up

The Everglades is the kind of place that will shock you with its uniqueness and abundance of exotic fauna. Paddling sit-on-top kayaks on a placid river that flowed through mangrove tunnels, and canoes in the generally calm, shallow waters of the Ten Thousand Islands, my family watched an almost constant aerial parade of white ibises, black anhingas, tri-colored herons, brown pelicans and great blue herons fly just overhead.

On one paddling tour from the campsite we had to ourselves on a wilderness beach—where we watched the sun sink into the Gulf of Mexico—my son and I twisted around excitedly in our seats as a dolphin circled our canoe several times. On another paddle with my daughter, we exchanged long gazes with a gaggle of roseate spoonbills perched in a tree.

Much of the Everglades is a vast wilderness—at 1.5 million acres, the third-largest national park in the contiguous United States, bigger than Glacier or Grand Canyon and twice the size of Yosemite—offering opportunities for remote, multi-day, water-based adventures. But there are family-friendly options, like paddling canoes for a few hours on a well-marked water route to camp on a beach you have to yourselves.

See my story “Like No Other Place: Paddling the Everglades.”

Paddling the Everglades is one of “The 10 Best Family Outdoor Adventure Trips.”

Hike and Camp on the Wild Olympic Coast

Ages 7 and Up

My kids, who were nine and seven when we backpacked this three-day, 17.5-mile traverse of Washington’s southern Olympic coast, remember playing for hours in tide pools; exploring a massive boulder wallpapered with mussels, sea anemones, and sea stars; and climbing up and down thrilling rope ladders on steep headwalls. Throughout their childhoods, they called it one of their favorite trips (and it’s one of my top 10 family adventures).

The adults on this hike remember it for the rich sea life and birds—we saw seals, a sea otter, a great blue heron, and other wildlife—as well as the scenery, with scores of sea stacks rising straight out of the ocean and giant trees behind the beach.

It’s a surprisingly rugged trip—which goes far in explaining why fewer backpackers hike the southern stretch of the Olympic coast compared to the less-strenuous northern stretch. But many kids who’ve done some dayhiking and backpacking will do just fine—and revel in the adventurousness nature of it. Parents would have to feel either comfortable guiding their kids on the mandatory rope ladders or confident in their kids’ ability to managing them on their own.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast” and all stories about Olympic National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Backpack in Glacier National Park

Ages 8 and Up

As my family hiked up the Gunsight Pass Trail on our way to that 6,900-foot pass in Glacier National Park, a mountain goat, as white as fresh snow, with sharp, straight horns, hopped onto the trail not 50 feet ahead of us, on a stretch where the path clings to the face of a cliff. We stopped, and my kids, then nine and seven, glanced back and forth between the goat and my wife and me, simultaneously amazed and wondering what came next.

We waited. And when the goat finally relinquished the trail to us, scrambling nimbly down the cliff below, we peered over the brink to see where it went—but it had disappeared. My daughter, Alex, muttered, “I can’t believe it went down there.”

The 20-mile Gunsight Pass Trail traverse from the Jackson Glacier Overlook to Lake McDonald Lodge, both on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, takes in views of glaciers and rocky peaks and features campsites at Gunsight Lake and Lake Ellen Wilson that sit beneath tall cliffs spliced by waterfalls. It offers a relatively short but incredibly scenic backpacking trip with easy transportation logistics: Both trailheads are served by the park’s free shuttle bus. It’s also not crowded with dayhikers like trails around Many Glacier and Logan Pass.

See my story “Jagged Peaks and Wild Goats: Backpacking Glacier’s Gunsight Pass Trail,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park,” my two expert e-books to longer backpacking trips in Glacier, and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

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

Descend Into the Grand Canyon

Ages 8 and Up

The Grand Canyon looks impressive from its rim, but you really have to hike down into the Big Ditch to experience the full Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole sensation of its awesome scale. With virtually no vegetation obstructing the long vistas, towers thousands of feet tall appear to balloon to massive dimensions as you slowly approach them, until they dwarf their surroundings, then shrink into the background as you hike farther away. After many visits, I’ve yet to find a mediocre view or a bad backcountry campsite.

Get that experience on a dayhike or backpacking trip into the canyon. Hike either of the easily accessed and best-constructed trails dropping into the canyon from the South Rim. Follow the Bright Angel Trail down as far as you want—there are numerous logical turnaround points within the first few miles, or go all the way to Indian Garden (nine miles and nearly 3,000 feet round-trip).

Or descend the South Kaibab Trail, one of America’s most scenic footpaths, with constant, ridge-crest views of a huge swath of the canyon. Accessible backpacking options off the South Rim allow for trips of two to five days or more.

See my e-book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon” and all stories about the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

Get the right pack for you. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and “The 10 Best Hiking Daypacks.”

Sea Kayak Back to the Ice Age

Ages 8 and Up

Southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay is the size of Connecticut and sits at the heart of a contiguous protected wilderness the size of Greece. There are simply few places of this size that are as pristine on the entire planet.

Glacier Bay has seen the fastest glacial retreat on Earth: Two centuries ago, there was no Glacier Bay, just a colossal river of ice 4,000 feet thick and 20 miles wide stretching 100 miles into the St. Elias Mountains. The ice has since pulled back 65 miles, creating a fjord with 1,200 miles of coastline that provides a living window into what the world looked like at the end of the last Ice Age.

On a multi-day sea kayaking trip, camping every night on a secluded, wilderness beach, you can see massive tidewater glaciers explosively calving bus-sized chunks of ice into the sea, humpback whales, orcas, Steller sea lions, mountain goats, seals, sea otters, brown bears, and a variety of birds and wildflowers—not to mention views of some of the more than 50 glaciers covering 1,375 square miles of the park, and peaks that rise to over 15,000 feet.

See my story “Back to the Ice Age: Sea Kayaking Glacier Bay.”

See also all stories about national park adventures and family adventures at The Big Outside.

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Over more than three decades of backpacking adventures throughout America’s West, I’ve been fortunate to explore deeply into our most cherished national parks, wilderness areas, and protected backcountry. All of them are special. But some places rise above the rest, inspiring a sense of awe that can motivate us to reorder our priorities and rearrange our lives—and they have that effect on us every time we return to them. This story spotlights those special places in the West and many trips that you can take in them.

From the High Sierra to the Wind River Range, the Cascades to the best of southern Utah, Glacier, the Tetons and Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon and more, the 10 places and more than 40 trips described below comprise a tick list of five-star adventures that will keep you busy for years. (They have done exactly that for me.)

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.

All of these adventures possess unique qualities that make them feel extraordinary while you’re out there and stay with you for a long time afterward—and I say that from the perspective of having taken scores of backpacking trips all over the country for more than 30 years, including the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

The descriptions below all link to stories at The Big Outside with many more images and information. (Those stories require a paid subscription to The Big Outside to read in full, including my expert tips on planning each trip.)

Please share your thoughts about my list or any suggestions you have for similarly awe-inspiring adventures in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

The Wind River Range

You could count on the fingers of one hand—without needing every finger—the number of Lower 48 mountain ranges where you can hike for days below rows of jagged 13,000-foot peaks, passing more of the prettiest alpine lakes you’ve ever seen than other people. And one of those places is Wyoming’s Wind River Range.

On a roughly 41-mile loop from Elkhart Park, two friends and I spent a night in one of the most awe-inspiring spots in the West, Titcomb Basin, an alpine valley at over 10,000 feet where evening alpenglow painted a granite wall of 13,000-footers above us golden. Our route crossed three 12,000-foot passes, one via an adventurous, off-trail route over that led into a lovely hanging valley.

A few summers ago, three companions and I made a very rugged, seven-day, 96-mile south-to-north traverse of the Wind River High Route, two-thirds of which is off-trail—one of the most difficult and stunning adventures I’ve ever loved. I returned in late summer 2022, when three of us backpacked a 43-mile loop in an area I had mostly never seen before and—not surprisingly—walked through inspiring scenery every day while encountering few other backpackers.

And most recently, in August 2023, a friend and I hiked a four-day, 41-mile route that crossed the Continental Divide four times, enjoying a five-star campsite near a beautiful alpine lake every night and passing through one of the justifiably best-known areas of the Winds, the Cirque of the Towers.

As I’ve learned on several multi-day trips into the Winds: Being there can make you believe that these are the most magnificent mountains you’ve ever seen. And you might be right about that. The Winds keep pulling me back.

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 Winds at The Big Outside.

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The High Sierra

Every time I return to explore another area of California’s High Sierra—as I did again most recently in August 2022, backpacking about 130 miles in nine days, mostly on the John Muir Trail through Kings Canyon National Park and the Ansel Adams and John Muir wildernesses—I’m reminded of just how magnificent and vast this mountain range is.

Spanning three iconic national parks—Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite—and several national forests and wilderness areas, with thousands of miles of trails and alpine lakes, the Sierra offers endless opportunities for backpacking trips of any length and enough adventures to fill multiple lifetimes.

My own many backcountry travels in the Sierra have included several backpacking trips and dayhikes in Yosemite, where the beauty never ends, even after you’ve hit all the best-known corners; hiking a 40-mile loop with my family in Sequoia, crossing passes up to 11,630 feet and marveling over a landscape the camera loved; climbing the Lower 48’s highest peak, Mount Whitney, with my son; and thru-hiking the JMT. All of those and other trips have given me a good base of knowledge about the Sierra—and only whetted my appetite for more.

See “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite” and “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” my stories about thru-hiking the JMT and climbing Mount Whitney, my expert e-books to three stellar backpacking trips in Yosemite, plus all stories about backpacking the JMT and backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.

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The Cascade Range

Stretching 700 miles from northern California through Oregon and Washington into southern British Columbia, the Cascade Range—with the notable exception of Mount Rainier—does not reach the heights of the Sierra. But the range is nearly twice as long and harbors some of the finest backpacking trails in the country, both famous and relatively obscure.

The 93-mile Wonderland Trail (lead photo at top of story) around Washington’s 14,410-foot Mount Rainier belongs on any list of America’s best backpacking trips—for the countless, jarring views of the most heavily glaciated peak in the Lower 48, some of the most beautiful wildflower meadows you will ever see, numerous waterfalls and cascades, raging rivers gray with “glacial flour,” and sightings of mountain goats, marmots, and black bears.

See my stories about my backpacking trip on what I consider the best sections of the Wonderland and “5 Reasons You Must Backpack Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail,” and my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park.”

The 41-mile Timberline Trail around Oregon’s Mount Hood rivals the Wonderland for wildflowers, waterfalls, and scenery, including frequent views of 11,239-foot Mount Hood. The Timberline also serves up challenges like potentially edgy creek fords—and it requires less than half the time of hiking the entire Wonderland, with no permit complications. See my story “Full of Surprises: Backpacking Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail.”

Check out these three other very worthy Cascades backpacking trips:

• The stunning and adventurous, 44-mile Spider Gap-Buck Creek Pass loop in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness.
• A 44-mile loop in the sprawling Pasayten Wilderness, combining the Pacific Crest Trail and more-remote and lonely trails with equally great scenery.
• And an 80-mile hike, with shorter variations, that delivers a stellar tour of North Cascades National Park.

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

Southern Utah

The national parks and other wildlands of southern Utah protect some of the best dayhikes and backpacking trips in America—period. But among all the multi-day hikes at the bottom of Utah, four stand head and shoulders above the rest: the Needles and Maze districts of Canyonlands National Park, Paria Canyon, and Zion’s Narrows.

In the more user-friendly Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, stratified cliffs stretch for miles and trails zigzag across waves of slickrock slabs below multi-colored sandstone candlesticks rising 300 feet tall. Across the Green River, in the Maze District, trails lead from overlooks of a vast, chaotic sweep of sandstone fins, towers, and canyons to circuitous routes through canyons that could only be called the Maze. With very rugged hiking through a hard-to-reach corner of the Southwest where water sources often dry up seasonally, the Maze is unquestionably hard—and a holy grail for serious Southwest backpackers.

Famous among backpackers for its towering walls of orange-red sandstone painted wildly with desert varnish and illuminated by reflected sunlight, hanging gardens where springs pour from rock, and campsites on sandy benches shaded by cottonwood trees, Paria Canyon is a must-do adventure made more, well, “interesting” by pockets of quicksand. Hike it top to bottom or combined with its 15-mile-long tributary slot canyon, Buckskin Gulch—which gets so tight that you must take off your pack and squeeze through sideways.

The Narrows of Zion National Park certainly ranks among America’s top 10 backpacking trips and the best in the Southwest. Much of the magic lies in seeing it change as you literally walk deeper into the earth, splashing down the river through deeply shaded, tight passages and seeing springs gush from solid rock, creating lush desert oases. Backpack the 14-mile route from top to bottom, spending a night in the canyon to savor the solitude of an evening below walls that soar 1,000 feet tall and a slice of black sky bursting with stars.

See my stories “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” “Farther Than It Looks—Backpacking the Canyonlands Maze,” “The Quicksand Chronicles: Backpacking Paria Canyon,” and “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows” and my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Narrows in Zion National Park.”

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.”

Glacier National Park

Few wild lands inspire feelings of awe as often and as intensely as Glacier. Besides almost constant views of mountains unlike any in America, on many multi-day hikes in Glacier you will see rivers of ice pouring off of craggy mountains and cliffs, some of the more than 760 lakes, and often mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose—possibly even a few grizzly and black bears: I’ve seen bears on every backpacking trip I’ve taken there.

Those hikes have included what I consider the best backpacking trip in Glacier as well as a 94-mile, north-to-south traverse of the park, combining the primary Continental Divide Trail route through Glacier and my hand-picked variations off it to hit what I believe comprise the park’s finest areas.

See my stories “5 Reasons You Must Backpack in Glacier National Park,” “10 Backpacking Trips for Solitude in Glacier National Park,” “How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park,” “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park,” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

Plan your next great backpacking trip on the Teton Crest Trail, Wonderland Trail,
in Glacier, Yosemite or other parks using my expert e-books.

Yellowstone’s Bechler Canyon

If every American should visit Yellowstone National Park—and every American should—those who long to explore its unique and rich backcountry should embark on the park’s best backpacking trip, through Bechler Canyon. Hiking for miles along the Bechler River Trail, beside a five-star trout stream, you’ll pass several thunderous waterfalls—including 45-foot Iris Falls and Colonnade Falls, where the Bechler River plunges 35 feet over an upper falls and another 67 feet over a second drop.

The trip features bracing river fords—which pose little risk beyond chattering teeth (a friend and I made our trip’s last ford in strong, frigid wind and wet snow falling in late September)—possible sightings of bison, bears and other wildlife; the opportunity to explore Yellowstone’s largest backcountry geyser basin near the shore of one of the park’s biggest backcountry lakes; and the icing on the cake: soaking in a natural hot springs-fed pool called Mr. Bubble.

See my story “In Hot (and Cold) Water: Backpacking Yellowstone’s Bechler Canyon” and all stories about Yellowstone National Park at The Big Outside.

Any trip goes better with the right gear. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents.”

The Grand Canyon

What can be said about the Grand Canyon that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? What words can measure up to the scale and majesty of this place—its infinite vistas, the deceptive immensity of the canyon walls and stone towers, the intimate side canyons where waterfalls pour through green gardens in the desert?

In this landscape of incomparable scenery, multi-day hikes vary from beginner-friendly to notoriously strenuous and challenging. Having ticked off some of the canyon’s best multi-day hikes—South Kaibab to Lipan Point, including the Escalante Route and Beamer Trail, Hermits Rest to Bright Angel Trailhead, Grandview Point to South Kaibab Trailhead, the Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop, the New Hance Trail to Grandview Point, the Royal Arch Loop, the canyon’s Gems Route, and the Utah Flats Route and Clear Creek Trail—and hiked and run rim-to-rim-to-rim multiple times in a day, I’m still scheming my next trip there.

The canyon has no peers. Every backpacker should go there.

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 Grand Canyon backpacking trips at The Big Outside.

Do your Grand Canyon hike right with these expert e-books:
“The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
“The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
“The Complete Guide to Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim.”

The Idaho Wilderness

Anyone following my blog for very long knows my affection for Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains—my backyard wilderness. But central Idaho harbors nearly four million more acres of almost-contiguous wilderness beyond the 217,000 acres in the Sawtooths: the 1.3-million acre Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, which is larger than many national parks, including Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Glacier; and the nearly 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness (“the Frank”), largest in the Lower 48 and bigger than Yellowstone.

If this vast realm of mountains and canyons—divided by just one rural highway and two remote dirt roads—were contained within one national park, it would be America’s third-largest.

Several years ago, I asked the Idaho Conservation League to help me create a long-distance backpacking trail through the state’s three signature wilderness areas. The result is the 296-mile-long Idaho Wilderness Trail, which crosses mountain passes over 9,000 feet and meanders below dramatic spires from the Bighorn Crags in the Frank to the Sawtooths. It follows three designated wild and scenic rivers, the Middle Fork of the Salmon, Main Salmon, and the Selway, and traces the shores of innumerable alpine lakes.

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

It also traverses pristine lands that are home to mountain goats and bighorn sheep, elk and moose, black bears, a population of wolves estimated to be at least seven times larger than that in Yellowstone—and that protect some of the nation’s best remaining habitat in the Lower 48 for restoring wild salmon.

Perhaps most uniquely, the IWT offers the kind of solitude you simply cannot find on most long-distance trails. In fact, many backpackers have never even heard of the wilderness areas the trail traverses.

See my stories “America’s Newest Long Trail: The Idaho Wilderness Trail” and “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains,” my expert e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains,” and all stories about backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains at The Big Outside.

Which puffy should you buy? See “The 12 Best Down Jackets”
and “How You Can Tell How Warm a Down Jacket Is.”

The Tetons

This list would not feel complete without Wyoming’s iconic Teton Range. Fairly beginner-friendly in terms of difficulty and navigation, a place where you may come upon a marmot, moose, elk, or black or grizzly bear, and so constantly picturesque from the campsites to the high passes and vast fields of wildflowers that it almost shocks the senses, these razor peaks never fail to dazzle.

I’ve returned to the Tetons more than 20 times over the past three-plus decades, most recently backpacking—again—my favorite variation of the Teton Crest Trail, universally considered one of the best backpacking trips in America. Two of my all-time favorite backcountry campsites lie along the TCT.

While the Teton Crest Trail captures the imagination of most backpackers, any multi-day hike in the Tetons will rank among the best hikes you’ve ever done. Want proof? Check out “The Best Short Backpacking Trip in Grand Teton National Park.”

See “The 5 Best Backpacking Trips in Grand Teton National Park,” “10 Great, Big Dayhikes in the Tetons,” all stories about backpacking the Teton Crest Trail at The Big Outside, and my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park,” which tells you everything you need to know to plan and pull off that trip—including how to get one of the most coveted and difficult-to-reserve backcountry permits in the National Park System.

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking trip on the Teton Crest Trail.
Want my help with yours? Find out more here.

Rocky Mountain National Park

The Colorado Rockies, with 58 peaks that rise higher than 14,000 feet and another whopping 637 that stand between 13,000 and 13,999 feet, have drawn hikers and mountain climbers like mice to peanut butter for decades. But for many, the Colorado Rockies reach their scenic apex in Rocky Mountain National Park.

While not nearly as large as other Western parks like Glacier or Yosemite, Rocky nonetheless offers some excellent and relatively beginner-friendly options for multi-day hikes. I’ve backpacked there on both sides of the Continental Divide, including taking my kids when they were young on a short, three-day hike in Wild Basin, in the park’s southeast corner, south of the park’s tallest and most famous mountain, 14,259-foot Longs Peak.

We camped our first night beside a small creek where the kids played for hours, and our second night a short walk from the shore of lovely Ouzel Lake, nestled in ponderosa pine forest at just over 10,000 feet, below a striking wall of 12,000- and 13,000-foot peaks.

See my story about backpacking with my young kids in Rocky Mountain National Park.

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So, you’ve been an avid [circle all appropriate terms: hiker/backpacker/climber/trail runner/skier/kayaker] for years, and now you’re spending big chunks of your days changing diapers and your nights wondering when you’ll sleep again. You’ve never gone this long without getting out into the mountains, and you see no remedy for that shortfall in the foreseeable future. Your new baby is more wonderful than you’d ever imagined—and yet, you’re feeling a little despair over what’s missing from your life lately.

I know where your head is right now. And I have good news for you: I’ve reached the bright light at the end of the tunnel, and you can get there faster than you might think. Here’s how.

First of all, I know it’s hard to take a long view when you’re so deeply buried in the day-to-day management of a hectic life. But as a father of two young adults, I can tell you that growing children race through development stages—each one very different—with blinding speed. While in many respects the infant and toddler years are the most demanding (and cutest), and can seem eternal at times, they do pass. In my experience, parenting keeps getting better.

But for now, you need some strategies for surviving the early years of parenting, when you face the greatest demands on your personal time—and your sanity.

The following tips reflect what I’ve learned from more than 20 years as a parent who has always strived to get outside as much as possible—dayhiking, backpacking, climbing, running, paddling, skiing—with my family whenever I can, but also, at times without them. Like many stories at The Big Outside, part of this one is free for anyone to read but reading the entire story is an exclusive benefit of a paid subscription. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you for supporting my blog.

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

1. Ignore the Naysayers

You’ll hear too many parents say things like, “Oh, you won’t be out backpacking/climbing/skiing anymore!” Don’t listen to them. These comments tend to come from people for whom getting outside isn’t as important as it is to you. They don’t understand your lifestyle or how much and how often you need to get out there—or how hard you’ll work at accomplishing that goal, no matter the obstacles.

When my kids were babies and toddlers I’d put them in a front pack or a child-carrier backpack and go for a hike by myself. My wife and I took them camping, dayhiking, skiing, backpacking, paddling rivers, and climbing from the time they were very young—even though it was a lot of work—because it gave us time outdoors and helped turn our kids into young people who now love backpacking, climbing, skiing, and paddling with us. She and I also took turns solo parenting to let each other get outside—for an hour, a few hours, a few days.

If you’re that type of person, that’s what you’ll do—regardless of what other people think or say.

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2. Hike Your Own Hike

That’s a motto among thru-hikers of long-distance trails, but the message applies just as well to raising children. Just as there are many ways to tackle a months-long hike, there are probably almost as many styles of parenting as there are parents. Just like setting out on a long hike, those first steps on the path of parenting can get bumpy. You’ll fall down and end some days bruised, sore, and wondering what the hell you’re doing.

Just figure out your own comfortable pace and what you need and don’t need; it doesn’t matter whether it resembles someone else’s approach. You’ll get there.

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

3. Embrace Good Advice

As much as you must hike your own hike as a parent, you will also meet other parents—some with kids older than yours—who, by all appearances, are doing it right. They get out as much as they like. Their kids actually like getting out with them, and seem like great kids.

Get to know those parents; they just might know some tricks you will find useful. At the least, they’re probably fun to hang out with.

Don’t miss my popular “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids.”

4. Take the Kids Outside Often

Both of my kids went on their first hike—in a front pack on my chest—within a few days after they were born. That was merely symbolic, of course. But those short walks were emblematic of the philosophy my wife and I embraced from the beginning of parenthood: Our kids would learn that getting outdoors together as a family is normal.

We dragged the kids out camping, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, dayhiking and backpacking, paddling rivers and climbing (when they expressed an interest in the last one)—doing everything we liked to do with our kids, even though it often meant going much slower when the kids were little and involved much more work. Even at home, whenever we had to go somewhere in town within biking range, in reasonable weather, we biked there.

If you want your children to share your passions, start them young and do it with them.

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5. Stop Worrying So Much

Before they were out of grade school, our kids had backpacked in parks from Grand Canyon to Olympic and among grizzly bears in Glacier; sea kayaked through wet, raw weather and camped on remote wilderness beaches in Alaska’s Glacier Bay; paddled among alligators in the Everglades; trekked through cold rain and wet snow in Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park; rock climbed 150-foot cliffs and rappelled into and crawled through slot canyons; and cross-country skied through snowstorms to backcountry yurts miles from the nearest road multiple times. (My award-winning book Before They’re Gone chronicles the year my family spent backpacking, rock climbing, paddling, and cross-country skiing in 11 national parks facing major threats from climate change.)

Bad parents, right?

Yes, we worry like any parents. We’re hyper-conscious about safety and ask a lot of questions. We’ve always tailored family activities to suit their ages and abilities. We’ve abandoned plans and turned back on trails when necessary.

But every time we’ve worried that we’re pushing our kids beyond their abilities, they have risen to the challenge and loved it.

It doesn’t matter whether your family tries to do what my family (or any other family) does; establish your own comfort zone. My point is this: Don’t over-worry about the kids. They’re often more resilient and adaptable than adults give them credit for.

I can help you plan the best backpacking, hiking, or family adventure of your life.
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See a menu of all stories about our many family outdoor adventures at the Family Adventures page at The Big Outside.

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In the Digital Era, the idea of families spending sustained time outdoors—actually taking trips built around some outdoor adventure enjoyed together—can feel like a wonderful aspiration that’s awfully hard to achieve. But that lifestyle is a reality for many families—and always has been for mine—and one that brings parents and children together for long periods of time (hours or even days!) in beautiful places in nature for an activity that’s genuinely fun and, most importantly, offline and unplugged.

How do you create that kind of lifestyle for your family? As the father of two young adults who are avid backpackers, skiers, climbers, mountain bikers, paddlers, and intelligent, fine young people who make me proud (and most importantly, love spending time with and just talking to their parents!), I believe this goal remains not only entirely feasible today, but all that much more critical—especially for young kids.

And when it’s done right, you and your children will consider the time you spend together outdoors some of the best you share as a family.

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.

For this story, I’ve synthesized the biggest lessons I’ve gleaned from two decades of parenting outdoors as often as possible—and four decades building my life around outdoor recreation, including formerly as a field editor for Backpacker magazine for 10 years and even longer running this blog—into seven tips that will help set you on the path to wonderful times together as a family.

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

No. 1: Don’t ‘Wait Until They’re Older’

For starters, abandon any misguided notion that you should “wait until the kids are older”—that’s a formula for winding up with a ‘tweener or teen who’s not interested in any of your wild-eyed notions about spending family time outdoors.

My initial motivation was admittedly somewhat selfish. One lesson I learned soon after becoming a father was this: If I wanted to keep getting outside—and especially on big trips—as much as I had before parenthood, I would have to involve my family in the activities I love doing. (That’s why that tip ranks no. 2 in my “10 Tips For Getting Outside More.”) But I also understood that making that effort when they were small would pay dividends as they grew older and more capable.

As I urge in my “Survival Guide for the Outdoors Lover Who’s a New Parent,” take your kids outside often, beginning when they’re too young to remember it—then their oldest memories will include being outdoors with their family. They will learn that getting outdoors together as a family is almost as routine as dinner.

That’s not to say it’s ever too late to start, of course. It’s never too late to spend quality time together.

Want to take your family backpacking? See these expert e-books:
“The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
“The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite”
“The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains”

No. 2: When You Need It, Get Expert Help

You want to get your kids outdoors more, exploring nature, and enjoying the myriad experiences available in local, state, and national parks; but you and your spouse lack the skills and knowledge to even know where to begin, never mind keep everyone safe. That’s not an obstacle—everyone begins as a novice. There are free programs, many of them family-oriented, available on public lands all over the country, and numerous paid guide services—an abundance of expertise available to help you acquire experience and skills.

As just one example, when planning a visit to a national park, search the park’s website for ranger-led activities, like hikes, that are usually free or low-cost and ideal for families and beginners; you’ll find them at virtually every national park and many other public lands. Those websites also list guide services and outfitters that are licensed to operate in that park.

For instance, you can find guided tours of all kinds in Yellowstone, guided hikes in Glacier National Park, river trips through the Grand Canyon, and climbing guides operating in Grand Teton National Park and on Mount Rainier, and ranger-led tours and interpretive programs in almost any park, including Yosemite, and an adventurous, ranger-guided tour of the Fiery Furnace in Arches.

See all of the stories about family trips listed at my Family Adventures page at The Big Outside, including stories about guided whitewater rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River and Utah’s Gates of Lodore section of the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument and the Green River’s Desolation and Gray canyons, climbing Mount Whitney, guided hiking and slot canyoneering in Capitol Reef National Park, sea kayaking in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, and kayak touring in the Everglades.

See also my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your next family adventure..

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No. 3: Talk and Listen to Them

From the longer perspective of a father of young adults, of all the advice that I offer in my popular “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids,” I think the two best nuggets of hard-earned wisdom are simply “talk and listen” and “work your P.R.”

When planning a trip, make your children feel like they’re part of the decision-making process. Welcome their questions, address their concerns, and give them some say in what you’re doing. They will be more emotionally invested in making it a success.

Your children crave your attention; shower them with it, especially positive reinforcement. Compliment kids when they do well and encourage them when they’re challenged. Tell children they’re good hikers, skiers, climbers, paddlers, or cyclists, and they will take pride in that. You will help them self-identify as a kid who likes being outdoors.

I can help you plan the best backpacking, hiking, or family adventure of your life.
Click here now to learn more.

No. 4: Take One-on-One, Parent-Child Trips

When my son and daughter were both very young, I established a tradition of taking an annual father-son and father-daughter backcountry trip, getaways that have become known as our “Boy Trip” and “Girl Trip.” (At a young age, my daughter gave me a waiver for my gender.)

By launching this idea when they were young and eager for entire days of one-on-one time with me, I created a tradition that my kids would look forward to as much as I did.

While most of our trips have consisted of backpacking and rock climbing in our home state of Idaho, I’ve also backpacked in the Grand Canyon with my daughter and climbed Mount Whitney with my son (click on the photos above and at left to read about either trip).

But it matters less what you do or where than simply that you do it, give your child your entire attention, make it fun, and demonstrate your commitment to it—so that, as your child gets older, the shared commitment remains strong.

I can report now, from the far end of the parenting journey with two kids who are young adults and avid backpackers, skiers, climbers, mountain bikers, and paddlers, that our son and daughter—as busy as their lives have become—still strive to spend as much time with us, especially outdoors, as they can, and we’re continually planning adventures together, whether for a few hours or a few weeks.

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No. 5: Blow Their Minds

Taking outdoors trips with little kids can, at times, create that defeated feeling of herding cats; but in some ways, it’s easier than when they get older, because you’re still in charge while they’re young. As they get older, they not only want more say in decisions about family outings and vacations, but they tend to come down with a chronic case of cynicism—everything is potentially “boring.”

Solution: Overwhelm their cynicism with trips so irrefutably fun that your offer becomes one they can’t refuse. One of my “10 Tips For Getting Your Teenager Outdoors With You” is: Do something really cool.

As our kids grew older and more physically capable, comfortable with bigger challenges, and self-confident, we took them exploring slot canyons, including two non-technical, family-friendly slots in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and a technical slot canyon that required four rappels in Capitol Reef National Park.

We rafted and kayaked whitewater rivers like Oregon’s Grand Ronde, Utah’s Green through Dinosaur National Monument, and Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon. We’ve backpacked and trekked hut to hut in amazing landscapes from the Tetons and Glacier National Park to the Tour du Mont Blanc and Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. I would regularly take them rock climbing and skiing.

No, it doesn’t have to be totally hard-core, involve international travel, or cost a small fortune. The point is simply to be willing to rise to the challenge of motivating your kids when they’ve grown a little tired of the same old. The fact that they want to step up to a higher level of outdoor adventure means you’ve been successful.

Make your kids want to go again. See “The 10 Best Family Outdoor Adventure Trips.”

No. 6: Recruit Another Family

From the first river trip we ever took as a family—a beginner-friendly, five-day float down the Green River in Canyonlands National Park—to hiking in Yosemite, backpacking Paria Canyon and the Needles District of Canyonlands, and skiing to backcountry yurts, as well as other trips, we have frequently brought other kids, another family, or multiple families along for the adventure.

Not only do the kids get energized by more peers, but it’s more social and fun for everyone—and adds the benefit of spreading the work out among the adults (when children are too young to be much help). Bring another family regularly into your trips, and you create more voices motivating the movement toward always planning the next one.

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No. 7: Pick a Shared Goal

When my son was 15, I proposed to him that he and I (for our annual Boy Trip) climb a mountaineering route up the highest peak in the contiguous United States, California’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, to raise money for an organization that introduces kids his age to the outdoors. He leapt at the suggestion.

Motivated by this goal, he joined me in spending the next several months training for it. After we successfully reached the summit, in our tent that night at our base camp at 12,000 feet, he told me it was “the best trip we’ve ever done, and it makes me excited to do bigger ones and climb more mountains like this.”

I told him I would love that.

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Bonus Tip: Don’t Worry, Just Take It Slow

If your family is entirely new to hiking or any outdoors endeavors, it’s okay. You have time. Take baby steps, learn as you go, and follow your gut instincts in choosing what’s right for your family. Seek a balance between encouraging everyone to try something new and not pushing so hard that anyone gets discouraged.

The only important goal is to keep making the effort to get out there. The rest will work out.

See more tips about walking that fine line in my “10 Tips for Keeping Kids Happy and Safe Outdoors” and “5 Tips For Hiking With Young Kids From an Outdoors Dad,” and my story “5 Questions to Ask Before Trying That New Outdoor Adventure.”

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An unforgettable campsite can define a backcountry trip. Sometimes that perfect spot where you spend a night forges the memory that remains the most vivid long after you’ve gone home. A photo of that camp can send recollections of the entire adventure rushing back to you—it does for me. I’ve been very fortunate to have pitched a tent in many great backcountry campsites over more than three decades of backpacking all over the U.S. I’ve distilled the list of my favorite spots down to these 25.

I update this list every year and it becomes a little more difficult almost every time. This year, I’ve added fresh photos from a couple of places I revisited in 2024: Painter Basin in Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness and the Grand Canyon, where I backpacked most of the Gems Route, which includes the most remote stretch of the 95-mile-long Tonto Trail. 

Below my top 25 list you’ll find a second list—now just as long—of campsites that were previously in my top 25. Each campsite photo below includes a short description of that trip, and most have a link to an existing story at The Big Outside.

In some cases, the photos from these places show the view a few steps from our tent, rather than the site itself.

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 share a brief anecdote with each photo because, for me, each campsite isn’t merely a beautiful scene: it is a story and a memory. Because that’s what camping in the wilderness is all about.

I’d love to read your thoughts about any of these places or your suggestions for campsites that belong on my list; I’m always looking for trip ideas. Share them in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Sweet dreams.

Sahale Glacier Camp, North Cascades National Park

We slogged up Sahale Arm into a cold, wind-driven rain, unable to see more than a hundred feet in any direction. But as my friend David Ports and I reached Sahale Glacier Camp (lead photo at top of story), the rain and wind abated and the clouds dropped below us, giving us a view of the earth falling away into a bottomless abyss a few steps from our tent door. A mountain goat strolled past our camp.

Perched at the top of Sahale Arm and the toe of the Sahale Glacier, at 7,686 feet, the highest designated campsite in Washington’s North Cascades National Park overlooks what appears to be a boundless, wind-whipped sea of sharpened peaks smothered in snow and ice, among them Johannesburg, Baker, Shuksan, Glacier Peak, and in the far distance, Mount Rainier.

See my story “Exploring the ‘American Alps:’ The North Cascades” and all stories about backpacking in North Cascades National Park at The Big Outside.

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Beside Royal Arch, Grand Canyon National Park

Backpacking the 34.5-mile Royal Arch Loop, the most remote and arguably the most rugged and lonely established South Rim hike in the Big Ditch, three friends and I put in a monster first day to reach the campsite beside Royal Arch—and was it ever worth the effort. We descended Royal Arch Canyon, which involves slow, strenuous, and exposed scrambling in spots—but is also lush with hanging gardens growing along its vibrant creek, which plunges through several crystal-clear pools—until we came into view of the arch, the Grand Canyon’s largest natural bridge (it’s water carved, so technically a bridge, not an arch).

We passed beneath the tall, thick arch (which provided ample shelter during dinnertime rain showers) and walked just beyond it to a flat ledge more than large enough for our two tents, directly beneath a towering sandstone pinnacle. Just steps beyond our ledge loomed a vertical, 200-foot pour-off dropping into the lower section of Royal Arch Canyon—a reminder not to wander far from the tents after dark. Come morning, dawn light would set the red walls of that lower canyon ablaze. For the four of us, all longtime backcountry explorers, this was an all-time best campsite.

See my story “Not Quite Impassable: Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Royal Arch Loop” with lots of photos, a video, and information on how to pull off this trip, and all stories about Grand Canyon backpacking trips at The Big Outside.

Start planning your next adventure now! See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
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Helen Lake, John Muir Trail, Kings Canyon National Park

Wind-driven rain and hail pounded us as we backpacked the John Muir Trail through the Evolution Basin on the eighth day of a nine-day, 130-mile hike through the Ansel Adams and John Muir Wildernesses and Kings Canyon National Park in California’s High Sierra, mostly on the JMT. The rain tapered before we crossed 11,955-foot Muir Pass in early evening, but gray-black storm clouds still threatened. A little while later, we pitched our tents on the only tiny patches of rock-free, flat ground we found above Helen Lake, at around 11,600 feet, drawing the curtain on an 18-mile day with over 5,000 feet of uphill and downhill. There have been few days when I’ve walked that far through grander wilderness.

The storm passed, granting us a dry, calm evening. The setting sun cast soft alpenglow upon a peak behind us and burnished the clouds hovering over the western horizon a dark burgundy. But the real payoff came the next morning, when the rising sun ignited the rocky faces of peaks across Helen Lake. The lake and a tiny tarn—more like a big puddle—near our camp offered razor-sharp reflections of our surroundings. Despite the weather that chased us there and our rocky tent sites, Helen Lake burned itself into memory for all three of us as an inspirational spot.

In fact, as always happens when I backpack through the High Sierra, we had a few truly glorious campsites on that August 2022 hike, including at Thousand Island Lake and Minaret Lake. See my story about that trip, “High Sierra Ramble: 130 Miles On—and Off—the John Muir Trail,” and “10 Great John Muir Trail Section Hikes.”

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No Name Lake, Glacier National Park

With two of the six camps on my reserved permit closed due to bear activity when two friends and I arrived at Glacier National Park in the second week of September 2023, we had to scramble to create a new permit based on backcountry campground availability—and ended up with an itinerary very similar to a hike I’d done in Glacier five years before (see this story). But in Glacier, there are no consolation prizes, only trails that awe every time you walk them.

We backpacked a seven-day, north-south traverse of the park, mostly combining the primary and alternate routes of the Continental Divide Trail from the Belly River Valley to Two Medicine, hiking through the Ptarmigan Tunnel and finishing with the Dawson Pass Trail’s alpine traverse overlooking the peaks in the park’s remote heart. But unlike last time, we spent our final night at No Name Lake, where a calm morning brought the kind of lake reflection you want to frame for a wall at home (as I did). Another surprise treat on that trip was beautiful evening and morning light at Morning Star Lake—which would have made this list if not for the serendipitous light at No Name.

See my story “Déjà Vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park” and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

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The Narrows, Zion National Park

It was one of the most glaring omissions in my resume as a backpacker: I had never hiked The Narrows of the Virgin River in southern Utah’s Zion National Park. (I actually had a permit to do it in October 2013, when Congress shut down the federal government, closing all the national parks and temporarily crushing my hopes of finally ticking off that classic hike.)

Then an unexpected opportunity arose: I had a window for a four-day trip in early November and saw an unusually good forecast for southern Utah. I broached the idea of backpacking The Narrows to my friend, David Gordon, he leapt at the chance, and we got a last-minute permit for a very popular trip at a time of year when there are far fewer people either competing for a permit or dayhiking from the bottom.

I shot this photo and video of David at our campsite, Narrows no. 1, in early evening; the slot on the left side of the photo is The Narrows—we had emerged from that slot, hiking downstream, just an hour or so earlier.

See my story “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows” and all stories about Zion National Park at The Big Outside.

Click here now to get my expert e-book to backpacking Zion’s Narrows.

Death Canyon Shelf, Grand Teton National Park

I could rattle off a list of gorgeous campsites in Wyoming’s Tetons, a park I’ve visited well over 20 times and never get tired of. But I decided to include just the two camping zones I consider the best places to bed down in the Tetons backcountry and can be reached by trail: Death Canyon Shelf (above and at right) and the North Fork of Cascade Canyon (below).

I’ve camped a few times in different spots on Death Canyon Shelf, a broad, three-mile-long bench at about 9,500 feet. With the earth dropping away abruptly into Death Canyon on one side, cliffs rising some 500 feet on the other side, and views across the jagged peaks and canyons of the Tetons—reaching all the way to the Grand Teton—there are few spots with such sweeping and dramatic panoramas. I’ve watched moose in Death Canyon through binoculars from the cliff tops and deer grazing around our campsite, was awakened one night by a bull elk outside our tent—and have usually caught a spectacular sunset followed by an equally glorious sunrise.

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

North Fork of Cascade Canyon, Grand Teton National Park

On my most-recent backpacking trip on the Teton Crest Trail, in August 2019, three friends and I started up the North Fork of Cascade Canyon on our second afternoon—having already enjoyed two days of a constant stream of breathtaking scenery. Where the trail emerges from forest into boulder-strewn meadows with a first, sweeping view of the canyon, my friend David looked over his shoulder and exclaimed, “Wow!” He was gazing down the canyon at the sheer north face of the Grand Teton rising several thousand feet above us (photo above).

We found a campsite in a copse of pine trees with a ledge that afforded an unimpeded view down the canyon as the setting down turned the Grand golden and then ruby red (photo at left). Getting an early start the next morning, we passed a massive bull moose strolling across a meadow on our way to Lake Solitude—which we had to ourselves at a time of day when its still waters offered a perfect mirror image of the surrounding cliffs and peaks. And the eye candy just kept getting better as we hiked the TCT high up a canyon wall to Paintbrush Divide at 10,700 feet.

See my stories “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail” and “American Classic: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” and my e-book “The Complete Guide to Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park.”

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking trip on the Teton Crest Trail. Visit my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan yours.

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Precipice Lake, Sequoia National Park

It almost seems unfair to compare other places to the High Sierra, Wyoming’s Teton Range and Wind River Range, Glacier National Park, or the Grand Canyon; those destinations dominate this list in part because I keep returning to them, but I think the photos speak for themselves. On a six-day, family backpacking trip in Sequoia National Park, we camped at two alpine lakes that deserved placement on this list: Precipice Lake and Columbine Lake (see Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites below these 25 favorites).

Precipice wasn’t even part of the planned itinerary; we intended to go beyond it, over Kaweah Gap, to camp in the Nine Lakes Basin. But when we reached Precipice in late afternoon on our third day, we decided within minutes to stop for the night. Cliffs of clean, white granite with black streaks ring much of the compact lake’s shoreline. The mouth of the outlet creek provides an excellent pool for a chilling dip. Granite ledges above the lake have flat areas for tents or to just lay out bags and sleep under the stars (as my 12-year-old son and I did). The evening alpenglow on the cliffs reflected in the lake and on 12,040-foot Eagle Scout Peak towering above Precipice, put the icing on the cake.

See my story “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park” and all stories about backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.

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Titcomb Basin, Wind River Range

The views kept getting better with every mile on the first day of a three-day, 41-mile loop that two friends and I backpacked from the Elkhart Park Trailhead in Wyoming’s Wind River Range in mid-September. But as we entered the long, alpine valley called Titcomb Basin to find a campsite for the night, craning our necks at the cliffs and peaks towering overhead, we immediately realized it was one of the prettiest backcountry spots any of us had ever seen.

An alpine valley at over 10,500 feet, Titcomb Basin sits below mountains on the Continental Divide that soar more than 3,000 feet above the Titcomb Lakes in the valley, the highest of which is 13,745-foot Fremont Peak. In fact, high peaks flank the valley on three sides like a long, narrow horseshoe. The only easy way in and out is via the trail entering the mouth of the basin. The next day, we hiked an off-trail route over Knapsack Col at about 12,200 feet, at the upper end of Titcomb, descending another trailless alpine valley speckled with wildflowers. 

Every time I return to the Winds, it feels like a reminder that I need to get there more often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a mediocre campsite in the Winds, including the six nights I spent in August 2020 on the 96-mile Wind River High Route.

Read my feature story about that 41-mile hike, “Best of the Wind River Range: Backpacking to Titcomb Basin” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

Which puffy should you buy? See my picks for “The 12 Best Down Jackets”
and “How You Can Tell How Warm a Down Jacket Is.”

Alice Lake, Sawtooth Wilderness

In the last week of June—not yet summer in the mountains—my son, Nate, and I backpacked with two friends to one of the gems of Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness: Alice Lake. While the ground was mostly dry and snow-free in the valleys, we had a frigid ford of a creek running knee-deep and fast with snowmelt, and then encountered up to three feet of snow still on the ground for the last hour or so to Alice Lake, which sits at 8,598 feet below an eye-catching row of granite pinnacles. We found Alice still partly frozen over. But the calm of late afternoon and then the next morning served up a glassy reflection of the snowy peaks beyond that illustrates why this area is a favorite among Sawtooths aficionados.

I’d been to Alice Lake a few times before, as had Nate, on his first wilderness backpacking trip—and one of the first of our annual “Boy Trips”—when he was six years old. In fact, on this recent visit, I recognized and pointed out to Nate the campsite where, seven years earlier, I hurriedly threw up our tent just before a violent thunderstorm rolled in. This time, we just spent one night out there, early enough in the season that we had a chilly night and no mosquitoes. Alice Lake has become popular and is usually overcrowded on summer weekends; plan to be there on a weeknight or pick another spot.

See my stories “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,” and all stories about backpacking in the Sawtooths at this blog, plus my e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.”

Lastly, don’t miss two more photos from Sawtooths campsites that I’ve had to bump to my list of Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites (see below)—which tells you something about the alpine lakes of the Sawtooth Mountains.

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

Below the Chocolate Drops, Maze District, Canyonlands National Park

After an arduous descent with some exposed scrambling off Maze Overlook, on a five-day, roughly 46-mile, early March backpacking trip in the Maze District of southern Utah’s Canyonlands, three friends and I followed occasional cairns down the South Fork of Horse Canyon. After some searching, we located our quarry—a small but clear pool perhaps four inches deep, one of the few springs we would find flowing in The Maze.

Our packs newly laden with many pounds of water, we hiked about a half-mile beyond the spring into the mouth of a canyon traversed by the Maze’s Chimney Route. Turning onto a sandy footpath, we walked up a short, dead-end side canyon and found soft, flat ground for our tents, surrounded on three sides by tall cliffs of desert varnish. Rising above the canyon rim behind our camp, one of the Chocolate Drops—distinctive stone towers, visible for miles in every direction, colored a darker shade of brown than most of the surrounding landscape—seemed to peer down at us curiously.

We spent two nights in that wonderful, secluded campsite, dayhiking a nearly nine-mile loop from it that linked up two thrilling and improbably circuitous routes through the Maze, and marveling at how the simultaneously warm and cool light of March days constantly transformed our campsite’s canyon walls.

See my story about that trip, “Farther Than It Looks—Backpacking the Canyonlands Maze” and all stories about Canyonlands National Park at this blog.

Hike all of the “10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Evolution Lake, John Muir Trail, Kings Canyon National Park

The first time I walked up to the shore of Evolution Lake, on my thru-hike of the John Muir Trail, I couldn’t see the lake. Arriving there after dark, we laid out our sleeping pads and bags on granite slabs under the stars and quickly nodded off. Catching our first glimpse of our environs at first light the next morning actually made it more magical, because we got to watch daylight slowly reveal this magnificent alpine valley to us.

The second time I walked up to Evolution Lake, on a nine-day, 130-mile hike through the High Sierra in August 2022, my two companions and I arrived on a beautiful morning—and that’s a place that will make you turn in a circle and gape. At 10,852 feet, surrounded by soaring cliffs that rise to tall peaks on all sides, including the 13,000-footers Mounts Mendel and Darwin and the 12,329-foot Hermit, it’s the lowest lake in the Evolution Basin and has the most protected camping. While we were moving on—commencing one of the JMT’s sections that earn it the nickname “America’s most beautiful trail” (a day that concluded at Helen Lake, described in the writeup above)—part of me wished we were spending the night there. I’ve also felt that way both times I’ve backpacked past Wanda Lake in the upper end of Evolution Basin.

See my stories “Thru-Hiking the John Muir Trail in 7 Days: Amazing Experience, or Certifiably Insane?” “High Sierra Ramble: 130 Miles On—and Off—the John Muir Trail,” and “10 Great John Muir Trail Section Hikes,” and all stories about backpacking the JMT at The Big Outside.

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Elizabeth Lake, Glacier National Park

The chilly September air pinched our faces as we took the first steps from our campsite on Elizabeth Lake, on our second morning backpacking the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier. The still, glassy water captured a razor-sharp, upside-down reflection of the jagged mountains flanking it. Then we heard the sound: a high-pitched, nasal whine that built into something like a shriek, the note suspended for several seconds before it was abruptly cut off. It was an elk somewhere in the forest nearby, bugling an invitation to prospective mates.

The campsite at the head of Elizabeth Lake, tucked into the forest just a minute’s walk from the lakeshore beach, not only graced us with that elk bugle, but we also saw our first two bears of the trip while hiking along the lake that morning. While we would hear elk bugling almost every morning and evening on that trip, and more bears as well as mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and moose, Elizabeth Lake awed us with its morning reflection of mountains and set the tone for a consummate Glacier experience that turned into one of my all-time best backpacking trips.

See my story “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” about that 94-mile backpacking trip. Click here to get my downloadable e-guide that will tell you everything you need to know to plan and take that trip (including some shorter variations of it), and click here for my e-guide to the best backpacking trip in Glacier.

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Along the Highline Trail, Wind River Range

Backpacking one of the premier long footpaths in the Winds, the Highline Trail, on a five-day, roughly 43-mile loop from the New Fork/Doubletop Mountain Trailhead at New Fork Lakes, my wife, Penny, our friend, Chip, and I reached an unnamed, small tarn beside the trail late one afternoon and the view stopped us in our tracks. We walked around the tarn and a few hundred feet beyond it to a flat area on a low rise.

We pitched our tents overlooking grassy meadows littered with glacial-erratic boulders that sloped languidly down to the lower of the Twin Lakes. Beyond that lake, the far side of the valley shot upward to a pair of behemoths reaching for the clouds: 12,119-foot Sky Pilot Peak and 12,224-foot Mount Oeneis. Culminating a day when the miles we hiked—10—again exceeded the number of other people we saw, it felt like we’d found an appropriate home for the night.

See “Backpacking Through a Lonely Corner of the Wind River Range” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

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Overland Lake, Ruby Crest Trail

My family reached Overland Lake in late afternoon on day two of a four-day, approximately 36-mile traverse of the Ruby Crest Trail in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains. Immediately—and literally—the three teenagers (including a friend of our daughter’s) staked out their tents turf on the flat top of rocky ledges just a few steps (but several feet) above the wind-whipped waters of the lake.

Although the wind blew all that night—and my wife and I pitched our tent in a more protected spot amid trees about 25 feet behind their tents—we all enjoyed eating and hanging out on that ledge while the evening sun poured alpenglow onto the west-facing peaks and cliffs above Overland Lake.

For several years, I’d been hankering to hike the Ruby Crest and explore a wilderness area that sees relatively few backpackers and dayhikers compared to marquis parks and mountain ranges around the West. We saw wildflowers blooming and incredible terrain, as well as relatively few mosquitoes… or other backpackers. Overland is a logical stop for Ruby Crest Trail backpackers, sitting at the southern end of a 12-mile day that stays high above treeline, with sweeping views.

See my story “Backpacking the Ruby Crest Trail—A Diamond in the Rough.”

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Painter Basin, High Uintas Wilderness

On the third afternoon of a six-day, roughly 58-mile loop hike in northeastern Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness, we reached our second 11,000-foot pass of the day—Trail Rider Pass at 11,700 feet—and paused to catch the breath stolen away by both the climb and the view of an imposing row of 13,000-foot peaks, including 13,528-foot summit of Kings Peak, Utah’s highest.

Then we descended through switchbacks into an alpine garden of rocks and creeks called Painter Basin, where we pitched our tents at around 11,000 feet in the long shadow of Kings Peak. The sun dipped behind Kings, igniting the tall, billowing clouds that filled the sky in a wide arc overhead—a beautiful evening that foreshadowed a night sky riddled with stars. The next day, we dayhiked some 10 miles and 2,500 vertical feet to the crown of Utah, a fun and scenic day.

I returned to Painter Basin in early October 2024 (going on short notice with an unusually good weather window) with my son on the first night of a four-day, roughly 60-mile traverse mostly on the Uinta Highline Trail—and Painter graced us with lovely dawn light on those big peaks. Much of both trips occurred between 10,000 and 12,000 feet and delivered a considerable degree of solitude and beauty.

See my stories “Backpacking—and Sandbagging—Utah’s Uinta Highline Trail” and “Tall and Lonely: Backpacking Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness” and all stories that feature the High Uintas Wilderness at The Big Outside.

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See “12 Expert Tips For Finding Solitude When Backpacking.”

Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park

For one of the trips for my book about taking our kids on wilderness adventures in national parks facing threats from climate change, we took a five-day sea kayaking trip in southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay, where cliffs shoot straight up out of the sea and razor peaks smothered in ice and snow rise thousands of feet overhead. We watched bald eagles and other birds flying overhead, harbor seals popping up out of the water near our boats, Stellar sea lions honking and carrying on while sprawled on the rocks of South Marble Island, and brown bears roaming rocky beaches looking for food.

We spent two nights at this campsite near the mouth of Johns Hopkins Inlet. From there, we kayaked up the inlet to within about a quarter-mile of the mile-wide snout of the Johns Hopkins Glacier; a thousand or more seals occupied floating icebergs or swam around the inlet. Throughout the evenings and mornings in camp, we listened to that massive glacier calve another bus-size chunk of itself into the sea every 20 or 30 minutes, with an explosive sound the native Tlingits called “white thunder.”

See my story “Back to the Ice Age: Sea Kayaking Glacier Bay.”

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Beside Hance Rapids, Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park

The first day of a three-day backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon with my 10-year-old daughter, Alex, and two other families was a tough one: descending nearly 5,000 vertical feet in 6.5 miles on the rugged New Hance Trail. By the time we reached our campsites beside the Colorado River, everyone was whipped. But sometimes it takes a hard day of hiking to reach a magical spot, and this lonely corner on the floor of the Big Ditch is a pretty good place to rest tired legs.

Our front porch offered a view of redrock cliffs just across the river. The gravelly drone of Hance Rapids drowned out all other noise. Night fell like a black curtain to reveal a sky riddled with far more bullet holes than all the road signs in Arizona combined (and these holes glowed). Morning brought a sharp chill to the air—it was November—and the slow, patient unfolding of dawn light descending (kind of like very tired backpackers) from the South Rim a vertical mile above us to the mid-canyon geologic layers and, finally, bathing our campsite in warmth. We left there completely rejuvenated.

See my story “A Matter of Perspective: A Father-Daughter Hike in the Grand Canyon” for more images, a video, and tips on planning this trip, and all stories about Grand Canyon backpacking trips at The Big Outside . See also my story “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” about a trip where the beach at Hance Rapids is a potential campsite, and get my expert e-book also titled “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon” to find out all you need to know to plan and pull off that amazing multi-day hike.

So many spots where I’ve camped in the Grand Canyon would make most people’s list of best camps ever. But I’d be remiss to not mention that every one of our camps for five nights on the GC’s Gems Route—the most remote section of the Tonto Trail and one of the canyon’s most remote trips—featured breathtaking views and a shocking amount of solitude. See my story “Let’s Talk Water: Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Gems.”

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

Pyramid Lake, Wind River Range

After several multi-day hikes all over the Winds, I’ve gotten to know those mountains well and slept in so many beautiful spots that it’s hard to select just a few among them for this story. But after hiking to Pyramid Lake once before, I fulfilled my vow then to return, pitching my tent there on the first night of a four-day loop from Big Sandy in August 2023.

A friend and I camped in a meadow an appropriate distance from the lakeshore, where we enjoyed a sunset that set clouds aglow and a dawn that made the peaks surrounding the lake appear to glow. That proved to be a portentous start to our 41-mile hike, which crossed four high passes, featured camps near gorgeous lakes each night—Washakie and Arrowhead followed Pyramid—and delivered the kind of solitude one can find in the Winds when you’re prepared to work for it.

I’m willing to go out on a limb and call it the best multi-day hike in the Winds.

See my story “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Wind River Range? Yup” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

Do you love backcountry lakes?
Check out these photos of the most gorgeous wilderness lakes I’ve ever seen.

Thousand Island Lake, John Muir Trail, Ansel Adams Wilderness

Few backcountry campsites launch a backpacking trip as beautifully as the first evening my two adventure partners and I spent on a nine-day, 130-mile hike through the Ansel Adams and John Muir Wildernesses and Kings Canyon National Park, mostly on the John Muir Trail. From our camp above the shore of Thousand Island Lake (shown in lead photo at top of story), we watched a sunset that blazed furiously, igniting tiers of billowing clouds drifting past in what seemed like an endless light show with multiple, unexpected encores.

As has happened, I think, every time I’ve backpacked through the High Sierra, that adventure granted us the gift of more than a few really nice camps, including Helen Lake (above) and Minaret Lake. John Muir dubbed the High Sierra the “Range of Light” and the moniker has stuck because of the way those mountains seem to cling tightly to and refuse to release the abundant sunlight they receive. Stir a fast-moving cloudscape into a sunset like we had at Thousand Island Lake and you get a scene to remember forever.

See my story about that trip, “High Sierra Ramble: 130 Miles On—and Off—the John Muir Trail,” “10 Great John Muir Trail Section Hikes,” and all stories about backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.

Score a popular permit using my
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Dome Glacier, Ptarmigan Traverse, Glacier Peak Wilderness

The first four nights of camping on the Ptarmigan Traverse in Washington’s North Cascades are in the alpine zone with 360-degree views of some of the most severely vertiginous and heavily glaciated and snow-covered peaks in the Lower 48. With clear skies, any of those camps might among the most memorable you’ve ever had. But besides White Rock Lakes (scroll down to the list of Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites, below), my other favorite campsite on the Ptarmigan was on the Dome Glacier, base camp for our climb of Dome Peak. Throughout a clear evening, with a sea of clouds filling the valleys below us, we looked south to the white pyramid of the volcano Glacier Peak, glowing above the clouds in the dusk light.

Climbers traditionally begin the Ptarmigan Traverse at Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park and walk south, largely hewing close to the Cascade Crest. Beyond Dome Peak, from the Cub Lake area in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the route descends to the Downey Creek Trailhead on Suiattle River Road. The route is mostly off-trail and crosses six glaciers; expert skills at glacier travel and navigating off-trail through mountains are required. See an excellent route description at summitpost.org/ptarmigan-traverse/154644.

Find the right tent for you. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents”
and “5 Expert Tips For Buying a Backpacking Tent.”

Below the East Face of Mount Whitney

In frigid blasts of wind raking the snow-covered mountainside in April, our party crested a steep slope to find ourselves facing one of the most-photographed and unforgettable mountain vistas in America: the East Face of California’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, highest peak in the Lower 48. On a flat pan of snow at 12,000 feet below that jagged skyline, we pitched our high camp, from which we made a successful ascent of Whitney’s Mountaineers Route the next day.

Spending two clear, starry nights in that camp, we saw the East Face in the varying light of all times of day, from dawn to sunset, dusk to dark. When I mentioned to one of our climbing partners that Whitney’s East Face was the only place I’ve seen that conjures mental images of the peaks of Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, this man—who’s also been to Patagonia—told me that he’d been thinking the same thing.

See my story about that trip, “Roof of the High Sierra: A Father-Son Climb of California’s Mount Whitney.”

Toleak Point, Olympic National Park

On my family’s second day of backpacking the southern Olympic coast, we had already marveled at a massive boulder in the intertidal zone on the beach that was wallpapered with hundreds of mussels, sea anemones, and vividly orange or purple starfish. We had also climbed down an 80-foot cliff on a rope ladder that was missing several rungs at its bottom.

Late that afternoon, we found a spot for our tents on the beach at Toleak Point, where dozens of the rock pinnacles called sea stacks rise out of the ocean just offshore. As the kids played in a tide pool, a sea otter emerged from the pool’s other end and flopped across the beach to plunge into the ocean. A seal cavorted in the waves near us. When I went to explore the sea stacks exposed at low tide, a great blue heron lifted off of one and soared away over the beach like a winged dinosaur. Another of the trips my family took for my book, this three-day hike on Washington’s Olympic coast is still remembered by our kids, as well as my wife and me, as one of our all-time favorite trips.

See my story “The Wildest Shore: Backpacking the Southern Olympic Coast,” with more photos, a video, and my tips on how to pull off this trip.

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Lake Ellen Wilson, Glacier National Park

Our weeklong backpacking trip had featured too many wildlife sightings to count—including bighorn sheep and numerous mountain goats, not to mention that we had an impending date with a sow grizzly bear and her two cubs. The scenery blew us away every day. I would have forgiven Lake Ellen Wilson, our final night’s campsite, for being anticlimactic.

But upon arriving there, we soaked tired feet in the lake’s cold, emerald-colored waters, a 20-second walk from our campsite, gazing around at a basin ringed by thousand-foot cliffs with several waterfalls pouring off of them. Then we laid down on the sun-warmed pebbles on the beach, which felt like a heated bed with built-in massage. For my friend Jerry Hapgood and me, dropping off into an afternoon nap on them was the default setting. It turned out to be our best campsite of the trip.

See my story “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” about backpacking my modified and expanded version of Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip, and all stories about backpacking in Glacier at The Big Outside.

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

Big Spring, Paria Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument

I’d known that Paria Canyon could hold some surprises. But our two-family party found a little more adventure than we’d anticipated—which became evident when the other dad in our group, Vince, plunged hip-deep into quicksand on our first afternoon. But he managed, with considerable effort, to extricate himself; and by the next day, the kids had figured out how to identify shallow quicksand that they could stomp around in, howling with laughter. (Before the trip was over, Vince’s wife, Cat, and I would also take a quicksand dip.) We hiked for five days, mostly in the cold but usually ankle-deep Paria River, through a canyon that ranged from narrow with sheer walls to a big, open chasm between distant cliffs. While every campsite was really nice, the one at Big Spring (above), on our second night, took first prize.

Paria, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border and enters the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (where we finished our hike), at the beginning of the Grand Canyon, is unquestionably one of the great, multi-day canyon hikes of the Southwest—partly explaining why it’s so difficult to snag a permit to backpack it. But the permit system also preserves an unusual degree of solitude and a unique wilderness experience: We saw very few other people over five days, and spent much of that time on our own. (The BLM allows 20 people to start backpacking the Paria daily; we grabbed nine spots.)

See my story “The Quicksand Chronicles: Backpacking Paria Canyon,” with my tips on how to plan this trip.

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Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites

As I visit new places, I occasionally add new campsites to the list above, and have to remove some great spots from the list (to keep it to 25, a somewhat random but sensible number). But bumping a site from my list doesn’t diminish its attraction, of course. So I will keep those former favorites in the list below, to give you even more ideas and goals for future adventures.

Upper Lyman Lakes, Glacier Peak Wilderness

On the second day of a five-day, 44-mile family hike through Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness, we ascended a long finger of snow and crossed the pass that represents the crux of this trip in terms of technical difficulty, Spider Gap, at 7,100 feet. From there, we descended snow into the head of a valley sculpted and scoured by ice just a geologic moment ago, the Upper Lyman Lakes basin.

The Lyman Glacier poured down the cliffs of 8,459-foot Chiwawa Mountain into the vividly emerald waters of the uppermost lake. Barren, snow-speckled peaks and cliffs ringed the valley on three sides. A creek leapt from the lake’s far shore, crashing over stones and a small waterfall, below which some of us took a frigid and very brief bath. Wildflowers sprung hopefully from the few, shallow patches of soil. We pitched our tents on a grassy knoll near a copse of conifer trees, with an unobstructed view of that entire basin. And we spent most of the evening watching the shifting light across the mountains until sunset lit the clouds afire, watching a pair of bucks and a few doe wander through our campsites, and, well, swatting mosquitoes. (It was late July in the North Cascades, after all.)

See my story “Wild Heart of the Glacier Peak Wilderness: Backpacking the Spider Gap-Buck Creek Pass Loop.”

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Benson Lake, Yosemite National Park

At dusk on the second day of a four-day, 86-mile backpacking tour of northern Yosemite—the park’s biggest swath of wilderness—my friend Todd Arndt and I strolled up to perhaps the most unlikely sight deep in the mountains: a sprawling, sandy beach that looks like it got lost on its way to Southern California. After hiking almost 23 miles that day, the trip’s longest, wiggling our toes in the cool sand and standing in the icy lake water in our bare feet reduced us to cooing babies.

A longtime backcountry ranger in Yosemite had told me that I’d find the park’s best backcountry beach at Benson Lake—but I never would have imagined such a vast expanse of fine sand deep in the mountains. It was one of many surprisingly gorgeous backcountry secrets I discovered over seven days of backpacking 151 miles through Yosemite’s most remote corners.

See my story “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” and my story about the three-day, 65-mile first leg of that weeklong odyssey, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows.”

Yearning to backpack in Yosemite? See my e-guides to three amazing multi-day hikes there.

Tanner Beach, Grand Canyon National Park

A longtime backcountry ranger who has hiked every named trail in the Grand Canyon wrote an email to me recommending that I try a route off the South Rim—only a section of which I’d hiked before—that he described as “the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon.” Given the source of that endorsement, how could I not do it? So two friends and I backpacked a six-day, 74-mile, point-to-point traverse that took us down to campsites on the Colorado River and, of course, back up to the rim.

That hike showed us many diverse personalities of the canyon, from one of its most scenic and popular trails, the South Kaibab, to one of its most remote and primitive paths, the Escalante Route. We experienced some of the highest levels of solitude I’ve ever had on Grand Canyon trails—hiking for hours without encountering another person, and having little company at three of our four campsites. But we also spent a fun evening at a campsite with a very friendly rafting party that graciously fed us well.

And our last campsite, shaded by a rock ledge at Tanner Beach, turned out to be the best camp on the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. I think you’ll see why when you read my story about that beautiful hike—titled, appropriately, “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.” Click here now for my e-book of the same title, which will tell you everything you need to know to plan and execute that trip.

See all stories about Grand Canyon backpacking trips at The Big Outside and my e-book to “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

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Columbine Lake, Sequoia National Park

Whichever direction you approach this lake from, you will pay for the privilege of a night here with significant toil. Filling a stone basin at nearly 11,000 feet, below the distinctive spire of Sawtooth Peak and an arc of snaggle-toothed mountains, Columbine is reached either via a 600-foot hump up through dozens of switchbacks from Lost Canyon; or a much harder 1,200-foot scramble, sans maintained trail, up a steep mountainside of sliding scree from Monarch Lakes to 11,630-foot Sawtooth Gap, where a primitive but better path leads down to Columbine. (We took the former and descended from Sawtooth Gap to Monarch Lakes—and were glad we did not carry backpacks up that route.)

Once there, though, your effort is (mostly) forgotten. We explored the granite ledges on the northshore of the lake, where crevices and small bowls in the granite hold tinypockets of water and you sometimes have to scramble on all fours over short, vertical walls. Alpenglow painted the peaks a salmon hue in the evening–of course—and sunrise cast an unbelievable pallet of orange, yellow, and reds onto a curlicue sculpture of clouds hovering just above one jagged ridge nearby. While not easy on the legs, Columbine Lake is very easy on the eyes.

See my story “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park” about this six-day backpacking trip, which included Precipice and Columbine lakes, with many more photos, a video, and information for planning this trip yourself. As of 2021, Sequoia National Park prohibits camping within 100 feet of Columbine’s lakeshore, to help protect the lake from use impacts.

Whitie Cox Camp, Middle Fork Salmon River, ID

Boy, it’s hard to pick one campsite that outdoes all others on the Middle Fork of the Salmon—they’re all pretty darn nice, often on large beaches in a canyon flanked by cliffs and mountainsides of pine forest, rocky crags, and golden grasses rising to summits 3,000 feet overhead. But for me, one stands out, and my family has, just by coincidence, camped there on both of our six-day rafting and kayaking trips down the Middle Fork.

In July 2019, on our second Middle Fork trip, joined by 20 good friends that included families with teens and young adults, we once again spent our second of five nights on the river at Whitie Cox camp. Just above a sweeping bend in the river, the camp has views up and down the canyon and a sprawling beach where the group sat in a large circle of folding chairs and talked and laughed for hours. After dark, some of us laid out our pads and bags on the sand and slept under the stars to the sound of the river softly murmuring past. In early morning, several of us hiked nearly a thousand feet up a ridge to an amazing vista up and down the canyon.

The Middle Fork, deep in central Idaho’s sprawling, 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, is rightly known as one of the great multi-day, wilderness river trips in America—if not the greatest—for its mix of breathtaking scenery, frequent rapids up to class III and IV, numerous hiking opportunities, hot springs, world-class trout fishing… and beautiful campsites.

See my story about that most-recent trip on Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River, and my story about my family’s first trip down the Middle Fork when our kids were four years younger.

See also my story about my involvement helping to create a new long-distance trail through the vast wilderness areas of central Idaho, which includes the Middle Fork Salmon River Trail, “America’s Newest Long Trail: The Idaho Wilderness Trail.”

Camp Schurman, Mount Rainier National Park

Camp Schurman sits at 9,460 feet, on the very tip of Steamboat Prow, a cleaver of busted volcanic rock and dust. Two massive glaciers, the Emmons and Winthrop, part around this stone prow in a way that illustrates how frozen water behaves much the same as its liquid form. More than four square miles of moving ice, thousands of years old, and stretching over nearly 9,000 feet of elevation, the Emmons is the largest glacier in the Lower 48; the Winthrop isn’t much smaller. When two friends and I set off to climb the Emmons in early August a few years ago, with much of the snow melted off the glaciers, they displayed heavy scarring: huge, frighteningly beautiful crevasses as plentiful as waves on a storm-tossed ocean.

A two-foot-high, oval, stone wall shielded our tentsite from the irrepressible, bone-chilling wind. Standing outside our tent, I was struck by the mind-boggling scale of Mt. Rainier. Looking up at the mountain, I couldn’t fit it all within my peripheral vision. And yet, I knew I was looking at a tiny fraction of Rainier—which made me feel both very small and very fortunate for just being there.

Getting There From White River Campground at 4,400 feet, five miles past the White River ranger station (get a climbing permit there), hike the Glacier Basin Trail 3.2 miles to Glacier Basin Camp, at 6,000 feet. Follow a climbers’ trail up into the basin, reaching the Inter Glacier (good training ground for new climbers) at around 6,800 feet. Climb to Curtis Camp on the ridge north of Mt. Ruth, then descend off the ridge onto the Emmons Glacier and continue to Camp Schurman at 9,460 feet.

Map/Guidebook Trails Illustrated Mt. Rainier no. 217, $11.95, (800) 962-1643, natgeomaps.com. Mt. Rainier—A Climbing Guide, by Mike Gauthier, $18.95, mountaineersbooks.org.

Contact Mt. Rainier National Park, nps.gov/mora.

Granite Park, John Muir Wilderness

On the second night of a three-day, 32-mile, partly cross-country traverse of the John Muir Wilderness from North Lake Trailhead to Mosquito Flat Trailhead in the High Sierra, we pitched our tents in Granite Park, an aptly named high valley speckled with scores of alpine lakes and tarns and encircled by an arc of 12,000- and 13,000-foot spires of barren, golden stone. In the evening, the sinking sun painted the peaks, lakes, and granitic landscape in a shifting, vivid light that was absolutely captivating. We couldn’t tear our eyes from the light show that went on for a few hours. When the last alpenglow faded away, night brought a sky riddled with stars.

In the morning, we set out early and I got the above shot of my friend Jason Kauffman passing a lake minutes from our campsite.

See my story and more photos about backpacking a 32-mile, partly off-trail traverse in the John Muir Wilderness for information on how to pull off this trip.

“Kid Rock” campsite, Green River, Canyonlands National Park

We made up the name for this campsite; it doesn’t have a name that I’m aware of, though it is an established and large campsite on the Green River in Stillwater Canyon, seven miles above the confluence with the Colorado River. We gave it that name because, minutes after we landed, the eight kids in our five-family crew—ranging in age from four to 12—immediately planted their figurative flag on this boulder at the edge of the campsite and christened it “Kid Rock.” We all now remember that site by the name the kids gave that boulder.

Really, there are many special campsites along this lazy stretch of the Green, which passes through a canyon of soaring redrock cliffs and spires. But besides being spacious and scenic, this one sits at the bottom of a trail that climbs about three miles uphill to White Crack, one of the most spectacular campgrounds on the White Rim.

See my story about floating for five days down the Green River through Stillwater Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Rock Slide Lake, Sawtooth Mountains

Having lived in Idaho since 1998, I have explored much of the state’s best-known mountain range, the Sawtooths. But it took me 13 years to finally backpack into the deep interior of the southern Sawtooths, an area speckled with mountain lakes that lies a solid two days’ hike from the nearest roads in any direction.

So when my friend Jeff Wilhelm and I carved out four glorious September days to finally explore this area, we found deep, clear lakes filled with lunker trout, ringed by jagged peaks, and trails that don’t receive many boot prints. Walking through the bright, airy forest there, filled with granite outcroppings, reminded me of the High Sierra—without all the people. We used Rock Slide Lake as a base camp for two nights to give us a day to explore with daypacks, and spent hours on its shore, marveling at the dawn and sunset light there.

See my story about a four-day, 57-mile in the southern Sawtooth Wilderness for more photos and information for planning this trip.

Green River, Dinosaur National Monument

Long shadows leaned over the steadily sliding river as we pulled into our first campsite on a four-day rafting trip on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the Utah-Colorado border. From the floor of Lodore Canyon, we gazed up at burgundy cliffs soaring a thousand feet overhead. One friend said to me, “This is probably the nicest campsite I’ve ever seen.” But what was truly amazing was that the second night’s campsite was better than our first—and the third night’s site was even more breathtaking than the first two. For that reason—and because many campsites on the banks of the Green in Dinosaur are equally beautiful—I’m simply lumping all of them together for this list.

See my story about that trip, “Why Conservation Matters: Rafting the Green River’s Gates of Lodore.”

Coyote Natural Bridge, Coyote Gulch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, UT

My memory of my wife’s and my first backpacking trip in Coyote Gulch 16 years earlier was cloudy when we returned recently with our 12- and 10-year-old kids and another family. Sometimes revisiting a place doesn’t measure up to a fond recollection of it; not so with Coyote Gulch, in southern Utah’s Escalante River canyons. It was more scenic even than I remembered. Soaring, red rock walls tower along its length. A steady creek pours over several short waterfalls, its year-round flow keeping the canyon bottom lushly green. And then there are features like Jacob Hamblin Arch and Coyote Natural Bridge.

My plan had been for us to spend our second night at one of the campsites below Jacob Hamblin; but the team was a little too pooped by the time we reached Coyote Natural Bridge to push on more than an hour farther. It turned out to be serendipitous, because we had the sandy beach area around the bridge to ourselves (whereas the campsites at Hamblin are popular). The kids played for hours in the creek and some adults took an evening hike while the others laid down on the warm sand with a book.

See my story about backpacking Coyote Gulch (and hiking slot canyons in the Escalante and at Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks), with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Tiger Key, Everglades National Park, FL

Songbirds chattered and flitted among the trees along the shore. Cormorants and brown pelicans skimmed the water’s surface. Egrets glided overhead. In one secluded cove in Tiger Key, an outermost island of the Ten Thousand Islands in Florida’s Everglades, we sat in our canoes and watched 10 brilliantly pink roseate spoonbills perched in a tree, watching us. In a small bay, we sat rapt while a dolphin swam wide circles around our canoe for about 20 minutes. Every evening, we stood in the warm beach sand watching the blazing red orb of the sun slowly sink into the Gulf of Mexico.

Another of the trips I took my family on for my book, paddling the Everglades was one of the most magical for all of us—for the scenery, the exotic birds, and the unique experience of having a wilderness beach all to ourselves.

See my story about kayaking the East River and canoeing and wilderness camping in the Ten Thousand Islands of Everglades National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

White Rock Lakes, Ptarmigan Traverse, Glacier Peak Wilderness

It was the third day of our six-day trip on arguably America’s premier mountain haute route. A multi-day walk along a high mountain crest, the Ptarmigan Traverse crosses six glaciers and stays high above treeline until the fifth day. We camped by lonely alpine lakes—one of which was still completely frozen and snow-covered in mid-August—below jagged summits in possibly the most vertiginous mountains in the country.

My climbing partners Stefan Kinnestrand and Wes Cooper and I ascended two of those glaciers, the LeConte and the South Cascade, in whiteout conditions on that third day, navigating by GPS while watching very carefully for crevasses. Then we scrambled from another pass down a precarious slope of loose rock so steep that a slip might have concluded with a tumble of several hundred feet right to the bottom. Most of the ground surrounding the White Rock Lakes remained snow-covered that August day, and the lakes were still almost completely frozen. When the fog finally lifted, we got a view across the deep valley of the West Fork of Agnes Creek to the Dana Glacier and Chikamin Glacier pouring off a ridge connecting several rocky peaks and spires. I’ll eventually post a story and more photos from the Ptarmigan Traverse.

Getting There Climbers traditionally begin the Ptarmigan Traverse at Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park and walk south, largely hewing close to the Cascade Crest. Beyond Dome Peak, from the Cub Lake area in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the route descends to the Downey Creek Trailhead on Suiattle River Road. The route is mostly off-trail and crosses six glaciers; expert skills at glacier travel and navigating off-trail through mountains are required. See an excellent route description at summitpost.org/ptarmigan-traverse/154644.

Spring Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park

Southern Utah’s Capitol Reef has scenery to match its siblings in the National Park System—but when it comes to crowds, this place ain’t no Zion or Yosemite. In the visitor center at the outset of a three-day, family backpacking trip, a ranger told me that we were the only party getting a permit to backpack into Spring Canyon that day.

We hiked below towering, burgundy cliffs with patches of white and orange and black water-stain streaks, passing enormous boulders piled up below the cliffs. More than four hours after setting out from the Chimney Rock Trailhead, we pitched the tent on a grassy bench in Spring Canyon, beneath cliffs topped by domes and spires soaring hundreds of feet overhead. Staying there for two nights, with a day of exploring in between, we saw no other people. If that kind of solitude is rare in the backcountry of many national parks, it’s especially unusual in a spot reached with relatively little effort.

See my story about dayhiking, slot canyoneering, and backpacking in Capitol Reef National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Lagunas Chevallay, Dientes Circuit, Chilean Patagonia

The 35-mile Dientes Circuit through the Dientes de Navarino (“Teeth of Navarino”) on Isla Navarino (Navarino Island), at the southern tip of South America, is chock full of ends-of-the-Earth moments and beautiful campsites. With my friend Jeff Wilhelm and 22-year-old Puerto Williams-based trekking guide Maurice van de Maele, I hiked for four days through a wild, wind-battered landscape of incisor-like rock towers and alpine lakes that gets visited by just a handful of people every year.

About halfway through the trip, the Antarctic wind blew us through Paso Ventarron (Ventarron Pass) as the late-day light pierced clouds above the Lagunas Chevallay. We descended the rocky trail to camp beside the large, unnamed lake shown at the head of the valley in the photo above.

See my story about trekking the Dientes Circuit, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

East Fork Owyhee River

Guiding our kayaks between tight canyon walls on Deep Creek, we didn’t see the confluence until we practically fell into it, the swift waters spitting us out into a deeper, wider channel: southwest Idaho’s East Fork Owyhee River. The four of us immediately landed and dragged our boats up onto a spacious beach on river right, tired and wet. I felt chilled in my wetsuit from a day that had seen us spend eight hours or more paddling through rain, snow, hail, and wind.

Perhaps a football field’s distance downriver, the East Fork made a sharp left turn and plunged into unseen quarters between sheer rhyolite walls. As evening descended, those cliffs became a study in contrasting light—some in dark shadow, some edged with sunlight, and the white rock of the farthest one glowing as if lit by some internal power source. Though just one of many scenes of staggering natural beauty from an eight-day, 82-mile adventure on the upper Owyhee River system, from Deep Creek to Three Forks, that one has stuck with me.

See my story about kayaking the upper Owyhee River, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Little Frazier Lake, Eagle Cap Wilderness

Sometimes the destinations closest to home are the ones you neglect for too long. That was the case for my family with northeastern Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, just a half-day’s drive for us, but a place we had not yet backpacked in (with the exception of one disastrous attempt, when our son was a toddler, that was aborted due to a nasty stomach virus. But I have skied the backcountry of Norway Basin in the Eagle Cap with friends.) So last summer, we finally took a five-day, 41-mile loop in the southeastern corner of this 350,000-acre wilderness.

We hiked up broad, U-shaped valleys and camped by boisterous streams and lakes that offered mirror reflections of dawn light and alpenglow on rocky, 9,000-foot peaks. I made the side hike up 9,572-foot Eagle Cap for its 360-degree panorama overlooking much of the range; the kids played in streams and had the treat of one of the most spectacular thunderstorms of their lives on our second afternoon. Our third campsite, at Little Frazier Lake, sat near the lake’s outlet creek, where my son worked for hours rearranging rocks; my daughter and I scrambled high up some nearby ledges. And in the morning, the lake offered up a perfect reflection of the stone basin cradling it. I will eventually post a story, with more photos, about this trip.

See my story about this five-day, family backpacking trip in the Eagle Cap, including more photos and a video, for information on planning this trip.

Unnamed Canyon, Beehive Traverse, Capitol Reef National Park

An hour into a three-day, cross-country traverse of the Waterpocket Fold formation in Capitol Reef, my friend David Gordon and I had already taken our first wrong turn, seen a bighorn sheep, and I’d dislodged a boulder that nearly crushed David. (We were off-route.) The incidents were omens for the days to follow, navigating our way through a maze of canyons, cliffs, domes, and towers, where it was not unusual to spend 20 minutes or more hemmed in by seemingly impassable cliffs before finding the narrow ledge or the break in the wall of rock that indicated the direction of our route.

My friend, local guide Steve Howe, spent many seasons working out this cross-country hike, which begins at Grand Wash and zigzags south a very circuitous 17 miles to Capitol Gorge. He calls it the Beehive Traverse, for the type of sandstone towers encountered along the way. He shared a map and GPS data with David and me to let us attempt it ourselves; very few people have hiked the route before us, and most of them were guided by Steve. On our second night, we camped in this unnamed canyon below flying buttresses of golden sandstone.

See my story, with lots of photos and a video, about backpacking the Beehive Traverse in Capitol Reef.

On the Dunes, Great Sand Dunes National Park

Not long into our first day backpacking across the massive sand dunes of this park—which tower several hundred feet tall—I was already convinced that carrying a pack loaded with food and gear for three days as well as two gallons of water up giant dunes was not a brilliant plan. Our group of editors from Backpacker Magazine marched a few miles over the rolling, sometimes steep dunes until we found a relatively flat spot to pitch our tents. Then the magic show began.

It was November, and the light of late afternoon and early evening transformed the shifting, mountainous dunes into three-dimensional works of abstract art. I wandered a wide perimeter around our camp in the evening and early morning, shooting photos of frost on multi-colored dunes that often came to a peak as sharp as on the roof of a house. At times, sand avalanching downhill under our boots made an eerie sound, a phenomenon known as “singing.” I decided the dunes more than made up for the effort expended getting there.

See my story, with more photos, about backpacking at Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes for information on how to pull off this trip.

Lake 8522, Sawtooth Wilderness, ID

We backpacked the Alpine Creek Trail in Idaho’s Sawtooths less than three miles up a sunbaked valley flanked by cliffs to where it ends abruptly in ponderosa pine forest. A steep headwall loomed above us, 500 vertical feet or taller, capped by rocky ledges—a daunting obstacle that would logically turn away most hikers. But I had been told that the basin of unnamed lakes just beyond the pass at the top of this earthen wall was worth the effort of reaching it. So my son, Nate, almost 11 at the time, and I, joined by his buddy, another Nate, and that kid’s dad, Doug Shinneman, clawed and high-stepped our way up a faint, very steep user trail, grabbing branches and slipping in mud, and scrambling up exposed ledges.

At the top, we saw that I’d gotten good advice. A cool forest embraces one side of the blue-green waters of Lake 8522; a granite cliff juts straight out of the water on the other side. We found a spot in the woods for our tents and spent the next couple of days fishing, exploring the higher lakes in the basin, and taking in some sunrises and sunsets that kept my camera busy.

Getting There From ID 75, about 20 miles south of Stanley and 40 miles north of Ketchum, turn west onto Alturas Lake Road and follow it about seven miles to its end at the Alpine Creek Trailhead. Hike the Alpine Creek Trail roughly 2.5 miles to where the maintained trail terminates. Follow a faint, very steep and rough user trail that climbs almost straight uphill several hundred feet, with some scrambling, to a pass that leads into a lakes basin. Lake 8522 is a short walk beyond the pass. This area has some user trails and established campsites, but is not managed like official trails; minimize your impact.

Map Earthwalk Press “Sawtooth Wilderness,” $9.95, (800) 742-2677, omnimap.com.

Contact Sawtooth National Forest Stanley Ranger District, (208) 774-3000, fs.usda.gov/sawtooth.

Doubtful Sound, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

It was a typical summer day in Doubtful Sound: alternating spells of light mist and steady rain punctuating brief periods without precipitation. The shifting gray overcast delivered about 10 minutes of sunshine the entire day. But the air was warm and the water flat, its dark surface as clear as a just-cleaned mirror. Tendrils of ghost-like clouds floated around granite cliffs that rose straight out of the sea up to 4,000 feet high; and the cliffs wore long coats of thick rainforest that seemed to defy gravity.

Our small group pitched our tents behind a rocky beach, in the forest of podocarp trees and punga tree ferns. After a mild night of periodic showers, we woke and walked to the beach to see the water still and glassy, reflecting the sea cliffs and misty clouds.

See my story about sea kayaking Doubtful Sound, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Tonto Trail, Grand Canyon National Park

If there’s a bad campsite in the Grand Canyon, I haven’t found it yet. But my favorite (so far) is this spot just off the Tonto Trail, on the plateau between Lonetree Canyon and Cremation Creek. We camped here on the last night of a four-day, late-March family backpacking trip from Grandview Point to the South Kaibab Trailhead (another trip my family took for a chapter of my book).

While we were exposed to the wind—which can blow pretty hard—and had to carry water to that camp, those were small tithes for a 360-degree panorama reaching from the South Rim to the North Rim, with countless named temples and buttes within view, most prominently the Zoroaster Temple (visible in the background of the photo above). While the kids played with rocks in the dirt and my wife read, I walked around with my camera, finding an amazing background in every direction.

See my story, with more photos, about backpacking in the Grand Canyon for information on how to pull off this trip.

Indian Basin, Wind River Range

Six friends, 500 pounds of gear and food for a week, one horsepacker to haul our stuff the 15 miles from the trailhead to Indian Basin—and plenty of alcohol, which figures prominently in this adventure tale. We had grand ambitions for several rock and snow climbs of peaks along the Continental Divide that week. We didn’t plan on daily, cold morning showers or the violent afternoon thunderstorms that would dump a couple inches of hail in 30 minutes and threaten to blow our tents to Iowa.

Though we never tied into a rope all week, we did tag a few walk-and-scramble-up summits, including 13,745-foot Fremont Peak in cold wind and fog, and 13,517-foot Jackson Peak. Mostly, though, we huddled in all of our clothes under a tarp in camp, plowing through our alcohol supply and laughing uproariously over things I barely recall. I got the above shot during one of the rare moments of glorious sunshine that made us optimistic about climbing—until the next storm cell drove us back into our tents.

Getting There The Elkhart Park trailhead is 14.5 miles from Pinedale. From US 191 (Pine Street), in Pinedale, turn north onto Fremont Lake/Half Moon Lake Road. In three miles, bear right on Skyline Drive. A short distance beyond a viewpoint overlooking the high peaks, bear right at a fork to parking for the Pole Creek Trail. Follow the Pole Creek, Seneca Lake, Highline (for just a quarter-mile), and Indian Basin trails about 15 miles to Indian Basin.

Map Earthwalk Press “North Wind River Range,” $9.95, omnimap.com.

Contact Bridger National Forest Pinedale Ranger District, (307) 739-5500, fs.usda.gov/btnf.

Dog Lake, Seven Devils Mountains

A fresh September snowfall had just blanketed the Seven Devils, which rise to over 9,000 feet and form the east rim of Hells Canyon in west-central Idaho. My friend Geoff Sears and I started our three-day hike in thick fog, at first catching only glimpses of the craggy peaks.

But the weather slowly cleared through the afternoon, as we leapfrogged surviving segments of a long-abandoned, faint trail leading to Dog Lake, where we put our tent up in a small basin that rarely sees human visitors. That evening and the next morning, under blue skies with no wind, the lake offered up a sharp reflection of the snow-plastered cliffs of black rock.

See my story about another backpacking trip in Hells Canyon.

Getting There From US 95, a mile south of Riggins, Idaho, turn west onto Squaw Creek Road (CR 517). Drive 16.5 miles to Windy Saddle Trailhead, a half-mile before Seven Devils Campground. Hike south on Boise Trail 101 for 7.4 miles. Just after crossing Dog Creek, turn west and look for traces of the faint trail leading about 1.3 miles to Dog Lake; you’ll be mostly bushwhacking through semi-open forest with some blowdowns obstructing the way.

Map The Hells Canyon National Recreation Area map, Hells Canyon NRA website (below).

Contact Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, Riggins ranger district, (208) 628-3916, fs.usda.gov/detail/wallowa-whitman/recreation/?cid=stelprdb5238987.

Mount Baker, WA

It was a wretched campsite, actually. We’d had no intention of staying there, but weather left us without a better choice than to endure an interminable night on that cold ground of sharp stones. The wind-tortured, 9,000-foot saddle separating the Coleman and Deming glaciers on Mount Baker in Washington’s North Cascades was simply where we ended up when Plan A—camping on the summit—crashed in the sea of ambitious dreams. My wife, Penny, and I were climbing our first Pacific Northwest volcano years ago with our friend Larry Gies, through thick fog that reduced visibility to less than 100 feet at times. By late afternoon, we gave up on reaching the summit, pinned our tents to the ground, and dove inside.

But two hours later, a mountain fairy granted us one of those rare, magical events that occur when least expected: Sunshine lit our tents. We stepped outside to see the cloud ceiling below us. We tagged the mountaintop as the setting sun strafed that sea of clouds with red and orange light. You can’t distinguish our tents in the photo above, but they’re in the saddle below us—that miserable, serendipitous spot.

Getting There From I-5 north of Bellingham, follow WA 542 for 33.8 miles. One mile past Glacier, turn right onto Glacier Creek FS Road 39, and continue eight miles to parking for Mt. Baker (Heliotrope Ridge) Trail 677. The trail ends after two miles, at 4,800 feet; continue on the climbers’ trail up the Hogsback to a tenting area at 6,000 feet on the edge of the Coleman Glacier.

Map Green Trails Mt. Baker no. 13, greentrailsmaps.com.

Contact Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest outdoor recreation information, fs.usda.gov/mbs.

The best-known dayhikes in America’s national parks are certainly worth adding to your outdoor-adventure CV. Summits and hiking trails like Angels Landing in Zion, Half Dome in Yosemite, the North Rim Trail overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Glacier National Park’s Highline Trail, the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail and many others represent the highlights of the crown jewels of the National Park System. And for that very reason, unless you take those hikes outside the peak seasons or times of day, you can expect to encounter a lot of other people.

But there are other national park dayhikes that remain off the radar of many hikers—so they attract a tiny fraction of the number of people flocking to the popular trails. This story will point you toward many of the best of them.

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 list of hikes below draws from more than three decades of exploring the parks, including the 10 years I spent as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. On these 18 hikes, you’ll find scenery just as majestic as those famous trails, while typically encountering few other people and possibly having these spots to yourself (as I did on several of them). 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 hikes is an exclusive benefit for paid subscribers to The Big Outside.

You might want to bring along a friend or your family—just to make sure you don’t get too lonely.

Share your questions or thoughts about these hikes—or suggest your own—in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Taylor Canyon, Zion

Easily accessible but far from the well-beaten paths of Zion Canyon, the five-mile, nearly flat, out-and-back hike up the Taylor Creek Trail explores a canyon with walls rising nearly 2,000 feet above a cool forest watered by a vibrant creek (lead photo at top of story).

You’ll pass two historic cabins dating back decades, and at the end of the maintained trail, reach Double Arch Alcove, a pair of giant arches in the Navajo sandstone beneath 1,700-foot-tall Tucupit Tower and Paria Tower.

See my “Photo Gallery: Hiking the Kolob Canyons of Zion National Park,” and all stories about Zion at The Big Outside.

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Tenaya Lake to Clouds Rest, Yosemite

The view across Tenaya Lake of a breathtaking sweep of granite domes and cliffs sets the tone for this 14-mile, round-trip hike up 9,926-foot Clouds Rest. In the same neighborhood as Half Dome, comparatively unknown Clouds Rest offers an even bigger panorama, taking in Yosemite Valley and Half Dome, plus an ocean of mountains spanning most of the park.

But it’s not as strenuous as the distance suggests, with just under 1,800 feet of elevation gain and loss. The hike’s highlight comes in the final 300 yards traversing the narrow summit ridge, above dizzying drop of 4,000 feet—that’s a thousand feet taller than the face of El Capitan.

See more photos from Clouds Rest and a video in “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” as well as “The 12 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite,” and all stories about hiking in Yosemite at The Big Outside.

Want more? See “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes”
and “Extreme Hiking: America’s Best Hard Dayhikes.”

Eagle Peak Trail, Mount Rainier

The fact that this trail ascends relentlessly nearly 3,000 vertical feet in 3.6 miles partly explains its obscurity. But the main reason may be that it lies somewhat out of the way, starting in the little village of Longmire, in a park already possessing an embarrassment of riches when it comes to dayhiking options.

Don’t let either of those facts discourage you, because this hike is a gem with a sudden, jaw-dropping payoff at the top.

It rises through lush, quiet, old-growth Pacific Northwest forest and crosses meadows bursting with wildflowers in mid-summer, ending at a saddle at 5,700 feet in the rugged Tatoosh Range—where Mount Rainier abruptly commands most of the horizon in front of you, looking both incomprehensively massive and close enough to touch.

See “The Best Hikes in Mount Rainier National Park” and all stories about Mount Rainier National Park at The Big Outside.

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Static Peak, Grand Teton

While no casual stroll—17.2 miles and 5,000 vertical feet round-trip—Static Peak unquestionably ranks among the finest dayhikes in Grand Teton National Park. But it’s often overlooked by visitors, who focus on the canyons farther north.

From Death Canyon Trailhead, hike past views of Phelps Lake, along a roaring cascade, into majestic Death Canyon, and eventually to a panorama from 10,790-foot Static Peak Divide that encompasses Death Canyon, Jackson Hole, Alaska Basin, and the southern Tetons. Continue up the half-mile, 500-vertical-foot user trail to Static Peak’s 11,303-foot summit for even bigger views spanning a large swath of the Teton Range.

See “10 Great Big Dayhikes in the Tetons,” and all stories about Grand Teton National Park at The Big Outside.

Plan your next great backpacking trip in Grand Teton, Yosemite,
and other parks using my expert e-books.

Big Spring, Squaw, and Lost Canyons and the Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands

While nearby Chesler Park commands the attention of most hikers in the Needles District of Canyonlands, the less-traveled trails into Big Spring, Squaw and Lost canyons and the Peekaboo Trail deliver similarly mind-blowing views of 300-foot-tall candlesticks and cliffs.

The 7.5-mile loop from Squaw Flat campground up Big Spring Canyon and down Squaw Canyon, with only about 600 feet of uphill and downhill, follows a circuitous route up steep slickrock over a sandstone pass overlooking the canyons and miles of redrock towers.

For a longer outing, add five to six miles to explore Lost Canyon and the Peekaboo Trail.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all stories about Canyonlands at The Big Outside.

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.”

Dawson and Pitamakan Passes, Glacier

At nearly 7,600 feet, Dawson and Pitamakan passes—and the several miles of high, alpine trail connecting them in the southeast corner of Glacier National Park—deliver sweeping panoramas of remote, icy peaks and strikingly blue alpine lakes from high above valleys carved into classic U shapes by ancient glaciers.

Connect them on a strenuous, 13-mile loop with 2,500 feet of up and down by catching an early boat shuttle across Two Medicine Lake and hitting Dawson first, ahead of the crowds that hike just to Dawson Pass—itself an outstanding, 9.4-mile, out-and-back walk for those looking for a moderately strenuous day. The early start will increase your chances of seeing wildlife like mountain goats and bighorn sheep, and you’ll leave most of the other hikers behind on the alpine traverse between the passes and the descent from Pitamakan. To shorten it, walk partway out the almost flat trail leading north from Dawson Pass and then double back (though you’ll encounter a stream of dayhikers).

See “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Glacier National Park,” “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park,” my expert e-books to the best backpacking trip in Glacier and backpacking the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier, and all stories about Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

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Hermit Trail, Grand Canyon

While most dayhikers flock to the Bright Angel and South Kaibab trails—and both are wonderful (the latter ranks among the best national parks dayhkes)—you can find rare South Rim solitude on a beautiful dayhike even in the peak spring and fall seasons.

Take the park shuttle to the end of the Hermit Road and descend the Hermit Trail into the canyon of Hermit Creek, slicing through the canyon’s vivid Supai and Redwall layers. It’s rocky and steep in spots—that’s why you’ll see few people. Turn around and retrace your steps when you like. Breezy Point is 5.5 miles and about 2,200 feet downhill and the Tonto Trail junction is seven miles and over 3,400 feet. Remember that going up is harder.

See photos in my story “One Extraordinary Day: A 25-Mile Dayhike in the Grand Canyon,” which describes a five-star Grand Canyon ultra-hike from Hermits Rest to Bright Angel Trailhead, with easy transportation logistics (as opposed to hiking the canyon rim to rim).

Do your Grand Canyon hike right with these expert e-books:
“The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
“The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon”
“The Complete Guide to Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim.”

Blacktail Deer Creek Trail, Yellowstone

The Blacktail Deer Creek Trail doesn’t climb a mountain or pass any thermal feature. But from its nondescript trailhead east of Mammoth, it meanders across gently rolling grasslands and meadows that look like an American Serengeti, where there’s a good chance of running into herds of elk and bison—or wolves or bears.

Reaching the cliff-flanked Black Canyon of the Yellowstone River at 3.7 miles and over 1,000 feet downhill, you can continue in either direction along the river; a quarter-mile downstream lies Crevice Lake, whose waters reflect the forest, hills, and cerulean sky.

See “The 10 Best Hikes in Yellowstone,” “The Ultimate Family Tour of Yellowstone,” and all stories about Yellowstone at The Big Outside.

Planning your next big adventure?
See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and The Big Outside’s Trips page.

Navajo Knobs Trail, Capitol Reef

For starters, it’s somewhat baffling that the Navajo Knobs Trail sees so few hikers, because there are few dayhikes in Utah’s parks—or in the entire National Park System—that compare with it. And at 9.4 miles out-and-back, with 1,620 feet of elevation gain and loss, it’s quite moderate.

Although starting at the busy trailhead for the immensely popular and short hike to Hickman Natural Bridge, the Navajo Knobs Trail quickly diverges from that trail, and you will see very few hikers while winding upward to overlooks above Hickman Bridge and, beyond that, a sweeping view of the cliffs, domes, and wild topography of Capitol Reef from the canyon rim, 1,000 feet above the Fremont River Valley.

And you’re not done. The trail continues meandering below enormous cliffs and towers, with continuously expanding panoramas that take in distinctive formations like Pectols Pyramid, The Castle, and Fern’s Nipple. At 4.7 miles, the ends with easy scrambling to the tiny summit of one of the pinnacles named the Navajo Knobs and an even broader and higher perspective on the fascinating geology and topography of Capitol Reef National Park.

See “The Best Hikes in Capitol Reef National Park” and all stories about hiking and backpacking in Capitol Reef National Park at The Big Outside.

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Heather Pass-Maple Pass Loop, North Cascades

In the vertiginous North Cascades, usually only climbers enjoy views of this park’s sea of jagged, snow- and glacier-clad peaks stretching for miles to every horizon.

But that’s also what you will find on this 7.2-mile loop, with 2,000 feet of uphill and downhill, from the Rainy Pass Trailhead on WA 20.

Starting in a forest of towering fir, hemlock, and spruce trees, you climb to views of cliff-ringed Lake Ann, dramatic Black Peak from Heather Pass—followed by Maple Pass, where much of the North Cascades spreads out before you.

Go in August or early September, after most of the snow has melted out, and when the huckleberries are ripe and columbine and other wildflowers bloom.

See my story “Exploring the ‘American Alps:’ The North Cascades,” and all stories about the North Cascades region at The Big Outside.

Got an all-time favorite campsite?
See “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites”

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Solitude has always reigned as one of the holy grails of backpacking: We all dream of finding that lonely campsite deep in the wilderness with an amazing vista, or hiking for miles or days encountering few or even no other people on the trail. Unfortunately, reality often conflicts with expectations for many backpackers when they discover that the dream trip they’ve been anticipating for months was apparently a dream trip for an awful lot of other people, too.

But the truth is that there are many ways to find backcountry solitude because the odds work in your favor: Most wilderness trails have few or no people on them most of the time. The search for solitude is less a needle-in-a-haystack conundrum and more a matter of thinking outside the box: You simply have to understand where and when to look for it—and stop thinking like everyone else thinks.

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 learned the tricks for finding solitude described in this story over more than three decades (and counting) and innumerable thousands of miles of backpacking, including the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog.

Following the strategies described in this story, I have enjoyed surprising degrees of solitude even on popular trails in major national parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, Glacier, Zion, the Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains, and others, as well as in federal wilderness in mountain ranges like the Wind River Range and Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, in the Southwest canyon country—and even on parts of the John Muir Trail.

I believe these tips will work for you, too.

Like many stories at The Big Outside, part of this story requires a paid subscription to read: The first six tips below are free for anyone to read, but reading the rest—including tips you may not find from other sources—is an exclusive benefit for readers with a paid subscription to The Big Outside.

Please share what you think of my tips or any of your own tips for finding solitude in the comments section below this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Click on any photo in this story to read about that trip.

1. Hit Less Well-Known Areas of Popular Parks

The first truth to understand is just how heavily concentrated most backcountry use is in the most popular parks. Chew on these stats for a minute:

• From 2011 to 2016, the number of permit requests for starting the John Muir Trail in Yosemite National Park doubled, reaching about 3,500. That explosive growth prompted Yosemite to implement a rolling lottery for JMT permits. These days, that system operates efficiently and fairly—yet still, nearly 70 percent of applications are unsuccessful.

• I once interviewed a retired backcountry ranger who’d worked for 37 years in Yosemite, 25 years as wilderness manager, and had hiked every trail in Yosemite “probably about 10 times.” (The definition of “good gig.”) He said about 10 percent of the park’s hundreds of miles of trails—the JMT from Happy Isles to Donohue Pass and the Sierra High Camps loop—accounts for about 80 percent of all trail use. Little Yosemite Valley alone accounts for almost 20 percent. He told me: “There are areas of the park where you will see very few people.” Having backpacked all over Yosemite, I’ve discovered how correct he was.

• Up to 2013, Mount Rainier National Park received around 800 applications every March (when the park begins accepting permit requests for the year) for wilderness permits to climb or backpack in the park, including all or part of the Wonderland Trail. That number jumped to 1,400 in 2013, 2,000 in 2014, over 2,700 in 2015, and 5,900 in 2017—44 percent of them for backpacking the Wonderland Trail. The park has campsite capacity to grant about 900 permits annually for the entire Wonderland, about one in three of the roughly 2,500 applications for a full Wonderland permit.

• When applying for a backcountry permit in the Grand Canyon on the earliest date possible (four months in advance), the success rate in obtaining one goes from nearly 100 percent for trips from December through February to around 40 to 65 percent in April and October. Upwards of 75 percent or more of applications for backpacking the three popular corridor trails (Bright Angel and South and North Kaibab) in spring or fall get denied.

The flip side of those statistics reveal that many backcountry areas even in popular parks see far less demand for permits, such as northern Yosemite and a hike I consider Yosemite’s best-kept secret backpacking trip, numerous trails in Glacier including sections of the Continental Divide Trail, the Grand Canyon’s Royal Arch Loop, Escalante Route, Gems Route, and Clear Creek Trail and Utah Flats Route, Mount Rainier’s Northern Loop, the Maze District in Canyonlands, Yellowstone’s Bechler Canyon, and a gorgeous swath of the High Sierra in Sequoia National Park, among many examples. I even enjoyed solitude on most of a solo, 34-mile loop in the Great Smoky Mountains—during the October peak foliage season.

Ready for Some Real Solitude?
See my story “Big Scenery, No Crowds: 12 Top Backpacking Trips For Solitude.”

I’ve helped many readers of my blog plan a backpacking trip—and successfully obtain a permit—in Yosemite, Grand Teton, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and other uber-popular parks. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan all the details of your next adventure.

See my stories “12 Expert Tips for Planning a Wilderness Backpacking Trip,” and “How to Decide Where to Go Backpacking,” the menu of stories on my All Trips List, and my expert e-books to backpacking trips.

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2. Go Outside the Peak Season

You may have read this tip before and thought it sounds decidedly unappealing. If so, reconsider your apprehension because this represents one of the easiest strategies for finding solitude.

Good weather often persists into autumn in many mountain ranges—while backcountry use tends to tail off sharply after Labor Day. I’ve long considered September the best month for backpacking in Western mountains and have almost always encountered mild, dry days, cool but not frigid nights—and no bugs. In the Southwest canyons, moderate temperatures often arrive by late winter or early spring and the fall season can extend late October and November.

As examples, target post-Labor Day—the later the better for fewer people and less competition for a backcountry permit, weather permitting—to hike many northern Rockies or Pacific Northwest trips such as “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park,” the Teton Crest Trail, Wind River Range, or Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail; late September or into October for “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite” or the John Muir Trail, mid-autumn for Zion’s Narrows (I hit a perfect weather window in early November—although I watched the forecast and our hike was preceded and followed by cold, wet weather), and late March to early April or late October well into November for “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

And friends and I enjoyed even more solitude than usual by backpacking the Maze District in Canyonlands in the first week of March—when, contrary to what many backpackers might assume, while we had cold nights, daytime temperatures were ideal for hiking, trails and routes were dry (and snow-free), and we found water flowing from seasonal springs that can dry up as early as April.

My related tip no. 9 (below) shares a trick I’ve learned about the transitional times between peak and off-seasons.

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3. Go to Wilderness Areas Instead of National Parks

For many good reasons, national parks are the marquis destinations for everyone who loves the outdoors. But the U.S. has over twice as much wilderness as parks: more than 111 million acres compared to 52.2 million acres in parks. That’s an area larger than California spread across more than 760 designated wilderness areas that are managed for the same values and uses as the large, wilderness-based national parks—although often without a need to reserve a permit in advance.

Many federal wilderness areas were protected before some newer parks and were once considered for national park designation—in other words, they’re just as nice, but without the red tape, renown, and crowds of some parks.

Want some suggestions?

I have long seen similarities between Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains and the Tetons and High Sierra. The Wind River Range certainly compares for majesty with any mountains in the West and may be outdone only by the High Sierra in its abundance of beautiful alpine lakes. While getting a backcountry permit for the John Muir Wilderness and others in the Sierra can be competitive, it’s nothing like trying to get a permit in parts of Yosemite or for the John Muir Trail.

Moreover, the Timberline Trail around Mount Hood is in many respects the scenic equal—and a shorter version—of Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail. Paria Canyon unquestionably ranks among the very best multi-day canyon hikes in the Southwest. You’ll find outstanding mountains and solitude in much of the High Uintas Wilderness (lead photo at top of story), Glacier Peak Wilderness, Pasayten Wilderness, and Eagle Cap Wilderness, and on the Ruby Crest Trail.

Looking for a trip in the East? One of my favorites is this 32-mile loop in New Hampshire’s Pemigewasset Wilderness.

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

4. Go to the Places You Rarely Hear About

Yes, some wilderness areas are as popular and crowded as some national parks—or even more crowded, especially if they lack a permit system or other management regulations that control the numbers of people. Proximity to population centers exerts a major impact on the numbers of people seen on trails (the subject of the next tip).

But sometimes it’s simply a matter of a destination becoming well known—a name familiar to many people all over the country. If you read and hear about the place frequently, other backpackers are reading and hearing about it, too.

Seek out places you rarely or never hear about—like some of those in the menu of stories on my All Trips List, including southern Utah’s Dark Canyon Wilderness, Hells Canyon, and Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains and wild and remote Idaho Wilderness Trail.

Plan your next great backpacking trip in Yosemite, Grand Teton,
and other parks using my expert e-books.

5. Go to Places Far from Big Cities

Living in Idaho, a largely rural state where the biggest city is much smaller than the major cities in many states, I have explored many mountain ranges and canyons visited by few other people simply because there aren’t very many people who live within a half-day’s drive of these places. Conversely, parks like like Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Great Smoky Mountains, Everglades, Grand Canyon and others lie within reach of millions of people for a weekend trip.

Travel to places that lie several hours’ drive from major population centers and airports and you are virtually assured of seeing fewer people.

Some national parks with five-star scenery that are prime examples of this tip and the previous one are North Cascades, Capitol Reef, and the southern Olympic coast.

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6. Backpack Deeper into the Backcountry

When I planned a 150-mile hike—split into two backpacking trips—to explore the most remote corners of Yosemite National Park (photo above), that pair of trips illustrated a phenomenon I have seen repeated many times in many places: The deeper we got into the backcountry, the fewer people we saw.

With most backpackers taking trips of 50 miles or less, the falloff in numbers of people in the backcountry becomes significant the more miles you put between yourself and the nearest trailhead. Spending more days in the backcountry also eases you into a different mindset that brings its own rewards, beyond finding solitude, but which solitude amplifies.

I’ve enjoyed the myriad benefits of longer trips on this 80-mile hike through the North Cascades National Park complex, this 57-mile hike in the remote interior of Idaho’s Sawtooths, this 74-mile trek I’ve called “the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon,” this 94-mile traverse of Glacier National Park (photo at right), and this 130-mile hike through the High Sierra, mostly on the John Muir Trail.

Upping your game from 40-mile backpacking trips to, say, 80 miles, or a thru-hike of a long trail like the John Muir Trail, becomes much more feasible when you get smarter about your trip planning and habits in camp and on the trail and lighten your gear.

See my stories “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking,” “5 Tips for Getting Out of Camp Faster When Backpacking,” and “12 Expert Tips for Planning a Wilderness Backpacking Trip.”

Score a popular permit using my
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

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Some people might say my wife and I are bad parents. We’ve repeatedly and deliberately placed our kids—at young ages—in risky situations. And I’m not talking about letting them ride their bikes without wearing helmets or frequently taking them to McDonald’s.

I’m talking about setting out with seven- and four-year-old kids to cross-country ski through a snowstorm for hours to a backcountry yurt. Tying a six-year-old into a rope and letting him or her rock climb a cliff. Rappelling into slot canyons. Backpacking into the remotest and most rugged wildernesses in the contiguous United States, from the Grand Canyon to the Tetons to Glacier National Park.

Rafting and kayaking a whitewater river deep in one of the Lower 48’s biggest wilderness areas. Paddling down a river teeming with alligators, or in frigid Alaskan waters plied by killer whales, while camping on wilderness beaches where brown bears would view those kids as the perfect hors d’oeuvres before a satisfying meal of adult humans. Trekking for a week through the snow-covered, highest peaks in northern Europe.

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And yet, beyond occasional whining and tears (which I do less of these days than I did as a new parent), we have suffered no disasters. Maybe we’ve just been lucky.

But I don’t think so.

It’s tempting to believe that you only have to take kids outdoors and nature will do the rest—because spontaneity is inherently better than micro-managing, right? But experience has taught me that how diligently the adults in charge control the situation will dictate how well the outing goes and how positive an experience everyone has, adults and children.

Through a lot of trial and a fair bit of error, I’ve learned a few things over the years about keeping kids, at all ages, both safe and happy outdoors—and when it comes down to it, safe and happy are always our ultimate objectives out there.

The good news is that whether you’re paddling among alligators or just out for a short hike in a state or national park with little kids, the strategies for success boil down to some simple rules that are as easy to follow as they are to overlook.

This article shares lessons I’ve learned while taking our kids—who today are fine young adults who make us proud and still love getting outdoors on trips with us—on numerous family adventures dayhiking, backpacking, climbing, skiing, and paddling since they were quite little, a period of time that included the 10 years I spent as Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and my many years running this blog.

Keep these 10 rules in mind and I think you will find that, as with my family and others that join us, everyone will be happy—most of the time, anyway. And safe.

Click on any photo to read about that trip. Please share your thoughts on my advice or your own tips or questions in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

1. Know Everyone’s Limits

When I was thinking about attempting a three-generation hike up Mount St. Helens, I was most concerned about the two people who would be the slowest and weakest in the group: the youngest person, my 10-year-old daughter, and the oldest, my 76-year-old mom. So I discussed the plans in detail with everyone who was going: how long it would take us, and how hard it would be both in concrete numbers (10 miles and 4,500 vertical feet) as well as comparing it to the difficulty of other activities they had done before. And I only considered hiking St. Helens with them because everyone had previously done well on hikes that were nearly as difficult.

This is my first rule because it’s so important, and yet incredibly easy to forget: Your group’s limits will be determined by the weakest member. At best, ignoring this can result in much loud complaining and bad feelings; at worst, someone could end up hurt, you may finish the day hours later than planned (with everyone exhausted, starving, and unhappy), and children may have a lasting negative impression of the event.

On the other hand, knowing and respecting everyone’s limits allows you to challenge those limits without undo risk and with the potential for huge emotional rewards for everyone: My family all made it up Mount St. Helens—and back down—and reaped the rewards of tremendous pride and self-satisfaction.

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2. Make Sure They Sleep Enough

This may seem like “duh” advice, but it’s remarkably easy to overschedule our kids just as we overschedule ourselves, resulting in an entire family of sleep-deprived people—not a fun group to hang out with. This is my second rule because it’s important enough to be interchangeable with my first rule, and I’ve found it rings just as true with grade-school kids and teenagers as it did when my kids were toddlers and preschoolers.

Before any trip, I make an extra effort to see that my kids get to bed at a decent hour. If I plan to wake them up earlier than usual for, say, a big day of hiking, I let them know in advance and get their buy-in with the plan. When camping, it’s easy to stay up later than usual, which is fun and fine occasionally. But too many late nights will catch up with them (and it’s hard to sleep late in the morning outside because of daylight), and studies show that a regular sleep schedule is the key to being well rested. Be aware of the time and whether your kids need to hit the sack.

See “Boy Trip, Girl Trip: Why I Take Father-Son and Father-Daughter Adventures”

3. Are They Warm Enough?

Your child’s body is not like yours, so don’t assume you will experience hot and cold identically. You may be hiking or skiing the same trail in the same air temperature, but kids can warm up more quickly because of their different metabolism and because they often simply move around more than adults. At the same time, they often cool down more quickly when stationary because they typically have much less body fat and mass.

Children don’t pay close attention to their own bodies until they’re really uncomfortable. Ask them regularly, “Are you warm enough?” Even when they say, “Yes,” their faces or body language may say, “No.” Look for signs that they’re cold in their posture, or reduced activity level, shivering, or blue lips. Tell them to add a layer if a cool wind kicks up, before they’re cold, or to shed a layer if you’re beginning a hot climb, before they’re sweating heavily (wet clothes can make them cold later).

Babies, of course, can’t tell you they’re too hot or cold—although crying may be a signal. A trick I used was to periodically check a baby’s or toddler’s fingers or feet, because those get cold first. On the other hand, you can overdress a young child, too. (Guilty.) If his or her face feels unusually warm, unzip or remove a layer of clothing.

One advantage with babies: You carry them, so they’re not cycling between warm and cold due to shifting exertion level. Keep in mind that wind plays a big factor when dressing a baby—put a windproof layer on her when needed, but not in calm air when it can make a baby too warm. Also, a baby in a carrier on your chest or back receives a fair bit of warmth from you.

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4. Shovel Food and Drinks At Them

I cannot even estimate how many times I’ve been reminded that a kid who’s complaining about being tired is usually just hungry. Give him a big candy bar or a sandwich. Children need to eat more frequently than adults—sometimes every hour.

Look for warning signs: grumpiness, a slowing pace, growing quiet, or a faraway look. Feed them pre-emptively—before they tell you, “I’m starving!” Ditto with water. But because most kids are sippers rather than gulpers, remind them every 15 or 20 minutes, “Everyone take a big drink.” They might object at first, but they’ll get used to doing this. Giving each kid a daypack and hydration bladder helps.

Another lesson I’ve learned the hard way: Don’t let a kid hit the wall. When he’s obviously in need of fuel, don’t let your own goals prompt you to suggest that you all “hike a little farther and find a better spot to stop soon.” Just stop immediately and give him something to eat; you will spare everyone a lot of unnecessary grief.

Make your family’s next big trip one of “The 10 Best Family Outdoor Adventure Trips.”

5. Spell Out the Rules

Even adults who are in an unfamiliar environment will occasionally make seemingly stupid, dangerous mistakes simply because they did not understand the hazard. Children are at greater risk of not recognizing hazards. With young kids, define clearly the safe-zone boundaries in camp and rules like no one wanders out of sight or earshot of camp, or plays at the edge of the river without wearing a PFD.

Experienced older kids need less instruction and can be given more freedom, but don’t assume older kids who are beginners understand every potential hazard. Have experienced kids watch out for the less experienced. Rather than making rules seem like restrictions, tell kids you’ve taken them on this adventure because you think they have the maturity and ability to be safe and respect the rules—allowing you all to pursue more such adventures in the future. Turn it into a teaching moment about personal responsibility, and they will understand that they are in control of their own destiny.

Click here for my e-guides to the best beginner-friendly backpacking trips in Yosemite and Grand Teton.

6. Make It a Game

Adults have the patience and perspective to endure the difficult and tedious times of a hike or other outdoor activity, knowing the payoff will come. That’s an important life lesson that children can glean eventually—but in order to guide them to that level of maturity, we have to make tedious times fun for them.

Kids’ needs for stimulation vary depending on their age. Play games while hiking, like starting with one simple word and taking turns thinking of rhyming words until only one person is left with a rhyme. My kids love “The Story Game,” where we take turns contributing short pieces to the plot of one developing story, which always takes humorous twists. Tell your kids a true story about some past adventure of yours. Stop at streams for kids to play in or boulders to scramble on. Promise them a special stop along the hike, or that everyone gets a big candy bar at the halfway mark, to give them something to look forward to.

Relevant to this tip: Let your child bring stuffed animals or other comfort items that will make them happier. Think about what could make them more comfortable during difficult times—like high-quality technical clothing, or a lightweight umbrella for hiking in the rain.

Want this lifestyle for your family?
Use my “7 Tips for Getting Your Family on Outdoor Adventure Trips.”

7. Surprise Kids

Simply put: Take them someplace really cool. Adults like big views, but kids want to interact physically with the environment. They want to play in water, climb on rocks, crawl through narrow crevices, weaponize sticks, throw stones.

On family backpacking trips when our kids were young, they always wanted us to camp by a creek that was safe for them to get in. They have always loved a paddling trip—being on the water all day, paddling a canoe or kayak or having a turn at pulling the raft’s oars. The Green River through Canyonlands National Park is an easy, family- and beginner-friendly, multi-day float trip.

But our family’s favorite multi-day river trip has been Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River.

Our children were amazed when we descended slot canyons in southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Choose outdoor destinations that you know will provide natural features that engage and excite kids. Make them want to go out again.

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8. Teach Them Skills

On a two-family, cross-country skiing trip to a backcountry yurt, the other dad in our group taught the four kids—age nine to 12—how to build a campfire. He monitored them to be safe, and showed them how, but also gave them the freedom to each start his or her own fire. It was a huge success: they learned a valuable survival skill and had a blast. The takeaway lesson for parents? Children want to learn adult skills; it can be fun and thrilling for them and give them larger lessons.

Start when they’re young teaching kids age-appropriate skills: how to pitch the tent, build a snow cave, light the backpacking stove, use the water filter, read the map, belay a climber and build climbing anchors, paddle and roll a kayak, ski backcountry snow and recognize avalanche hazard. The long-term payoff for parents—besides the satisfaction of seeing your children learn? They learn how to take over these chores from you.

9. Let Them Bring a Friend

Young kids (generally under 10) love being with their parents and getting your direct attention. As they get older, you can still enjoy rewarding parent-child time in the backcountry together. I take an annual father-son and father-daughter trip with my kids for wonderful one-on-one time together—something they look forward to as much as I do.

But it becomes more important to older kids, especially teenagers, to have a friend along. Inviting one of their friends not only helps your child enjoy the trip more, it usually means less complaining: whining isn’t a cool thing to do in front of your friends.

Plus, you could be introducing another kid to the outdoors: When my son was 15, he told me that he wanted us to take two of his buddies on their first backpacking trip. We went, and it was a big success, from the boys enjoying it together to me seeing my son assume a leadership role showing his friends how to pitch their tent, cook on the stove, and other skills. (Read about it here.)

Finding other families that share these interests, where the parents and kids all become close friends, is like finding gold.

I know dangerous. Read “Why I Endanger My Kids in the Wilderness (Even Though It Scares the Sh!t Out of Me).”

10. Give the Gift of Independence

We have to dote on little kids—they need the attention emotionally and require it for their own safety. But as they get older, they must learn to anticipate and self-manage their own needs, so that you and they don’t have to go through the agony of the parent always telling the kid what to do.

This is hard, but know when to cut the cord. Find that delicate balance between giving kids enough rope to trip once in a while—which is okay because they have to learn to fix their own mistakes—without giving them enough to hang themselves. No one enjoys it or benefits when a parent is constantly correcting or instructing a child who’s old enough to figure it out. Everyone is happier when a child doesn’t need a parent’s help.

Ultimately, independence gives children the larger benefit of self-confidence—the belief that they can manage any personal crisis in life. That may be the best gift you can give your children through taking them outdoors.

See all of my stories about family adventures and all stories about backcountry skills at The Big Outside.

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“Oh, no, I wouldn’t take young kids down that river in May. It’s much too dangerous. I tell families to go in June or later, when the river’s lower.”

That was the dire warning issued to me over the phone by an employee with an outfitter based in Moab, Utah, that offers multi-day float trips down the Green River in Canyonlands National Park. His tone completely derailed me: Based on everything I’d read and heard, May was an ideal time for a family trip on the Green—which may well be America’s best easy float trip.

From the put-in at Mineral Bottom on the Green, through 52 miles of Stillwater Canyon and then four miles more on the Colorado River to the takeout at Spanish Bottom, the river slowly unfurls beneath a constant backdrop of giant redrock cliffs and spires. Off the water, you can take side hikes to centuries-old Puebloan rock art and cliff dwellings, camp on sandy beaches and slickrock benches, and maybe even spot bighorn sheep scrambling around on precipitous rock faces.

I had several friends excited about it. We’d comprise a party of 17, with nine adults and eight kids, the oldest 11, the youngest my four-year-old daughter, Alex. A few adults were experienced kayakers or canoeists, but most of our party were novices. I’d assured everyone we’d have no problems, that the river current would be gentle. But I’d never taken my kids on a multi-day river trip before, and I’d never been on the Green (though I had seen much of Stillwater Canyon while mountain biking the White Rim Trail in the park).

I like uncertainty in the backcountry, but encountering surprise challenges with little kids along can be stressful—and potentially dangerous. And at the other end of our group’s age range was my 80-year-old mother-in-law, Ann. High on my personal list of Big Screw-ups to Not Commit? Losing my mother-in-law on a river.

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So I checked into the river’s level and talked to people who knew the Stillwater section, including an employee at another outfitter—and ultimately concluded that first guy I spoke with was blowing a lot of unhelpful hot air, probably because he had never taken kids on a wilderness trip. He reminded me of other (usually childless) people I’ve encountered who, while well-meaning, seem to think children are like fragile glass vases that will shatter if not handled with extreme care. Like most kids I’ve known, mine are as fragile as an alligator.

We decided to go for it.

Under a blazing desert sun on a May morning at Mineral Bottom, we launch a small armada of three heavily loaded rafts, two kayaks (a single and a two-person), and a canoe. If we set out buzzing with excitement—adults all smiles and kids clearly feeling like they’re joining John Wesley Powell’s first descent into the unknown—we have no idea what a lasting impact the next five days will have on us.

That first afternoon, we tie up the boats to scrub brush on a riverbank of slick mud at Fort Bottom. Then we walk 15 minutes to the ruins of a one-room log cabin built in the 1890s by a rancher named Mark Walker. Not much more than 100 square feet, all that remains of it are walls of hand-cut logs, a stone chimney, and roof beams, the willows and mud that formed the roof long gone. Still, it’s remarkable that any of it still stands after a century of abandonment. We enter through the open doorway and walk around the small area of dirt floor, the kids both amused and awed by the vision of someone residing in such a tiny space so far from civilization.

Leaving Fort Bottom, we float into early evening as the long rays of sunlight burnish the deep reds of the canyon walls and cast long shadows across the river. The rippled water displays a complexion of blurred streaks mirroring the shades of crumbling rock above.

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We eventually find a campsite at Potato Bottom. The kids spray onto the beach to play and explore, while the adults commence what will become a three-hour ritual every afternoon of unloading boats, pitching camp, and feeding 17 people. Each morning, we’ll reverse that process—no faster—eating, packing up camp, reloading boats.

But if managing so large a group requires enormous effort, life on the river represents the diametric opposite: the height of leisure.

By our second morning, we adjust to the lazy rhythms of paddling and drifting for those several water-borne hours of each day, leaning back under a nuclear sun to watch it all slide torpidly by us: the ancient geology, the scattered, small groves of cottonwoods and willows, and the always-blue sky. We make slow progress rowing rafts burdened with several hundred pounds of gear, food, water, and humans. And the placid-almost-to-a-fault Green gives us very little speed assist. But we don’t care. We’re in no hurry.

The kids migrate between boats like pirates. They pull on a raft’s oars until bored with the task, eagerly jump at sharing the two-person kayak with an adult, take dips in the silted, chilly river, instigate water fights, and play cards or games in a raft.

We pull to a riverbank two or three times a day to investigate a side canyon or eat lunch. We know there are several other boating parties on the river because we see them in campsites every afternoon; but groups spread out on the slow river, so we rarely encounter those other people during our hours on the water. Generally by mid-afternoon, one of us lifts the lid of a cooler, and the soft hissing of a beer can opening draws our other boats toward the sound.

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“Dad, can we go in the kayak together?”

Our six-and-a-half-year-old, Nate, has been eyeing the two-person kayak covetously. So after lunch that second afternoon, we again shuffle bodies around between boats, and Nate and I cast off onto the brown water in the two-person hard shell. Easily gliding along much faster than the rafts, we paddle ahead of them, drift to let them catch up, circle a raft to ambush its occupants with splashes, and explore the base of cliffs shooting straight up out of the river.

Predictably, that evening, his little sister whispers the same request to me. So on our third morning I again take the two-person kayak out, this time with Alex in the front cockpit, so small her head and shoulders barely rise above the deck. She does her best to manage the two-bladed paddle that’s longer than she is tall, often content to just hold it.

“You’re an awesome kayaker,” I tell Alex. She turns around to me, her smooth-skinned little face split with such a wide smile that I have to smile, too. We spend just a couple of hours together in that boat, but I sense we’ll both remember it for a long time.

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Later that third afternoon, I’m back in the two-person kayak with one of the six-year-old girls, Sofi. I paddle us far ahead of the group, looking for an available campsite big enough for our flotilla. But we keep passing campsites already occupied. The day turns into our longest on the water as we paddle into evening, Sofi and I so far ahead of the others that we don’t see them for two hours.

I worry that everyone behind us is growing tired, hungry, and grumpy. But Sofi utters not a complaint, content to eat snack bars, occasionally dip her paddle into the river, and bask in her extended adventure in the kayak, scouting ahead of our group.

Then I hear Sofi suck in her breath softly. She lifts an arm and points to the riverbank to our right. Not 10 feet from us, a great blue heron, shockingly tall, lithe, and absolutely still, stands in a shallow eddy, one eye staring back at us. I stop paddling and we drift in silence for a moment of frozen time. Finally, the giant bird spreads its wings as if throwing a cape over its shoulders, lifts itself from the water and flaps downriver, disappearing into the backdrop of red cliffs.

Eventually, I see Mark steaming toward us in the single kayak. A longtime whitewater paddler, he’s been dubbed “the fast guy” by the young kids. He catches up and points toward river left, asking, “How about over there?” It looks like a promising spot: a flat bench-like area a short scramble up a steep, rocky riverbank from the water. It turns out to be our best campsite of the trip: acres of dry, flat ground for tents, some shade, big rocks where we set up our kitchen area and lounge—and one huge boulder that quickly earns the moniker “Kid Rock,” where the kids all nestle like puffins on a seaside cliff, lost for hours in their stories and laughter.

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With our first steps on the descent from Maze Overlook into the labyrinth of mostly dry desert canyons that comprise one of the greatest geological oddities in the National Park System—the Maze in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park—we already face our first obstacle: Removing our backpacks, we scramble one by one over a ledge drop of several feet and pass our packs down.

But this introduction to the most technical section of our route merely hints at the arduous and improbable terrain awaiting around the corner.

Shouldering our packs again, the four of us follow a wildly circuitous trail mostly across slickrock, marked by cairns but otherwise unobvious and not visible on the ground. It takes a winding downhill course below redrock cliffs and towers, past mounds of shattered boulders resembling ancient ruins, and along the sloping rims of giant bowls of rippled stone. In several spots, we again remove and pass our packs down and scramble through tight crevices or downclimb a ladder of shallow footsteps chiseled into a sandstone cliff face.

After a shocking amount of time and effort—taking nearly three hours to descend just a mile and 500 vertical feet—we reach the sandy bottom of the South Fork of Horse Canyon. There, we commence a search to find the one natural spring that we’re counting on to sustain us for the next three days.

It’s the second morning of our five-day backpacking trip into the Maze, in the first week of March. My friends Todd Arndt, Pam Solon, and Jeff Wilhelm and I had arrived here two nights ago, spending the night before starting the hike in a primitive, waterless, roadside campsite on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land just outside the park entrance, at around 6,500 feet. We awoke there yesterday to temps in the upper teens and—fortunately—warm, late-winter, high-desert sunshine.

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After checking in at the Hans Flat ranger station—surely one of the most remote ranger outposts in the country—and driving a few miles of rough road to the trailhead, we spent our first day hiking about 11 miles and 1,700 feet down the North Canyon Trail. The sun shone warmly but the temp probably never topped 40° F all day, if it even got out of the thirties, while a slight but wintry breeze kept us often wearing a couple of layers. By late afternoon, we found a place to camp near the rim of Horse Canyon, about a mile northwest of Maze Overlook.

When I stepped out of my tent during that clear and cold first night in the backcountry, my breath condensing in front of my face, the brilliant streak of the Milky Way across the ink-black sky felt almost alarming.

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Maze Overlook

We awoke on our second morning to another bluebird sky and ice in our water bottles and slammed a hot breakfast while gazing at distant cliffs burning red in the early sun. Hiking about 45 minutes up a four-wheel-drive road from our first camp—and seeing no vehicles on it—we reached the Maze Overlook.

It could be called Amazing Overlook.

Standing at the brink of the Maze Overlook’s white cliffs, the name bestowed upon the vast, chaotic sweep of sandstone fins, towers, and canyons below makes perfect sense: It could only be called the Maze. And from that prospect, it’s hard to imagine another place deserving of the moniker. Mesas and pinnacles loom above the twisting labyrinth of chasms, including the four tall, slender, brown pinnacles called the Chocolate Drops, misshapen as if partially melted.

After our arduous descent off Maze Overlook, now well into our second afternoon, we follow occasional cairns and boot prints in sand down Horse Canyon’s South Fork, looking for the water source known as the Below Maze Overlook spring—which the ranger who issued our permit yesterday told us should be flowing.

After some searching, we find a trickle of water and attempt to trace it upstream to its source. But the trickle diminishes to stagnant puddles—and then disappears completely. After some bushwhacking, slogging through sand, and clambering over rocks in the dry creek bed, we realize that trickle was as good as we’re going to find. The ranger had warned that this had been a dry year and some springs may be dry already—even before the end of winter. Despite the cold, we were wise to come this early in the season.

We backtrack to the trickling stream, locate its deepest pool—perhaps four inches, enough to pump water—and, happy the stream is at least clear, we fill every bladder, bottle, and dromedary we brought. Then we hike maybe a half-mile farther, entering the mouth of the canyon traversed by the Chimney Route and turning onto a footpath leading up a short, dead-end side canyon. There, we find soft, flat ground for our tents, surrounded by towering walls of desert varnish.

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Rising above the canyon rim behind our camp, one of the Chocolate Drops seems to peer down at us curiously—at once closer to us as the crow flies than we would have anticipated but miles from us via any route that bipedal primates could walk.

As the sun sinks behind a cliff, heralding another calm, clear, and cold night, we pull on warm layers—and I contemplate how, over several hours today, we hiked a grand total of just over five miles.

Already, we’re learning this truth about the Maze: There are no direct lines and everything lies farther away, in both distance and time, than it looks.

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The Chimney Route

On our third morning, we awaken once again to ice in our water bottles; but in the steep-walled canyon enclosing our campsite, the sun’s warmth only reaches us as the four of us set out to dayhike a loop of almost nine miles—one that will prove more adventurous and scenic than I think any of us anticipates, despite the Maze Overlook vista having set the stage for it.

Less than an hour from camp, we stop before a panel of slightly faded pictographs painted across one wall of the broad, cottonwood-punctuated Pictograph Fork in the Maze—ancient art known as the Harvest Scene.

Believed to have been created by the Archaic People who lived in this region from 8,000 to 2,000 years ago, predating the more widely known (but still little-known) Anasazi, the Harvest Scene’s age has been estimated at 3,000 years—created a millennium before the birth of Christ and the rise of the Roman Empire. Experts consider it identical to one of the most elaborate and best-preserved examples of rock art in the Southwest, the Great Gallery in the Horseshoe Canyon District of Canyonlands, not far north of this spot as the crow flies but also much farther away for non-flight creatures like humans.

Following the Chimney Route past the Harvest Scene, we walk along a nearly flat, sandy river wash in a dust-dry canyon that spans hundreds of feet across, with colorful and complex walls of red and white rock rising 200 to 300 feet tall. 

The canyon grows steeper and more rugged as we follow a well-cairned route up a narrow, overgrown, dry creek bed, eventually zigzagging up ledges on a canyon wall. In spots, rocks stacked by trail builders act as step ladders, enabling us to clamber over the smooth lip of a high ledge or a pour over carved by water from the rare downpours cascading off these cliffs. Patches of ice linger in shaded corners.

Pausing to survey the vertical landscape of rock all around us, an insignificant pocket within the much vaster breadth of the Maze, I can make out no obvious route through it; we’d be lost without these cairns or having the route mapped on a GPS app on Pam’s phone.

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It’s eerily quiet in that way of environments rarely visited by moisture, where only small populations of the most tenacious species of plants and animals cling to a fragile existence. We step carefully around miniature gardens of biological soil crust.

Reaching the canyon rim, we follow widely spaced cairns indicating our route across a slickrock plateau. A slender tower of what looks like hardened, dark-brown mud appears ahead: Chimney Rock. Below that distinctive landmark, at the end of a four-wheel-drive road, we encounter the only other person we’ll see all day, a dayhiker on a roughly nine-mile loop from his campsite at Maze Overlook. In fact, he’s among just a handful of people we’ll bump into in five days out here.

Like the frozen hands of a broken clock, three twisting trails emanate from Chimney Rock: the Chimney Route that brought us here; a trail that charts a winding course through Water Canyon and to the Dollhouse; and the faintest of the three, Pete’s Mesa Route, the one we want to take to complete this loop from our camp.

And there’s no trail signage. Except for the cairns and four-wheel-drive roads, little has visibly changed probably since the Archaic People walked these canyons.

Pete’s Mesa Route traces a high, broad ridge arcing back toward Horse Canyon. For most of its course, we stay up high, seeing the Chocolate Drops in the distance and nearer formations that resemble them. Trailless side canyons choked with fallen rocks and desert scrub tumble away to either side of us.

In the far distance, the topography subtly hints at a deep abyss where the Green River’s Stillwater Canyon meets the canyon of the Colorado River. Beyond that rise the candlestick towers of Canyonlands’ Needles District, while the muscular mesa of the park’s Island in the Sky District looms over everything.

A few miles from Chimney Rock, Pete’s Mesa Route rolls abruptly off the tableland, mimicking the Chimney Route’s zigzags across ledges where we can easily imagine bumping into desert bighorn sheep. We scramble down short, vertical drops, using more step ladders of stacked rocks. Reaching the bottom of another tight, anonymous side canyon, we walk down it until it dumps us back onto a familiar trail, where we know the way back to our tents.

As we stroll back into camp, about six hours after we left, Todd—who has taken countless hikes of all distances with me—calls today’s outing “one of the 10 best loop dayhikes I’ve ever taken.”

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The Gear I Used See my reviews of the outstanding backpack, tent, down jacket, trekking poles, rain shell, stove, sleeping bag, and air mattress I used on this trip.

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See my expert tips in these stories:

“How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking”
“8 Pro Tips for Preventing Blisters When Hiking”
“5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking”
“How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be”

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Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned backpacker, you’ll learn new tricks for making all of your trips go better in my “12 Expert Tips for Planning a Wilderness Backpacking Trip,” “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.”

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Here’s how you reach the best prehistoric Indian rock art in America: From Utah Highway 24, a remote two-lane bisecting the inhospitable desert between the rugged spine of the San Rafael Reef and the deep and isolated canyons of the Green and Dirty Devil rivers, turn east onto a dirt road at a small, easily overlooked sign for Horseshoe Canyon. (Reference point: It’s a tenth of a mile south of the turnoff for Goblin Valley State Park.) Drive about an hour on that sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy road—which can become impassable in heavy rain or when wind piles sand drifts across the road, and where a few roadside signs are the only indicators of civilization—to the West Rim Trailhead.

Then hike down into Horseshoe Canyon and nearly three miles up canyon to a panel of rock art that will reduce even the most seasoned pictograph and petroglyph hunters to awed silence.

My family and another did just that on a weeklong trip to southeastern Utah. The nearly seven-mile, out-and-back dayhike of Horseshoe Canyon, a district of Canyonlands National Park, features red rock walls rising up to about 200 feet tall. But the hike’s main attraction are four pictograph panels, including one widely considered the “most significant” preserved example of prehistoric rock art in America.

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We passed actual dinosaur tracks hardened into rock on the switchbacking trail that drops 800 feet from the canyon rim into Horseshoe Canyon. In the canyon bottom, where a shallow stream nourishes a few stands of cottonwoods, we stopped at the first three panels of rock art on the hike, known (in order) as High Gallery, Horseshoe Gallery, and Alcove Gallery.

Then, about three-and-a-half miles from the trailhead, we walked up to a pictograph panel of colorful figures spanning some 200 horizontal feet beneath an overhanging canyon wall: the Great Gallery. Created by people who used pigments made from powdered minerals to paint on stone—as opposed to more-common petroglyphs, which are produced by chipping away the weather-darkened surface of rock to reveal lighter stone underneath—the Great Gallery consists of a row of mummy-like figures with heads but no limbs, as well as some human-like images and others that resemble bighorn sheep. The largest figures measure over seven feet tall.

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A volunteer ranger gave us an impromptu lecture about the rock art in Horseshoe Canyon, which dates back at least 2,000 years to the Archaic people, who predated the Anasazi and Fremont Indian cultures. Archaeologists are still studying the rock art of Horseshoe Canyon and trying to date it, but no one really understands the meaning or message the art was intended to convey, if any.

For information about hiking Horseshoe Canyon, see nps.gov/cany/planyourvisit/horseshoecanyon.htm.

See all of my stories about Canyonlands National Park, hiking and backpacking in southern Utah, national park adventures, and family adventures at The Big Outside.

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The June evening was more than a few hours old when, without warning, the sky suddenly caught fire. The kids, teenagers and ’tweeners, and some of the adults in our group scrambled up onto a nearby rock formation at least 50 feet tall to observe the sunset from high off the ground. Like a wildfire swept forward by wind, hues of yellow, orange, and red leapt across bands of clouds suspended above the western horizon, their ragged bottoms edges, appropriately, resembling dancing flames.

For a span of just minutes that felt timeless, the light painted and repainted the clouds in ever-shifting, warm colors starkly contrasted against the cool, deepening blue of the sky—as if a vast lake had ignited. We stood hypnotized and enchanted on that evening during a long weekend of camping at Idaho’s City of Rocks National Reserve, until the last, dying flames of the celestial conflagration faded and were extinguished. For that brief time, the sunset had us all, adults and kids, completely in its thrall.

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I follow a simple rule whenever I’m in the wilderness or any natural setting like the surroundings in the primitive campground at the City of Rocks (the sunset described above is shown in the lead photo at the top of this story): I never miss any dramatic sunset. And I almost never miss a similar sunrise. The reason is simple: These are often the most sublime and inspiring times of the day. Passing on them is essentially depriving yourself of one of the best reasons to be out there.

Catching a great sunset occurs with the serendipity of meeting the person who becomes your spouse (although, thankfully, far more frequently)—it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and not blowing the opportunity. The sky conjures a universe of color and emotion in fleeting moments, rushing headlong to a grand finale, after which many observers stop paying attention. But I’ve always enjoyed taking in the slow, quiet onset of dusk, spreading out like a ground fog before rising to overtake the sky. Night then settles in for its long watch, the stars emerging in a flutter of eyes popping open—a few tentatively at first, building to a visual crescendo of hundreds of thousands of specks of light.

From the buildup to sunset through nightfall, it’s the best silent film ever made. I could watch it over and over for a lifetime without ever feeling like its magical spell has diminished in power. The sky’s myriad personality changes across the span of hours from sunset through sunrise make me think that nocturnal animals have it right, and we humans sleep away the sky’s most fascinating hours.

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Sunset in the Everglades

At our campsite on a wilderness beach at Tiger Key in the Ten Thousand Islands of Everglades National Park, which we had to ourselves for two nights on a canoeing trip, our kids, then age 10 and almost eight, abruptly forgot about their sand castles as the enormous, blood-red ball of fire that is the sub-tropical sun appeared to swell and burn with greater intensity and slipped toward the horizon. My entire family stood spellbound as that flaming orb slowly lowered itself into the vast bathtub of the Gulf of Mexico.

Witnessing the dawn comes with the challenge of rising earlier than many people prefer. But after you’ve made the effort to reach a uniquely beautiful and remote corner of the backcountry, trading a dawn that may hold the most precious moments of an entire trip for another hour or two of slumber strikes me as a lost opportunity.

When I’m sleeping outside, the first light of predawn usually awakens me, and I’m glad for that: I want to be awake. I invariably look up to see what the sky has in store. Any signal of an imminent dawn worth observing—like wispy clouds hovering above the eastern horizon, or puffy cotton balls dabbed across the blue dome—will prod me to dress and step outside the tent. If I had slept out under the stars—my default choice if the night promises to stay dry and not buggy, because why sleep inside nylon walls when I can sleep beneath a starry sky?—then all the better: I can watch it from my warm bag.

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Dawn on Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit

I have many times begun hiking before or at first light, often because I had many miles to cover, but also partly because it grants me the great privilege of watching the birth of another day. I’ve watched a carpet of crimson light unroll across mountains and canyons deep in the backcountry of places like Yosemite, the Wind River Range, below the magnificent east face of Mount Whitney, on the crest of the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, from the canyon rim high above the Green River in Canyonlands National Park, in Evolution Basin on the John Muir Trail, and countless other places.

On a fiercely chilly November morning, our last on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, my wife, our new Slovenian friend Gorazd, and I joined a procession of hikers and headlamp beams on a 45-minute walk up Poon Hill—a ritual for Annapurna trekkers. On its open summit, at over 9,000 feet, we gazed at a Himalayan night sky riddled with stars twinkling above the milky silhouettes of five snowy giants glowing faintly in the moonless hour before dawn—including one of the planet’s highest peaks, Dhaulagiri.

The mountains appeared to float above valleys still black with night. Slowly, rich bands of red, orange, and yellow ignited on the eastern horizon. As dawn bled across the sky, flashes of golden light struck the white crown of the first peak, and then hopped across the tops of the others. Within a few minutes, the rising sun turned the world’s greatest mountains blindingly white.

Hitting the trail early usually rewards me with solitude unknown in many places during the daytime hours, and wildlife encounters that are far rarer between mid-morning and early evening. I’ve strolled past bighorn sheep lounging casually beside the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park; heard elk bugling in the Tetons, Yellowstone, Olympic Mountains, and elsewhere; and watched a big bull moose emerge from the pond where it had been feeding on plants in Maine’s Baxter State Park.

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Sunset at Delicate Arch

Science provides a simple explanation for the beautiful light that captivates us at sunset and dawn. When the sun hovers near the horizon, its light passes through more atmosphere before reaching our eyes than it does when it’s directly overhead. That much atmosphere effectively erases the shorter, blue and purple rays of the visible light spectrum from our vision, while the longer red, orange, and yellow light rays remain visible but get more widely scattered across the sky.

But that explanation comes nowhere near sparking the depth of feeling of the actual event—which makes witnessing each possible wild sunrise and sunset a difficult pleasure for me to give up, no matter what obstacle stands in the way.

On the last afternoon of a three-family, spring-break trip to southeastern Utah, where we’d backpacked and dayhiked in Canyonlands and Arches national parks, I could barely muster the energy to lift myself out of the bed where I’d slept most of the day, sicker than I’d felt in recent memory. I willed myself to stand up—it felt like a mountain climb—and to go through with our plans to hike to Delicate Arch in Arches to watch the sunset that evening.

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Just four of us went: my friend, Vince, his 13-year-old daughter, Sofi, my 11-year-old daughter, Alex, and me. It’s possible I’ve never hiked a trail more slowly than that evening. Shuffling along, I watched one person after another pass me, even the slowest, oldest, littlest, and least-fit hikers; watching sunset at Delicate Arch is a popular ritual, so there may have been more than a hundred people out there that evening. We gave ourselves more than an hour to hike the mile-and-a-half-long trail, and thanks to my torpid pace, we arrived only minutes before sunset.

We watched that striking natural sculpture of red and orange rock appear, for several minutes, to glow against the backdrop of deepening blue sky and the gleaming, snow-capped La Sal Mountains in the distance. And even though the return walk took even longer because I was so sick—our car was one of the last to leave the parking lot that night—not one step along the way made me regret the effort to watch that sunset.

We don’t get enough of them in a lifetime as it is; I can’t afford to miss any good ones.

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All of America’s 59 national parks possess special qualities and scenery, without a doubt. But southern Utah’s concentration of unique and awe-inspiring landscapes sets its five parks apart from the rest—and they’re each quite different from one another. You should see them all, and a prime season for hiking the Southwest is just around the corner. In this blog post, I’ll share many photos from Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion, and tips on the best ways to explore these parks.

For starters, how do the five southern Utah parks differ from one another?

Arches has more than 2,000 natural stone arches, as well as hundreds of soaring pinnacles, giant fins, and balanced rocks. Bryce Canyon holds the world’s greatest number of hoodoos, or bizarrely sculpted pinnacles created by erosion.

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Canyonlands is a vast wonderland of multi-colored cliffs, deep canyons, tall spires, and two major rivers. Capitol Reef’s Waterpocket Fold, a nearly 100-mile-long, jumbled ridge of rock, conceals sandstone domes, natural bridges, beautiful canyons, and bighorn sheep. And Zion, Utah’s first and one of America’s flagship national parks, may be the most varied and magical, from the 2,000-foot cliffs of Zion Canyon (lead photo at top of story) to a backcountry filled with geologic anomalies.

Ready to plan your next hiking, backpacking, or paddling trip to any of these parks?

Start by getting some inspiration and ideas from the gallery below, which contains photos from the numerous trips I’ve taken dayhiking, backpacking, and paddling in Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion National Park. Below the photo gallery, find links to the many stories at The Big Outside about these adventures in southern Utah’s national parks, from relatively easy trips ideal for young families (which I took with my family when our kids were young) to very hard-core adventures.

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Looking for beginner- and family-friendly dayhikes and other trips in southern Utah’s parks? Check out my stories about the best dayhikes in Utah’s national parks, my favorite hike in Bryce Canyon, dayhiking in Arches, and floating the Green River through Canyonlands (one of my family’s best trips ever).

Want to find the best backpacking in the Southwest? See my stories about backpacking Zion’s Narrows, The Needles District of Canyonlands, Spring Canyon in Capitol Reef, and a traverse across Zion, as well as “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest” and “The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First.” And definitely read my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Plan your backpacking trip in Zion’s Narrows or other flagship national parks using my expert e-guides.

Are you ready for some top-shelf, expert adventures in the Southwest? See my stories about descending Zion’s incomparable Subway, slot canyoneering in Capitol Reef, and one of the most eye-popping backpacking trips I’ve ever taken, a mostly off-trail route along the spine of Capitol Reef’s Waterpocket Fold (photo above).

Like most stories at The Big Outside, most of the feature stories linked here require a paid subscription, which costs just pennies over $4 a month for a full year or as little as 5 bucks for one month. My blog can help you find and plan all of your adventures. Get full value from it. Click here or the blue button below to subscribe now.

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See my All National Parks Trips page for a menu of all stories about national parks adventures at The Big Outside.

Read about my National Outdoor Book Award-winning book, Before They’re Gone—A Family’s Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, which chronicles the year my family spent taking wilderness adventures in 11 parks threatened by climate change.

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When the National Park Service turns 100 on Aug. 25, it will mark not just the diamond anniversary of what writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously called “the best idea we ever had”—it marks the evolution and growth of that idea from a handful of parks created in the early days to a system in many ways without parallel, that protects 52 million acres of mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, deserts, prairies, caves, islands, bays, fjords, badlands, natural arches, and seashores in 59 parks. Without that protection, these places that draw visitors from around the world would otherwise almost certainly have been exploited and destroyed.

After the designation of Yellowstone in 1872 (lead photo, above) as the world’s first national park, several more followed before the NPS was born in 1916, many of them now legendary names: Sequoia, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, Glacier, Haleakalā, Hawaii Volcanoes, Wind Cave, Lassen Volcanic, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain. During the same time period, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed 18 national monuments (a number exceeded by only one president, Barack Obama, who has designated 19 monuments), many of which later became national parks, including Grand Canyon and Olympic.

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Throughout 2016, The Big Outside is featuring numerous stories about national parks to celebrate the National Park Service centennial, including the photo gallery below of images from nearly all of the national parks I’ve visited (close to half of the 59, so I have more work to do), and some NPS-managed national monuments.

Read more about the Park Service’s history and how you can join its centennial celebration at nps.gov/subjects/centennial. Find a national park and more information about the NPS at nps.gov/findapark.

See the All National Parks Trips page for a menu of all stories about national parks adventures at The Big Outside, or click on the name of any park in the list below of some of my favorites for stories I’ve posted at this blog about that park.

Canyonlands National Park
Everglades National Park
Glacier National Park
Glacier Bay National Park
Grand Canyon National Park
Grand Teton National Park
Mount Rainier National Park
North Cascades National Park
Olympic National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park
Sequoia National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Yosemite National Park
Zion National Park

Click directly to these stories for ideas for your next trip:

“Photo Gallery: 10 Amazing National Park Adventures (and How to Pull Them Off)”
“5 Classic (Age-Appropriate) National Park Adventures For Families”
“Photo Gallery: 11 National Parks, One Year”
“10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit”

Read about my National Outdoor Book Award-winning book, Before They’re Gone—A Family’s Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, which chronicles the year my family spent taking wilderness adventures in 11 parks threatened by climate change.

Do you like The Big Outside? I’m Michael Lanza, the creator of The Big Outside, recognized as a top outdoors blog by a USA Today Readers Choice poll and others. Subscribe for updates about new stories and free gear giveaways by entering your email address in the box at the bottom of this story or in the left sidebar, and follow my adventures on Facebook and Twitter.

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This is National Parks Week, a good time to contemplate the writer and historian Wallace Stegner’s famous quote: “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Are you planning to visit a national park this week or this year? Here’s a gallery of photos from several parks I’ve visited (including Olympic, photo above) to offer a little inspiration.

You’ll find stories, photos, videos, and trip-planning tips and information at The Big Outside about adventures in many national parks, and I’m planning to post more parks stories in the coming weeks and months.

See a gallery of photos from (almost) every national park I’ve visited, and a menu of all of my stories about parks at my All National Parks Trips sub-page at my All Trips page.

If you’re not visiting a park this week, celebrate National Parks Week by starting the planning now for your next park trip. After all, life’s too short to not visit at least one national park every year.

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Do you like The Big Outside? I’m Michael Lanza, the creator of The Big Outside, recognized as a top outdoors blog by USA Today, a Trip Advisor site, and others. Subscribe for updates about new stories and free gear giveaways by entering your email address in the box at the top of the left sidebar or on my About page, and follow my adventures on Facebook and Twitter.

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I just found your blog today after starting my research for a summer guided rafting tour for families. In my next life I’d like to come back as one of your offspring! My husband would like to take our eager son on a guided, overnight rafting trip this summer to celebrate his 10th birthday: father-son trip, but someone else does the heavy lifting so dad and son can focus on enjoyment of the river, campfires and overall one-on-one time. We live in the Bay Area but our son is keen to travel for this trip—Idaho, Utah, Oregon, or Colorado, to name a few suggestions. Can you point us toward some well-regarded guiding companies and provide any insight to consider when we comparison shop?

Kind regards,
Catherine
Lafayette, CA

Hi Catherine,

There are a huge number of guided rafting outfitters and trips out there. I have not done any kind of comprehensive review of them all to know the best, but I do know of some good, reputable, well-established operators who offer reasonably priced trips. You may have already found my stories about our family rafting trips on Idaho’s world-class Middle Fork of the Salmon River (lead photo, above, and photo below), which we took with  Middle Fork Rapid Transit, and Oregon’s Grand Ronde River—a really fun and relatively shorter trip (usually three days) that we did unguided.

Utah’s Green River has several sections that are floated on easy water, including Stillwater Canyon in Canyonlands National Park—which is technically very easy, no whitewater, but gorgeous.

Many of the trips I focus on are somewhat longer, multi-day trips (five to six days), but there are guides who lead one- and two-day trips on sections of the Snake River below Grand Teton National Park, for instance, and on sections of Idaho’s Salmon River.

Two other guide companies I know enough about to recommend, and which have trips on numerous Western rivers, are O.A.R.S., where I’ve known guides; and Holiday River Expeditions, with whom my family is planning to take a four-day rafting trip through the Gates of Lodore section of the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, on the Utah-Colorado border, next summer. That popular stretch is known for its challenging rapids and amazing canyon country.

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I’ll tell you a few trips that are on my to-do list:

The Owyhee River in southwest Idaho and eastern Oregon; I’ve kayaked the upper Owyhee, which is too small to raft, but the main Owyhee River is regularly guided, very wild and pretty with lots of rapids, and not as popular as rivers like the Salmon and Green.

The Tuolumne River east of Yosemite National Park is considered one of the best overnight whitewater rafting trips in the world for its numerous class IV rapids, excellent campsites, and scenery in a federally designated wild and scenic canyon. Check out c-w-r.com/rivers/tuolumne-river.html.

The Grand Canyon, of course, is the granddaddy of long, wilderness, whitewater trips, and it happens to take place within one of the scenic wonders of the world. The park’s website lists outfitters that offer trips ranging from three to 18 days in the canyon.

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There are many more that you will find through online searches. I would simply look for an established outfitter that has been in business for many years, especially on the river you want to raft, and talk to them about safety protocols, your husband’s and son’s experience level, and their guide-client ratio. Reading their websites will provide you will good insights about how they operate and whether you just like their approach.

I think your husband and son will love any trip they take and be inspired to do more together, so I would suggest they pick a trip they have time to do and that they think will be exciting but not intimidating for them.

Good luck, thanks for writing and following The Big Outside.

Best,
Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks so much for taking the time to send me a reply with the information! We are on it. Take care and happy summer.

Catherine

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We follow a zigzagging line of stone cairns over waves of slickrock in the backcountry of the Needles District of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Cliffs and 300-foot-tall sandstone candlesticks tower around us, in more shades of red than Crayola has yet replicated, glowing in the warm afternoon sunshine of late March. Five adults and four kids from three families, we traverse slabs, scramble in single file up the smooth, dry bottom of a narrow water runnel, and pump out calf muscles walking straight up steep ramps. In the desert Southwest, trails haven’t learned the axiom of Euclidian geometry that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We’re navigating a maze without walls.

Above us, a long, sandstone ridge forms a 200-foot-tall wall, mostly of sheer cliffs, separating Big Spring Canyon from Squaw Canyon. Just below a saddle in that ridge, we use hands and the balls of feet to smear delicately up a short but steeper slab, where a slip could result in a cheese-grater slide and tumble back down to the bottom.

Out of habit and instinctive parental concern, I offer to carry any kid’s backpack up the slab. But they all basically shrug off my offer—while, I can’t help but notice, being kind enough not to openly laugh it off. To them, three 13-year-olds and an 11-year-old, this minor challenge represents a welcome flash of excitement—a mild adrenalin pulse they will remember as one of today’s highlights, not something to worry over. Then each of them scrabbles expertly up it.

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In the slickrock pass between the canyons, we drop our packs for a break and to enjoy a view that would make Dr. Seuss smile. Stratified cliffs stretch out in three directions. Stone towers, with bulbous crowns bigger around than the column on which they sit, seem ever at the verge of toppling over: On top of flouting generally accepted rules of geometry, this Alice’s wonderland ignores the laws of physics. I’m not sure that’s good for backpackers tromping through here who are used to their environment simply behaving the way it’s supposed to behave.

After the snacks have been consumed and the pictures taken, we shoulder packs again and the four kids lead the way down into Squaw Canyon, amused by the continually circuitous route of cairns through a place where you can see for miles and still not be able to see exactly where you’re going.

The Needles District of Canyonlands

I’ve come to southeastern Utah with my son, Nate, and daughter, Alex, and our friends and frequent adventure partners the Serios (Vince, Cat, and daughters Sofi and Lili) and Jeff Wilhelm and his 21-year-old daughter, Jasmine. We’ve planned a spring-break week of backpacking and dayhiking to explore the Needles District of Canyonlands and Arches National Park. First up is this overnight, short, easy hike up Big Spring Canyon and down Squaw Canyon, followed by a dayhike to the incomparable Chesler Park area of The Needles (lead photo at top of story). Then we’ll base camp at a rented condo in Moab for a few dayhikes in Arches.

The Needles District and Arches harbor the kind of geological oddities that fascinate both kids and adults. I’ve walked in the past to almost every spot we’ll visit this week. But by returning with my kids, I can relive vicariously, through them, that magical experience of seeing all of this for the first time.

One of the four geographically distinct areas of Canyonlands National Park, the Needles District covers the high plateau and canyons south and east of the Colorado River and south of Moab. The Colorado and Green rivers subdivide the park’s districts—the other three being the Island in the Sky, The Maze, and Horseshoe Canyon. And the rivers themselves provide a platform for water-based adventures like the classic, multi-day float trip on the Green through Stillwater Canyon, and one-day or half-day, beginner-friendly canoe trips on the Colorado, supported by Moab-based outfitters that will rent you the canoe and water gear and pick you up by jetboat in the afternoon.

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With its trail network and backcountry campsites, the Needles is the district of Canyonlands most conducive to backpacking—although you’re limited in how far you can hike by the scarcity of water, forcing you to carry a lot of it. From our route’s last reliable water in Big Spring Canyon, we’re hauling all we’ll need for nine people for the rest of our first day through our second day.

While that can make it challenging to backpack with kids who can’t yet carry their share of gear and food weight, it just requires recalibrating your sense of how far your family can hike and how many days you backpack.

After the Needles District, hike the other nine of “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Erosional forces working over unfathomable gulfs of time formed this arid and tortured landscape; but it looks more like the work of giant children squeezing mud from their fists. The desert Southwest has a way of defying comprehension, even among people who’ve come to know it well. I can only imagine what it looks like to the eyes of these kids, since it wasn’t until adulthood that I first gazed in awe and disbelief on this region.

A mile down Squaw Canyon from the pass, we reach our designated campsite near the junction with the Lost Canyon Trail. Tomorrow, Jeff, Jasmine and I will explore the geological abstractions of Lost Canyon, along with the Peekaboo Trail, while the others take the direct route down Squaw Canyon back to our cars.

Tents go up, cook stoves come out. Night falls early in March, gifting us with one of the darkest and most star-riddled skies in the country.

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Chesler Park

Hiking to Chesler Park has the quality of approaching the Emerald City in the land of Oz: Chesler’s outsized, multi-colored towers of Cedar Mesa sandstone form a castle-like rampart on the horizon, looming ever larger as you near it. The day after finishing our overnight backpacking trip, we’re dayhiking some 11 miles out-and-back to Chesler. As our party spreads out on the trail, Nate and I hike together, scrambling atop smaller rock formations along the trail and passing between two close sandstone walls that form a narrow corridor.

The long, morning shadow of 300-foot-tall pinnacles falls over us as we walk up one of the Chesler Park Trail’s few steep sections. At a break in the row of pinnacles, we stroll through a sort of natural doorway into Chesler Park. It’s pretty much as I remember it from a backpacking trip here many years ago: a horseshoe of sandstone spires arcing around a patch of desert about a mile across. We walk to a couple of ledges overlooking Chesler and the badlands outside its walls, where white-capped mushrooms of stone sprout from the earth and yet more burnt-red spires rise in the distance.

I try to persuade the kids to hike a couple miles farther, to the other side of Chesler Park, where the Joint Trail passes through a very narrow, sheer-walled slot in solid rock that I know will delight them. But today, I get no takers. The sun’s hot, our hike will cover about 11 miles without going out to the Joint Trail—and the kids know we’re headed from here to a condo, our first showers in a few days, and real food and ice cream. So I surrender to a wave of momentum that I can’t stop, and we turn around to hike back out.

Like this story? You may also like my “10 Tips For Getting Your Teenager Outdoors With You”
and my very popular “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids.”

Arches National Park

About a mile-and-a-half out the Devils Garden Trail in Arches National Park, just past Landscape Arch—the park’s largest, spanning 306 feet—the trail appears to terminate abruptly. But it doesn’t, a fact made obvious by the hikers ahead of us on this popular trail, leaning forward into a steep, narrow, stone ramp ascending between cliffs. We follow the traffic toward some of the more remote arches in the park’s Devils Garden area, Navajo and Partition.

Within the first hour of hiking into Devils Garden, we had already visited Landscape as well as Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch. Later, two of us will take the half-mile walk out to Skyline Arch. Yesterday, we spent a couple of leisurely hours walking around the park’s Windows Section, ogling and scrambling around a veritable riot of sandstone bridges that boggle the mind: the twin North and South Windows, Turret Arch, and Double Arch, all within a short walk of one another.

Several years ago, when these kids were too young to remember much of their first visit to Arches, we hiked them down the flat, mile-long Park Avenue trail, below signature formations of Arches National Park like the Three Gossips and the Courthouse Towers. We also took them on the 20-minute walk around Balanced Rock, a sight so improbable to them that the term “balanced rock” embedded itself in my children’s vocabulary, as a term referring to any random assemblage of rocks, however tiny or ephemeral, that appeared top-heavy.

Tell me what you think.

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