Do you wonder how some people come back from national parks and other outdoor trips with fantastic photos? Would you like to take the kind of pictures that make people ooh and aah? Improving your photos may not be as complicated as you think. The following tips on outdoor and landscape photography, which I’ve learned as a trained professional and refined over more than three decades of shooting the finest scenery in America and the world, will help you take home better photos whether you’re a beginner or an experienced photographer.

Sure, equipment like a high-end camera with interchangeable lenses helps a lot, and the more time you spend shooting and learning how to hone your skills, the better your photos will be. Shooting raw files—which record more data for each photo than jpegs and can be edited more extensively—and learning how to use a high-end editing program like Adobe Lightroom also greatly improves photo quality.

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But the best camera gear and editing software cannot create a great photograph. That still requires skill—beginning with understanding some fundamental rules of composing images.

I’ve assembled here what I consider the 15 simplest, easy-to-follow, actionable, and most effective tips for taking better pictures, especially landscape photos, and improving your outdoor photography. Follow them and your family and friends will start asking to see your trip pictures.

Click on most photos in this story to read about that trip. Like many stories at The Big Outside, part of this one is free for anyone to read but reading the entire story and all of my landscape photography tips requires a paid subscription. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you for supporting my blog.

If you have comments or questions on my tips or your own to share, please do so in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

1. Look for Dramatic Light

We were on a family vacation in Yellowstone National Park, and after doing the sit-and-wait with the kids—and several hundred other tourists—for Old Faithful to erupt, I wanted to stop at Midway Geyser Basin. I had done the walk through Midway before, and thought that then—in late afternoon, with dappled, low-angle light coming through scudding clouds—would be a perfect time to shoot Yellowstone’s largest hot spring, the wildly multi-colored and aptly named Grand Prismatic Spring.

The timing could not have been more perfect. The light accentuated the contrast between the dark hills in the background; the steam rising from the water, brightened by low-angle sunlight slashing through it; the deeply blue sky; and the incredibly rich, kaleidoscopic colors of Grand Prismatic, whose waters also reflected their surroundings perfectly in that light. In about 30 minutes of shooting, I came away with even more than the 14 keeper images in the gallery above—which for a serious photographer is a major haul.

The lesson: Dramatic light is what makes a landscape photo pop. Know your location and think about the best time of day and even the best season to shoot it to capture it in strong light.

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2. Think About Your Foreground

Photos are two-dimensional, and if you just shoot a row of distant mountains, the photo will look flat. Shooting in dappled sunlight (described in tip no. 1) helps make a photo look more three-dimensional.

But you can convey a sense of depth—of the three-dimensional appearance of the landscape—by shooting with a wide-angle lens and composing your photo with a person or object in the foreground, as I did in the above shot from the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park and in the lead photo at the top of this story of a small tarn above Helen Lake, along the John Muir Trail in Kings Canyon National Park, and the second photo in this story of Alice Lake in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.

Position the camera close to, say, a big rock, a lakeshore, or a wildflower and frame the image so that there’s scenery in the middle distance (maybe a lake or forest) and far away (the mountains). Observe closely and you will notice many photos at The Big Outside and elsewhere that employ this basic technique.

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3. Think About Your Background

The background may not be your primary subject, but it can either make your subject more prominent or swallow it.

For instance, if the subject is a person or people in the middle distance who look small against a scenic backdrop (see tip no. 5)—as with the photo above from a peak named Bláhnúkur in Iceland—position the camera (yourself) relative to your subject so that there’s a bright backdrop behind the person, like the sky or lake waters or light-colored rock or ground.

A person who’s small in the image would get lost against a dark backdrop like forest—unless that person is wearing brightly colored clothing (another trick for making the subject stand out against the background).

Conversely, if your subject is very bright—like a wildflower spotlighted in a shaft of sunlight, such as these geraniums (at right) in Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park—position yourself to shoot so that there’s dark shadow behind the flower, to make it stand out better; and use a low aperture setting to blur the background (tip no. 10, below).

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4. Follow the Rule of Thirds

Beginner photographers commonly place the subject smack in the middle of the photo (and, too often, they cut off a person’s feet—a no-no). Compose photos following the rule of thirds: Mentally divide your image into thirds along the longer edge, i.e., when shooting a horizontal picture, the imaginary lines dividing the photo into thirds run vertically. Place your subject—person, bunch of wildflowers, animal, whatever—in the right or left third of the frame, as in the photo above of a backpacker on the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier. Have the person facing toward or away from the camera or facing into/across rather than out of the picture.

For the same reason, do not compose a photo with the land-sky horizon cutting straight through the middle of it; give the sky one-third of the picture or place the horizon in the lower third of the photo and let a dramatic sky dominate the image.

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5. Put a Person in There for Scale

You’ve seen many examples of this and probably done it yourself: Place a person or people far enough from the camera to make them appear small in order to convey a sense of the landscape’s vastness, as I did in the photo above from the Teton Crest Trail. Magazines use photos like this frequently because they know that readers identify with the person in the photo—the “I want to be there” effect.

The trick to doing this effectively is to make sure the tiny person remains large enough and visible against the background (tip no. 3) so as not to disappear, and to remember the Rule of Thirds (tip no. 4). Having just one person in the picture also introduces a powerful feeling of solitude that amplifies the sense of vastness.

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

6. Look to the Sky

The sky is typically at least two f-stops brighter than the earth and sometimes much more than that—especially in early morning or evening, as in the photo above from Wanda Lake on the John Muir Trail in Kings Canyon National Park. An f-stop is a full step in aperture settings as they used to appear on cameras in the pre-digital era, i.e., the different between f5.6 and f8, or f8 and f11, which represents a halving of the amount of light entering the camera as you move up the f-stop number scale, just as going from a shutter speed of 1/125 to 1/250 halves the amount of light entering the camera. Modern digital cameras increase aperture versatility by allowing adjustments of one-third of a full f-stop, for example, inserting two more partial f-stops (6.3 and 7.1) between f5.6 and f8.

Overexposing the sky so that it washes out—loses all or most detail—makes the photo look dull. In pre-digital days, photographers used graduated filters to darken the sky when shooting while keeping the earth brighter. Today, we can edit digital photos for the same effect produced by those old graduated filters, but it’s more difficult to restore details in an overexposed sky when editing than it is to brighten underexposed earth. So I often expose for the sky and brighten the shadowed land when editing.

Very simply: Point the camera toward the sky and depress your shutter-release button halfway to set the exposure. Then depress and hold the camera’s auto-exposure lock (typically marked AE-L and AF-L if it doubles as the auto-focus lock, and within reach of your right thumb) as you move the camera to compose the picture you want, and then shoot it.

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Picture a chain of peaks rising to over 11,000 feet, some composed of chalk-like rock that looks, from a distance, like snow. Scores of crystal-clear lakes above 9,000 feet ripple in the breeze and creeks run with trout and salmon. Mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, black bears, even gray wolves roam this wilderness. And backpackers find the kind of solitude you can’t find in many wild lands.

That’s the White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho. Put this relatively new American wilderness on your radar—and get there before every other backpacker discovers how gorgeous and quiet it still is, as you’ll see in the photos below from the backpacking trips and long dayhikes I’ve taken in the White Clouds, including to Quiet Lake, below the range’s highest peak, 11,815-foot Castle Peak (lead photo, above).

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After countless backpacking and hiking trips across the country over the past four decades, including the 10 years I spent as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog, I find myself drawn more and more to those places off the beaten path.

The White Clouds are that kind of place, less well-known but similar to the neighboring Sawtooth Mountains, which I rank among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

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See all stories about the White Clouds at The Big Outside, including “Exploring a Wilderness Hopeful: Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains” and “Head in the Clouds: Hiking in Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains.”

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Water makes up about 60 percent of our bodies—and, I suspect, 100 percent of our hearts. We crave it not only physically, for survival, but emotionally, for spiritual rejuvenation. We love playing in it for hours as children and we paddle and swim in it as adults. We’re drawn by the calming effects of sitting beside a stream or lake in a beautiful natural setting, an experience that possesses a certain je ne sais quoi—a quality difficult to describe, but that we can all feel.

And nothing beats taking a swim in a gorgeous backcountry lake.

I’ve come across quite a few wonderful backcountry lakes over more than three decades of exploring wilderness—including about 10 years as the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine and even longer running this blog. I’ve just updated and expanded this list of my favorites—adding a lake I camped beside last year in Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness—to give you some eye candy as well as ideas for future adventures, and perhaps compare against your list of favorite backcountry lakes.

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Click on the links to my stories in these brief writeups to learn more about each of these trips. Part of this story is free for anyone to read, but reading the entire story is an exclusive benefit of a paid subscription, which also provides full access to all the numerous stories about trips at The Big Outside, and those include my tips on planning those trips. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan a trip to any of these lakes.

If you know some gorgeous lakes that are not on my list, please suggest them in the comments section below this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Here’s to your next peaceful moment beside a gorgeous lake deep in the mountains somewhere.

Elizabeth Lake, Glacier National Park

Early on the second morning of a six-day, 94-mile traverse of Glacier National Park, mostly on the Continental Divide Trail, three friends and I set out from the backcountry campground at the head of Elizabeth Lake, hiking along the sandy shore. An elk bugled from somewhere in the forest nearby. The glassy water reflected a razor-sharp, upside-down reflection of the jagged mountains flanking it. Among many lovely backcountry lakes in Glacier, Elizabeth Lake is one of the finest.

See my stories “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” and “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” plus my e-books “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park” and “Backpacking the Continental Divide Trail Through Glacier National Park.”

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Helen Lake, John Muir Trail, Kings Canyon National Park

In the wake of a violent thunderstorm, we crossed 11,955-foot Muir Pass on the John Muir Trail in Kings Canyon National Park in early evening on the eighth day of a nine-day, 130-mile hike through the High Sierra. Finding what seemed the only two patches of rock-free ground, we pitched our tents above Helen Lake, at around 11,600 feet. The next morning, the rising sun ignited the peaks across Helen Lake, the scene captured in razor-sharp reflections in the lake and a tiny tarn near our camp—burning that almost accidental camp above Helen Lake into memory for all three of us.

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.”

Planning a backpacking trip? See “How to Plan a Backpacking Trip—12 Expert Tips”
and this menu of all stories with expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.

Tarn Along the Highline Trail, Wind River Range

Searching for a suitable campsite along the Highline Trail late one afternoon on a five-day, roughly 43-mile loop hike in the Winds, my wife, a friend, and I reached an unnamed, small tarn—and the view stopped us in our tracks. From our camp a few hundred feet off-trail beyond the tarn, we overlooked grassy meadows littered with glacial-erratic boulders that sloped down to another lake. Beyond that, 12,119-foot Sky Pilot Peak and 12,224-foot Mount Oeneis towered over the valley. I shot this photo as we hit the trail the next morning.

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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Alice Lake, Sawtooth Mountains

Idaho’s Sawtooths must be in contention for the title of American mountain range with the most beautiful lakes—maybe eclipsed only by the High Sierra and Wind River Range. Like the Sierra and Winds, backpacking in the Sawtooths brings you to the shores of multiple lakes every day, shimmering in sunlight, rippled by wind, or offering a mirror reflection of jagged peaks on calm mornings and evenings. Alice (also shown in lead photo at top of story) is one of the larger and prettier of them, a spot I’ve visited several times without getting tired of the view across it to a row of sharp-edged peaks.

See all of my stories about Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, including “The Best of Idaho’s Sawtooths: Backpacking Redfish to Pettit,” “Jewels of the Sawtooths: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes,” and “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths,” and my e-guide “The Best Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains,” which describes a route that includes Alice Lake.

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

Precipice Lake, Sequoia National Park

Precipice wasn’t even our intended campsite on the third day of a six-day, 40-mile family backpacking trip in Sequoia, in California’s southern High Sierra. We planned to push maybe a mile farther, to camp on the other side of 10,700-foot Kaweah Gap. But when we reached Precipice Lake at 10,400 feet, and saw its glassy, green and blue waters reflecting white and golden cliffs, and took a bracing swim, it wasn’t a hard sell when I suggested we spend the night there. It became one of my 25 all-time favorite backcountry campsites.

See my story about that trip, “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” and all of my stories about Sequoia National Park at The Big Outside.

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

Lake Solitude, Grand Teton National Park

Hiking in the chilly, early-morning shade of the North Fork of Cascade Canyon, we looked up to see a huge bull moose sauntering through a meadow speckled with wildflowers, maybe a hundred yards from us. Minutes later, thanks to our early departure from camp, we reached the rocky shoreline of at Lake Solitude—the first people there that morning, enjoying a true period of “solitude” at this spot that’s enormously popular with dayhikers. In the calm morning air, the lake lay absolutely still, mirroring in sharp detail a cirque of cliffs, rocky mountainsides, and lingering patches of old snow.

See my story about my most recent trip in the Tetons, “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” my stories “Walking Familiar Ground: Reliving Old Memories and Making New Ones on the Teton Crest Trail” and “American Classic: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail,” and all of my stories about the Teton Crest Trail and Grand Teton National Park.

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No Name Lake, Glacier National Park

On the last night of a seven-day, north-south hike through Glacier, right after making the Dawson Pass Trail’s awesome alpine crossing from Pitamakan to Dawson passes, two friends and I spent our final night at No Name Lake—which I’d hiked past without stopping on a very similar, six-day trip five years before (see this story).

The next morning brought the kind of calm air that creates a perfect, mirror-like lake reflection—this one enhanced by the coincidental angle of the sun across the cliffs above the lake that lent it such striking, high-contrast light. Happening upon a moment like that makes me gasp.

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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Rainbow Lake, North Cascades National Park Complex

After a relentless, seven-mile-long, 3,500-foot uphill slog to Rainbow Pass in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, a friend and I descended to a wonderful, wooded campsite on the shore of Rainbow Lake. We stuffed fistfuls of huckleberries into our mouths, then walked down to the lakeshore, where the setting sun was setting larch trees—their needles turned golden in late September—afire. It seemed a fitting final night of an 80-mile trek through the heart of the North Cascades National Park Complex.

See my story about that trip, “Primal Wild: Backpacking 80 Miles Through the North Cascades,” and all of my stories about the North Cascades.

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Overland Lake, Ruby Crest Trail

Near the end of my family’s second day of a four-day, approximately 36-mile traverse of Nevada’s underappreciated Ruby Crest Trail, a nearly 2,000-foot uphill slog landed us at a pass at about 10,200 feet. Almost 1,000 feet below us, a stone bowl held Overland Lake like a pair of cupped hands. Beyond it, the backbone of the Ruby Mountains stretched for many miles—exciting us over the alpine walk that awaited us. We descended into that bowl to make camp on a rock ledge jutting into one corner of the lake, at around 9,400 feet. The Ruby Crest Trail cuts a snaking route along the spine of Nevada’s Ruby Mountains, a north-south range of granite-rimmed lake basins and arid valleys carved by ancient glaciers. Overlooking this hike would be your loss.

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

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Island Lake, Wind River Range

As I mentioned above, few mountain ranges in America are as blessed with gorgeous backcountry lakes as Wyoming’s Winds. That makes it hard to pick out just one or two as favorites, but Island Lake deserves a shout out as much as any and more than most. Two friends and I hiked past it on a three-day, 41-mile loop from the Elkhart Park Trailhead to Titcomb Basin and over Knapsack Col in the Winds—and if we didn’t already have our hearts set on spending that night in Titcomb, we could have easily pitched our tents by Island for the night.

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

Don’t let red tape foil your plans.
See my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Wanda Lake, John Muir Trail, Kings Canyon National Park

The seven-day thru-hike of the John Muir Trail that I made with some friends featured many unforgettable moments and a lifetime’s worth of stunning scenery—and aching feet—but few moments as quietly lovely as the early morning that we hiked along the shore of Wanda Lake. We were climbing toward 11,955-foot Muir Pass when we reached this uppermost lake in the Evolution Basin, a high valley scoured from granite by long-ago glaciers and studded with lakes. As my friend Todd walked along the lakeshore, I captured perhaps my best image from that entire trip.

See my story “Thru-Hiking the John Muir Trail in Seven Days: Amazing Experience, or Certifiably Insane?” See also all of my stories about backpacking the John Muir Trail.

Ready for a better backpack? See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
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May Lake, Yosemite National Park

A friend and I reached May Lake on the last afternoon of one of my top 10 best-ever backpacking trips, a weeklong, 151-mile tour of the most remote areas of Yosemite. We arrived as the sun dipped toward the western horizon, casting beautiful, low-angle light across the lake, which sits at the base of craggy, 10,845-foot Mount Hoffman. But you can visit May on an easy dayhike of 2.5 miles round-trip. Bonus: There’s a High Sierra Camp on May’s shore that’s a good base camp for hiking the area, including the steep jaunt up Hoffman, which has arguably the nicest summit view in Yosemite.

See more photos, a video, and trip-planning tips in my story about the 87-mile second leg of that 151-tour of Yosemite, “Best of Yosemite, Part 2: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” and my story about the 65-mile first leg of that adventure, “Best of Yosemite, Part 1: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” and “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite” (including May Lake and Mount Hoffmann) at The Big Outside.

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Quiet Lake, White Cloud Mountains

A longtime backcountry ranger in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) got my attention when he told me that Quiet Lake was his favorite in the White Clouds, which are part of both the SNRA and one of America’s newest wilderness areas. He wasn’t overhyping it. When I backpacked to Quiet Lake with my son, following a partly off-trail route that was moderately strenuous and not too difficult to navigate, we hit the summit of a nearly 11,000-foot peak with an amazing panorama of the White Clouds, traversed a barren, rocky basin with four alpine lakes, and pitched our tent by the shore of Quiet, below the soaring north face of 11,815-foot Castle Peak, highest in the White Clouds. And we didn’t see another person the entire time. If you need a bit of peace and quiet—not to mention breathtaking natural beauty—go here.

See my “Photo Gallery: A Father-Son Backpacking Trip in Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains,” and all stories
about Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains at The Big Outside.

Get the right shelter for your trips. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents”
and my expert tips in “How to Choose the Best Ultralight Backpacking Tent for You.”

Lake Sylvan, Beartooth Wilderness

Quite by accident, two friends and I saved the best campsite for our last night on a five-day August hike through Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness. We pitched our tents a short walk from the shore of Lake Sylvan, tucked into a cirque below the cliffs of Sylvan Peak, which rises to nearly 12,000 feet. That night capped a trip where we enjoyed complete solitude at two of our four camps and for several hours each day while hiking below jagged peaks, seeing small glaciers at the heads of glacially carved cirques, to one pass at around 11,000 feet, and across the treeless tundra of a plateau at over 10,000 feet.

See my story “Backpacking the High and Mighty Beartooth Mountains.”

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Minaret Lake, Ansel Adams Wilderness

The relentlessly steep trail brought us to stunning Iceberg Lake at almost 9,800 feet and continued, even more strenuously, upward over talus and scree to Cecile Lake, at 10,260 feet at the feet of the 11,000- and 12,000-foot High Sierra spires known as the Minarets, lined up like chipped and broken bowling pins. With the “trail” terminating there, we found our way across more talus and down a steep gully to Minaret Lake—arguably the prettiest among several lakes we’d already seen that day. We found a spot for our tents amid conifer trees a short walk from the lakeshore and enjoyed a sunset and sunrise that ranked among the best of several great ones on that trip.

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.”

Start out right. See “10 Perfect National Park Backpacking Trips for Beginners”
and “The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First.”

Ouzel Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park

Tucked into the ponderosa pine forest at around 10,000 feet, in the park’s Wild Basin area, Ouzel is reached on a moderate hike of less than five miles and 1,500 vertical from the Wild Basin Trailhead. Although it gets some dayhikers, you can have a protected campsite in the trees there all to yourself, as my family did on a three-day, early-September backpacking trip. My kids, then 10 and seven, played and fished for hours in the shallow waters near our camp and the lake’s outlet creek.

See my story “The 5 Rules About Kids I Broke While Backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park.”

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

Mirror Lake, Eagle Cap Wilderness

Early on the clear and calm, third morning of a 40-mile family backpacking trip in Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, I left our campsite and walked down to the shore of this lake, anticipating the scene I’d capture in pixels. Mirror Lake, in the popular Lakes Basin, earns its moniker, offering up a flawless reflection of its conifer- and granite-rimmed shore and the cliffs of 9,572-foot Eagle Cap Peak high above it. Our hike made a long loop through some less-visited areas of the wilderness, but you can reach Mirror Lake on weekend-length hikes, too.

See my story “Learning the Hard Way: Backpacking Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness,” and all of my stories about backpacking in Oregon at The Big Outside.

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Peak Lake, Wind River Range

As I’ve written elsewhere at this blog, take a long walk in the Winds and you can hardly swing an extended tent pole without hitting a lake or tarn. I have now backpacked past Peak Lake on separate 41-mile and 43-mile loop hikes in the Winds (which overlapped by just several miles of trail that did not grow dull on the return visit). Shimmering at the bottom of a tiny bowl, surrounded by peaks resembling giant incisors, Peak Lake can be reached from a few different directions—none of them short walks, which helps keep this jaw-dropping little basin in the Winds relatively quiet. Both times I’ve walked past it, the only company I had was my two companions.

See my stories “Backpacking Through a Lonely Corner of the Wind River Range” and “Best of the Wind River Range: Backpacking to Titcomb Basin,” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

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Oldman Lake, Glacier National Park

On day six of a weeklong hike through Glacier National Park, three of us reached Pitamakan Pass on a bluebird morning and set our packs down; we had to spend some time enjoying this prospect. Behind us, Pitamakan Lake and Seven Winds of the Lake nestle in the cliff-ringed cirque that we just hiked through on the Continental Divide Trail. But even more impressive, the view south took in the immense horseshoe of cliffs and forested mountainsides cradling Oldman Lake, below the sharp point of Flinsch Peak and the 2,000-foot stone wall of Mount Morgan rising virtually out of the waters of Oldman.

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

Get my expert e-books to the best backpacking trip in Glacier
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Thousand Island Lake, John Muir Trail, Ansel Adams Wilderness

Thru-hiking southbound on the John Muir Trail, among the first of many moments that signal how this trek seems to keep getting better and better is when you descend toward Thousand Island Lake in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. Yosemite—a pretty impressive place in its own right—now lies miles behind you. Banner Peak, scraping the sky at nearly 13,000 feet, has been in sight for some miles and looming ever larger. Then you catch your first glimpse of the lake, speckled with islets, and it takes your breath away.

Remind yourself that much more of this kind of stuff still awaits you.

See my stories “Thru-Hiking the John Muir Trail in Seven 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 see my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you plan your JMT thru-hike—as I’ve helped numerous other readers.

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Imagine this: You’re heading out on a long, beautiful hike deep in the backcountry, but instead of a full backpack, you carry a light daypack. You’ve avoided hassles with getting a backcountry permit and there’s no camp to set up and pack up. I love backpacking—and I do it a lot. But sometimes, I prefer to knock off a weekend-length—or longer—hike in one big day.

A completely different way to experience a hike, walking 15 to 20 or more miles in a day feels liberating in how lightly you travel and how much ground you can cover. The following list of 15 hikes represents the very best long—and huge—dayhikes I’ve taken over more than three decades of hiking all over the country, as a longtime field editor for Backpacker magazine and running this blog.

I’ve taken huge dayhikes many times simply because I had just one day free and wanted to see as much as possible. But there are some long stretches of trail that, to me, just cry out to be hiked in a day—for aesthetic reasons and because the length and access are just right and the scenery top shelf. The hikes on this list possess those qualities.

Like many stories at The Big Outside, part of this story is free for anyone to read, but reading about all of the hikes in this story requires a paid subscription to this blog.

If you have a favorite long dayhike that you think belongs on this list, tell me in the comments section at the bottom of this story, and I’ll try to get to it. Or just tell me what you think of my list. I try to respond to all comments.

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 Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim

Arguably the granddaddy of ultra-dayhikes, traversing the Grand Canyon from the South Rim to the North Rim and back again constitutes not only the most demanding stroll on this list, but a mind-blowing, top-to-bottom tour of one of Earth’s most magnificent and unfathomable natural features—twice in one day. By its shortest route (depending on which trails you use), the r2r2r, as it’s known, is 42 miles round-trip with a cumulative elevation gain and loss of over 21,000 feet.

Backpacking the route requires obtaining one of the most hard-to-get backcountry permits in the National Park System, so if you possess the fitness and skills to knock it off in a day, that may offer your best chance of actually doing it. Of course, the shorter (and perhaps saner) alternative is to hike across the canyon in just one direction, halving the distance, using available shuttle services to travel between the rims before or after your hike (depending on your lodging arrangements).

I hope it goes without saying that this is an extremely arduous undertaking in an extreme environment and should only be attempted by very fit, experienced desert hikers: Every time I’ve done it, I’ve seen a surprising number of people attempting to hike it in just one direction (rim to rim) who were already suffering mightily long before they would finish it. This is no place to experiment with how far you can hike in a day: Be certain you are prepared for this massive undertaking.

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

Click here now for my expert e-book to hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim!

Logan Pass to Many Glacier, Glacier National Park

Take one of the prettiest moderate-length dayhikes in the National Park System—Glacier’s Highline Trail—and tack on waterfalls, a view from above a glacier, and a walk down a valley flanked by peaks, and you have the 16.4-mile, point-to-point traverse from 6,646-foot Logan Pass on the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Many Glacier, via Swiftcurrent Pass. This hike delivers uninterrupted views of the park’s jagged peaks and cliffs, and there’s a good chance you’ll see bighorn sheep and mountain goats. The distance includes the optional but very worthwhile side hike—1.2 miles and a steep 1,000 feet—to the Grinnell Glacier Overlook, a notch in the long cliff known as the Garden Wall.

See my stories “The 8 Best Long Hikes in Glacier National Park” and “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” and all of my stories about Glacier National Park at The Big Outside.

Do you want to backpack in Glacier? See The Big Outside’s E-Books page for a menu of all expert e-books available at this blog, including to two five-star trips in Glacier.

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Tenaya Lake to Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park

From the post-card view of the granite domes and cliffs flanking Tenaya Lake, to two of Yosemite’s finest summts and two of its most spectacular waterfalls, this 21-mile traverse hits many of the park’s best and most famous landmarks.

After admiring the view from Tenaya Lake’s southwestern shore, hike up 9,926-foot Clouds Rest, culminating with its gripping, sidewalk-width summit ridge, with a drop-off of several hundred feet on the left and a cliff on the right that falls away a dizzying 4,000 feet—a thousand feet taller than the face of El Capitan.

Then comes Half Dome’s thrilling cable route (lead photo at top of story) and a view of Yosemite Valley that would otherwise require you to have rock climbing skills or wings—for which you need a permit—followed by a descent of the Mist Trail past 594-foot Nevada Fall and 317-foot Vernal Fall, before finishing at the Happy Isles Trailhead in Yosemite Valley.

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

Gear up right for huge hikes like this. See the best hiking shoes and the best hiking daypacks.

Traversing Zion National Park

Few “dayhikes” on any list of ultra-hikes stretch as long as this—or get as scenic—but the north to south traverse across Zion National Park has earned something of a cult following among uber-fit hikers and ultra-runners.

From Lee Pass Trailhead to East Entrance Trailhead—with a short shuttle-bus ride in Zion Canyon from The Grotto to Weeping Rock—you’ll navigate a 47-mile grand tour of some of the most amazing scenery in the Southwest: deep chasms with burnt-red and white walls, soaring cliffs and beehive rock formations, and edge-of-the-rim walks high above labyrinths of slot canyons.

Throw in a few stunning, short side hikes along the way—Northgate Peaks, Angels Landing, and Hidden Canyon—and you log more than 50 miles on one of the most incredible days of hiking in the entire National Park System.

For a shorter but still full day of hiking that’s a reasonable length for many more fit hikers and trail runners, hike the West Rim Trail, 16.6 miles from the upper trailhead near Lava Point to the Grotto trailhead (shuttle bus stop no. 6) in Zion Canyon, a mostly downhill hike with about 800 vertical feet uphill and 3,600 feet downhill.

But the most scenic stretch of the West Rim Trail lies between its lower switchbacks, starting below Walter’s Wiggles and the spur trail to Angels Landing, and the upper junction with the Telephone Canyon Trail—and you can see all of that on an out-and-back dayhike from the Grotto that’s the same distance as hiking the West Rim Trail from top to bottom, without requiring a shuttle—but of course, requiring you to hike up and down about 3,000 vertical feet.

See my stories “The 10 Best Hikes in Zion National Park,” which provides details about an ongoing trail closure that has prevented completing this full traverse, although it’s still possible to hike about 40 miles from Lee Pass to Zion Canyon, and “Mid-Life Crisis—Hiking 50 Miles Across Zion In a Day,” and all stories about Zion National Park at The Big Outside.

If you like this list, check out “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes.”

Paintbrush-Cascade Canyons Loop, Grand Teton National Park

Probably the most popular backpacking trip in the park, the nearly 20-mile Paintbrush Canyon-Cascade Canyon loop from String Lake Trailhead, with a bit over 4,000 feet of elevation gain and loss, sees hikers and runners regularly notching it in a day.

The scenery is classic Tetons: serrated peaks and deep canyons with rock walls soaring thousands of feet overhead, and waterfalls tumbling off those walls in Cascade Canyon. Plus, the loop crosses one of the highest points reached on any trail in the park, 10,720-foot Paintbrush Divide, where the panorama takes in a huge chunk of the Tetons. It also passes cliff-ringed Lake Solitude in the North Fork of Cascade Canyon, where you’re looking straight down the glacier-carved valley at the towering north walls of the Grand Teton and Mount Owen.

See “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 backpacking the beginner-friendly loop described above.

Presidential Range ‘Death March’

This archetypal huge dayhike—the first known traverse dates back to 1882—the 20-mile, 8,500-foot “Death March” of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range remains above treeline for 15 miles, with vistas spanning the White Mountains. And the distance and difficulty hit a sweet spot—within reach for fit hikers, yet hard enough to fire aspirations, especially given the notoriously rocky and steep character of trails in the Whites.

Starting at one of the trailheads below 5,367-foot Mount Madison (the Air Line and Osgood Trail are personal favorites) and hiking south to Crawford Notch (to tick off the harder, northern summits first), purists tag all nine summits along the way, including the Northeast’s highest, 6,288-foot Mt. Washington—where winds exceed hurricane force an average of 110 days a year, and the average year-round temperature is below freezing, at 27.2° F. Pack some layers.

See my stories “Step Onto Rock. Step Down. Repeat 50,000 Times: A Presidential Range ‘Death March’,” “Big Hearts, Big Day: A 17-Mile Hike With Teens in the Presidential Range,” and all stories about the White Mountains at The Big Outside.

Get ready for your next big hike. See my stories “Training For a Big Hike or Mountain Climb”
and “How to Know How Hard a Hike Will Be.”

High Divide-Sol Duc Loop, Olympic National Park

Like the above hike, this 18-mile loop with over 3,000 feet of elevation gain is popular with backpackers, but a doable objective for many fit dayhikers—and a great day in a mountain range that’s largely beyond reach to all but backpackers and climbers on strenuous, multi-day outings.

Hiking counterclockwise, you’ll pass lovely Sol Duc Falls, with its triple columns, and climb through old-growth rainforest to higher meadows carpeted with lupine and other wildflowers. On a clear day, the High Divide Trail’s long alpine traverse delivers views across the deep, lushly green trench of the Hoh River Valley to ice- and snow-blanketed Mount Olympus. After passing beautiful Heart Lake, set in another sprawling meadow, the loop makes a gentle descent below ancient, giant trees along the Sol Duc River. You’re likely to see elk and mountain goats at higher elevations and black bear almost anywhere.

See all of my stories about Olympic National Park at The Big Outside.

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Crossing the Wind River Range

Huge vistas for much of the way, in one of the highest ranges of the Rocky Mountains, are the payoff on this 27-mile, east-west crossing of the southern Winds, from the Bears Ears Trailhead in Dickinson Park to the Big Sandy Opening Trailhead.

With a cumulative elevation gain of about 4,500 feet, this traverse stays above 11,000 feet for many miles, with views of peaks rising above 12,000 feet on the Continental Divide. Don’t pass up the 20-minute, off-trail side trip up 12,250-foot Mount Chauvenet, overlooking a row of peaks that includes Buffalo Peak, Camel’s Hump, and Mounts Washakie and Hooker. But the hike’s highlight is the Cirque of the Towers, a mind-boggling horseshoe of sheer-walled granite peaks standing shoulder to shoulder.

See my story “A Walk in the Winds: Hiking a One-Day, 27-Mile Traverse of Wyoming’s Wind River Range,” and all stories about the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

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It is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of life, like death and taxes: Occasionally on backpacking trips you will hike past one of the most sublime patches of wilderness real estate you have ever laid eyes on, a spot so idyllic you can already see your tent pitched there and you standing outside it, warm mug in your hands, watching a glorious sunset. But it’s early and your plan entails hiking farther before you stop for the day—not camping there. Or your permit isn’t for that site. Or even worse, you are looking for a campsite, but someone else has already occupied this little corner of Heaven.

Disappointment is an awfully large pill to swallow, especially if you know you may never get back to that place. Then again, you might make a note on your map and return there someday. Goals are a powerful motivator.

My recently updated story “Tent Flap With a View: 25 Favorite Backcountry Campsites” has photos and descriptions of the best spots in the wilderness where I’ve ever spent a night over the past three-plus decades, including many years running this blog and previously as a field editor for Backpacker magazine for 10 years. So it seems fitting to spotlight the best camps I never had but wish I did—all of them places potentially awaiting your tent.

Just make sure you get there before someone else grabs it.

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

This list grows every year—an inevitable outcome of backpacking frequently—giving you more ideas for trips to take. The descriptions below include links to stories at The Big Outside about those trips, with more images and information about planning them. Those stories about trips, and many other stories at this blog, require a paid subscription to read in full, although you don’t need a subscription to purchase any of my E-books or my Custom Trip Planning.

Please share your questions or suggestions about these campsites or others in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I try to respond to all comments.

Hamilton Lakes, Sequoia National Park

Granted, there are a lot of great campsites in the High Sierra. But some really do stand out even from the many extraordinary sites—in fact, two of our camps on this Sequoia trip made my list of 25 favorite backcountry campsites.

After a morning hike along a stretch of the High Sierra Trail that traverses hundreds of feet above the cliff-flanked canyon of the Middle Fork Kaweah River, we reached the largest of the Hamilton Lakes, nestled in a bowl of granite at 8,235 feet, just in time for a long lunch break. Everyone took a swim in the invigorating water, but mostly we just soaked up the panorama of jagged peaks rising to over 12,000 feet that surround the lake.

See my story about that 40-mile, family backpacking trip, “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” with lots of photos and a video, and all stories about backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.

Get the right pack for you. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs”
and the best ultralight backpacks.

Alaska Basin, Teton Crest Trail

There’s hardly a bad place to pitch a tent (legally) in all of Grand Teton National Park—and certainly not even a mediocre spot along the Teton Crest Trail. In fact, my list of 25 favorite backcountry campsites includes two along the TCT. But simply because I’ve always been successful at getting my desired campsites on my backcountry permit, I have always hiked through the one area along the TCT that lies outside the national park and doesn’t require a permit for camping: Alaska Basin.

But I’ve hiked through it enough times to realize what I’m missing. The two campsites shown in these photos happen to be perfect perches we passed that lie just off the TCT in the basin. Both have broad, flat areas of clean granite with amazing 360-degree panoramas of the mountains and cliffs surrounding Alaska Basin. That’s why I’ve recommended Alaska Basin as a campsite depending on the type of hiking itinerary people are seeking when I provide custom trip planning for the TCT.

See my story about my most-recent trip on the TCT, “A Wonderful Obsession: Backpacking the Teton Crest Trail.”

Get my Teton Crest Trail e-book or my custom trip planning for the TCT.

Yuma Point, Grand Canyon

On the last, hard but stunningly pretty day of a 40-mile hike from the South Kaibab to the Hermit trailhead, our group of six family and friends ascended the often steep and difficult Boucher Trail—yet another tortured footpath that illustrates why the words “hard but stunningly pretty” describe so many trails in the Big Ditch. After a long uphill grind, we reached the long, level bench the Boucher Trail follows below Yuma Point, at just over 5,400 feet, and saw immediately why in-the-know GC backpackers consider it one of the very best campsites in the canyon.

Several spacious, obviously pre-used camps on dirt sit right behind a large, flat rock ledge at the brink of cliffs overlooking a huge swath of the canyon from more than 3,000 feet above the Colorado River. Yes, I sure did imagine laying my pad and bag out on that ledge, gazing up at a night sky crazy with stars and then watching the sunrise light up the canyon. Those camps lie a short walk off the Boucher Trail 5.2 miles from the Hermit Trailhead, at 6,640 feet—and that’s about the only relatively “easy” way to get there. One drawback: Yuma Point lies right below the Dragon Corridor, where the sky is filled with a daily invasion of constant sightseeing overflights between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

See “Backpacking the Grand Canyon: Tonto West to Boucher Trail” and 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, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

I’d read on some websites that viable campsites were non-existent in Death Hollow, in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. And looking at the contour lines of this deep and generally narrow cleavage in the slickrock plateau, it did seem like a bad bet to assume one would find good camps in there. Turned out, that was wrong.

On the middle day of a three-day hike on the 22-mile Death Hollow Loop, two friends and I backpacked down the dramatic canyon of Death Hollow, frequently walking in the creek amid small cascades and weaving our way around deep, calm pools and other obstacles and hazards—and bushwhacking through thickets of poison ivy that stood taller than us. And we passed a handful of camps where we’d have been happy to spend a night on one of the best backpacking trips in the Southwest, where each of our three days presented different terrain and scenery, a sort of three-in-one wilderness adventure in landscapes that repeatedly made me to pause and just gape.

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

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Liberty Lake, Ruby Crest Trail

On the last afternoon of my family’s backpacking trip on Nevada’s Ruby Crest Trail, a steady uphill climb deposited us at the edge of Liberty Lake, a cobalt eye tucked tightly within a shoreline of granite slabs, patches of evergreen forest, and a talus mountainside. We followed the trail around and above the lake, where we stood on a ledge overlooking the lake and the long chain of the Ruby Mountains stretching into the distance (lead photo at top of story). Although camping there didn’t fit neatly into our four-day itinerary, it was easy to see why other backpackers had set up camp nearby.

Liberty Lake was not the only highlight of an approximately 36-mile, south-to-north traverse of the Ruby Crest Trail. We enjoyed a campsite on another beautiful alpine lake, wildflowers in bloom, relatively few other backpackers, and long stretches of hiking above 10,000 feet, traversing an almost treeless alpine zone for miles.

See my story about my family’s trip, “Backpacking the Ruby Crest Trail—A Diamond in the Rough,” at The Big Outside.

Get a full wilderness experience.
See “12 Expert Tips For Finding Solitude When Backpacking.”

Imogene Lake, Sawtooth Wilderness

Returning to Imogene Lake again for the first time in some years, on a weekend backpacking trip with my then-11-year-old daughter, I was reminded just how gorgeous this sprawling water body is. On calm days—like we had on that visit—the water reflects an Impressionist painting-like panorama of pine forest and rocky peaks.

I was actually planning to finally atone for my sin of having hiked past Imogene on at least two or three previous occasions by setting up camp here with my daughter. But we got a late start on a Friday and rolled in to Hell Roaring Lake—four miles below Imogene—after dark. So we just dayhiked to Imogene. I’ll camp there yet—I swear. Meanwhile, Hell Roaring is a pretty nice spot, too, and close enough to visit Imogene on a morning hike.

See my story “Jewels of the Sawtooths: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes,” about father-son and father-daughter backpacking trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths, and all stories about backpacking in the Sawtooths, including in the remote southern Sawtooth Wilderness and “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths.”

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Below Nevills Arch, Owl Canyon, Bears Ears National Monument

Consider this a shining example of “if we’d just hiked a little while longer, and started early enough to beat the party that got there first, we’d have camped here.” On the second morning of our three-day loop through Owl and Fish canyons, in southeastern Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, we walked through the amphitheater where striking Nevills Arch presides over a sort of royal court of tall, red cliffs and pinnacles that resemble melted candles—and right past the lone campsite on flat, packed dirt that sits within the warm embrace of that amphitheater.

Having camped (at a pretty nice spot, anyway) just an easy 30-minute or shorter walk farther up Owl Canyon, it was a little painful seeing how close we’d come to enjoying this camp—although the small group who’d camped there were still packing up as we strolled past it. One of the best backpacking trips in the Southwest, the two- to three-day Owl-Fish loop offers an unusual combination of qualities: short distance, incredible scenery (and night skies), solitude, rugged hiking and scrambling, and a permit that’s easier to get than for better-known Southwest backpacking trips.

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

Elbow Lake, Wind River Range

In the week before Labor Day 2022, a prime time to be in the mountains, my wife, Penny, our friend, Chip, and I backpacked a five-day, roughly 43-mile loop from the New Fork/Doubletop Mountain Trailhead at New Fork Lakes, mostly exploring an area of the Winds I had not seen before. But we also walked a stretch of the Highline Trail (part of the Continental Divide Trail) which I had hiked previously (on this trip), reminding me not only how nice that trail is but that I’ve now hiked past Elbow Lake twice without laying out my sleeping bag there.

I rank that day among the prettiest I’ve ever hiked in the Winds—and that’s saying a lot. We started out from one of the best backcountry campsites I’ve ever had, overlooking the lower of the Twin Lakes, 12,119-foot Sky Pilot Peak, and 12,224-foot Mount Oeneis, following the Highline Trail past several alpine lakes and tarns to sprawling Elbow Lake—embraced by granite slabs and grassy earth where you can’t help but picture your tent pitched. From there, we continued to a pair of high passes and more spectacular lakes.

And as happened throughout that trip, we passed fewer than 10 people all day.

See “Backpacking Through a Lonely Corner of the Wind River Range” all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside. National forest and wilderness managers require camping at least 200 feet from any lake or trail in the Winds.

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

Iceberg Lake, Ansel Adams Wilderness

Two companions and I walked one of the finest sections of the John Muir Trail on a nine-day, north-south trek of nearly 130 miles through the Ansel Adams and John Muir Wildernesses and Kings Canyon National Park, exploring high lakes basins and crossing passes at 11,000 to 12,000 feet. But one highlight came early in that trip, when we detoured off the JMT to hike below the row of jagged spires called the Minarets in the Ansel Adams.

On the steep uphill hike from Ediza Lake—itself a nice spot to pitch a tent—we reached Iceberg Lake, tucked into a compact bowl at 9,774 feet right at the foot of sheer rock walls that rise to sharp points. Not far from the lakeshore, we saw some perfect little patches of dirt for tents. The Minarets can be visited on a weekend or three- to four-day hike that will give you a great sampler of the central High Sierra.

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

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

Dead Horse Lake, Uinta Highline Trail, High Uintas Wilderness

In an unusual window of warm and mostly clear weather in early October, my 24-year-old son, Nate, and I backpacked nearly 60 miles through Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness, mostly on the Uinta Highline Trail—which blew us away. We had some great camps, but one we sadly walked past was beside Dead Horse Lake, at around 10,900 feet at the head of a lake-filled basin tucked inside a ragged horseshoe of castle-like peaks between Red Knob Pass, at 12,000 feet, and Dead Horse Pass, at 11,600 feet.

Getting there isn’t easy from any direction—which typically ensures more solitude—and neither is getting out. Hiking southbound from the lake on the Uinta Highline, we climbed below tall cliffs and sheer buttresses soaring several hundred feet above us, the trail tilting steeply upward, weaving through huge boulders, and frequently consisting of no more than a goat path of boot prints across sliding scree. At Dead Horse Pass, I told Nate, “I think I know what killed the horse.”

Still, the High Uintas, and especially the Uinta Highline Trail, deserve more attention from serious backpackers than they get: This place is a big, majestic wilderness with 13,000-foot peaks and over 1,000 mountain lakes. Go there.

See my story “Backpacking—and Sandbagging—Utah’s Uinta Highline Trail” and all stories about backpacking in Utah’s High Uintas at The Big Outside.

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The Narrows, Zion National Park

Rather than pick one of the campsites in Zion’s Narrows that a friend and I hiked past—we stayed in campsite one, which made my list of 25 favorite backcountry campsites—I have to give all of the 11 other designated campsites in The Narrows a collective spot on this list.

On the second day of an overnight, top-to-bottom backpacking trip of The Narrows, we checked out campsites two through 12, and I eventually gave up on the idea of picking a favorite. Each one sits within sight and earshot of the burbling river, below sheer, multi-colored walls rising hundreds of feet to a ribbon of sky overhead. Some may have a little more space or some other appeal; but given the location, any one of them guarantees you an incomparable night.

See 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.”

Indian Ridge, Yosemite National Park

On our first night in the backcountry during a four-day, 45-mile hike in Yosemite, a friend and I carried water up onto Indian Ridge, on Yosemite Valley’s North Rim, and found a great campsite a short walk from an unnamed dome overlooking a panorama that took in Half Dome and distant mountains to the south. We watched a sunset linger until the final light of day dripped from the sky.

But not long after hitting the trail the next morning, we saw where we wished we had camped. A little farther down Indian Ridge, the terrain opens up and flat spots abound just off the trail—where we saw no other backpackers. We had a much closer and more spectacular view looking directly at the huge Northwest Face of Half Dome just across the deep gulf of the Valley. Park regulations require camping at least a half-mile from the North Rim of Yosemite Valley—which is easy to achieve and have plenty of spots to choose from on Indian Ridge—and more significantly, you have to carry water up there.

But I don’t know of another spot in the backcountry where you can camp with that kind of view of Yosemite Valley.

See my feature story about that trip, “Yosemite’s Best-Kept Secret Backpacking Trip.”

Get the right shelter for your trips. See “The 10 Best Backpacking Tents”
and “How to Choose the Best Ultralight Backpacking Tent for You.”

Elizabeth Lake, Glacier National Park

I first included Elizabeth Lake on this list after backpacking Glacier’s magnificent Northern Loop, which I describe how to plan and hike in my e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Glacier National Park.” But since then, I’ve returned to Glacier to make a comparably awe-inspiring, 90-mile, north-south traverse of the park, mostly following the Continental Divide Trail, but with some variations I built into the route to show friends who accompanied me what I consider some the finest scenery in Glacier (described in this e-book).

And on our first night of that more-recent trip, we camped at Elizabeth Lake—and I got the photo above early the next morning, as the calm, chill air turned the lake into a mirror reflecting the surrounding, jagged peaks. So technically, I’ve now hiked past Elizabeth (twice, actually) and camped there, but I decided it still belongs on this list so that you don’t risk passing up a chance to spend a night there.

See my stories about backpacking Glacier’s Northern Loop and Gunsight Pass Trail and about traversing the park mostly following the Continental Divide Trail, and my most recent hike in Glacier, a weeklong traverse mostly on the CDT with an itinerary and camps that varied from the first CDT trip.

Glacier ranks among “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

Jacob Hamblin Arch, Coyote Gulch

I had fully intended for our group of two families to spend our second night backpacking Coyote Gulch right beneath Jacob Hamblin Arch; I remembered, from a trip there years earlier, that it’s a magical spot to layover and watch the light shift.

But when our group reached Coyote Natural Bridge that afternoon, the kids were ready to call it a day; and it being about an hour (at a family pace) downstream from Jacob Hamblin, and not a bad place at all to pitch tents on the broad, sandy beach below the bridge (it was formerly on my top 25 best backcountry campsites list), I quickly gave up on the idea of reaching the arch. I also knew the arch is a popular spot, so all available sites could be snapped up by the time we got there. It turned out they weren’t, and a prime campsite, on the upstream side looking right up at the arch, was actually empty when we got there the next morning. Oh, well.

See my story about backpacking Coyote Gulch and dayhiking slot canyons and trails in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and neighboring Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks for more photos, videos, and detailed trip-planning information.

After Coyote Gulch, hike the rest of “The 12 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Island Lake and Peak Lake, Wind River Range

Take a long walk in the Winds and you can hardly swing an extended tent pole without hitting a lake or tarn. When two friends and I backpacked a roughly 41-mile loop in the Winds, I deliberately planned a route that included a night in Titcomb Basin, where lakes shimmer below the soaring granite walls of 13,000-foot peaks. But we inevitably hiked past countless, pretty lakes that presented alluring campsites.

Two of the most memorable were Island Lake, where we stopped for lunch en route to Titcomb, and Peak Lake, which nestles in a tiny bowl below peaks that resemble incisors, and which we reached after hiking cross-country from Titcomb over Knapsack Col and down a lonely valley to reach the Shannon Pass Trail. On a trip where a shocking number of lakes feel like one of the prettiest spots on the planet, these two have burned lasting images in memory.

See my story about that trip, “Best of the Wind River Range: Backpacking to Titcomb Basin” all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

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By the Colorado River at Hance Rapids, Grand Canyon

While I have camped on the beach at Hance Rapids on the Colorado River (it’s on my top 25 best backcountry campsites list), more recently, I backpacked past that beach on a six-day trip that I concluded—after several trips in the Big Ditch—is “the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon.” As we left that beach, we walked past a spacious (and empty!) campsite fully enclosed by trees that cast substantial shade.

Anyone who’s hiked in the canyon understands the value of shade—especially in a campsite. We had many miles to go that day, so we didn’t stop. But the beach at Hance Rapids on the Colorado River has long been on my radar (since I took this three-day hike) as a spot to plan spending a night when hiking through this corner of the canyon. This shady site will be the first place I check for occupants the next time I plan to bed down on that beach.

See my story “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” which includes a potential night at Hance Rapids, 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 a trip easier for first-timers, “The Best First Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon.”

Marie Lake, John Muir Trail

It was the fourth morning of our seven-day thru-hike of the John Muir Trail through California’s High Sierra, from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney. Three friends and I were climbing toward Selden Pass in the John Muir Wilderness and not even thinking about taking a break yet; we wouldn’t stop for the night until hours later.

Below us, Marie Lake lay still in a bowl of granite ledges with trees dotting the landscape, rocky islands in the lake, and an infinite selection of places around the lake to temporarily call home.

This was one of the most painful times I’ve hiked past a beautiful backcountry camp.

And in August 2022, I did it again when two companions and I backpacked past Marie Lake—although only after enjoying a nice swim and lunch there—on a nine-day trek of nearly 130 miles through the Ansel Adams and John Muir wildernesses and Kings Canyon National Park.

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

Want my help planning your JMT thru-hike?

I’ve helped many readers plan all the details of this classic trip, including getting a very hard-to-get permit, figuring out how many days to take, and finding the best campsites. See my Custom Trip Planning page to learn how I can help you. 

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

Pyramid Lake, Wind River Range

It sure seems like I keep walking past really nice campsites in the Winds—maybe I just need to spend more time there. On an August trip with my son a few summers back, we aborted a planned four-day loop crossing the Continental Divide twice and finishing through the Cirque of the Towers—because the weather was so bad, with almost continuous rain and virtually no views of the mountains and no sign it would improve. But we did hike from one camp to visit Pyramid Lake and saw enough of its surroundings to know I wanted to return.

Now I’m happy to call this a success story because I did get back to this part of the Winds in August 2023, on a four-day, nearly 41-mile hike crossing four high passes, when a friend and I spent our first backcountry night a short walk from the shore of Pyramid Lake. At nearly 10,600 feet, the lake nestles in a rocky basin at the foot of 11,978-foot Pyramid Peak (which we scrambled up on that trip), 12,454-foot Mount Hooker, and 12,185-foot Tower Peak. (The lake is also a short, cross-country hike from the valley of the East Fork River on the Wind River High Route, which I write about in this story about the Wind River High Route).

See my story about that August 2023 trip, “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Wind River Range? Yup” and all stories about backpacking in the Wind River Range at The Big Outside.

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

Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park

On day three of a four-day, 87-mile, backpacking trip in the remote, northern reaches of Yosemite with my friend Todd, we reached one of that trek’s scenic highlights: the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River. With granite walls soaring hundreds of feet above a crystal-clear river that tumbles over innumerable waterfalls, massive boulders, and a beautiful bed of cobblestones, the canyon bears a striking resemblance to the park’s iconic feature, Yosemite Valley—except that it’s twice as long and has no roads or buildings and few people.

Todd and I actually spent a pleasant night in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, initially sleeping under the stars on a big granite slab by the river, then quickly pitching our tarp in the woods when rain started falling after dark. But we didn’t score one of the several primo campsites we saw in the canyon, either because we walked past them before we were ready to stop for the night, or someone else already occupied them. To grab one of the campsites that sit near any of the waterfalls and great swimming holes, I suggest trying to reach the mid-canyon stretch by early afternoon, before most other backpackers.

See many more images, a video, and trip-planning trips in my story about that backpacking trip in northern Yosemite, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” and all of my stories about Yosemite at The Big Outside, including “Best of Yosemite, Part 1: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” about a 65-mile hike south of Tuolumne.

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

Bench Lakes, Sawtooth Wilderness

As we hiked past the second-highest of a string of five lakes that sit above 8,000 feet on the east side of the Sawtooths, the glassy waters of a calm early morning offered a perfect reflection of the incisor summit ridge of Mount Heyburn high above us. It was early on a long day my friend Chip Roser and I would spend climbing Heyburn, and would ultimately be one of the day’s finest moments. A rough, sometimes-obscure use trail leads to the Bench Lakes from Trail 101 above Redfish Lake. The highest of the Bench Lakes, at over 8,600 feet, is the most alpine of them and has campsites right at the foot of Heyburn.

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

I’ve helped many readers plan an unforgettable backpacking trip in the Sawtooths.
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Toltec Beach, Royal Arch Loop, Grand Canyon

As with the Tetons, there’s not likely a bad campsite in the GC—or at least none that I’ve found. But when three friends and I reached Toltec Beach, beside the Colorado River on the Grand Canyon’s very rugged, 34.5-mile Royal Arch Loop, around lunchtime on our second day, we all made a vow to return there. The river offered an area to cool ourselves in the water, there was a tree casting nice shade onto the sand, and the views, of course, were epic.

The Royal Arch Loop makes a top-to-bottom-and-back-up circuit of the canyon—going from a words-can’t-do-it-justice panorama at the rim to dipping your toes in the Colorado. It delivers a highlights reel of just about every type of physical feature that makes backpacking in the Grand Canyon unique: sweeping views, an intimate side canyon with lush hanging gardens nurtured by a vibrant stream, a high solitude quotient, and one drop-dead gorgeous campsite after another.

See my story about that trip “Not Quite Impassable: Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Royal Arch Loop,” and all stories about backpacking in the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside

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Snowdrift Lake, Grand Teton National Park

I’ve had the pleasure of gazing upon the emerald waters of this alpine lake four times now—and I actually did once pitch a tent on a slope above the lake, but never in the site at the lake’s eastern end. A long, oval, often wind-battered gem parked at the head of Avalanche Canyon, just a few hundred feet below 10,680-foot Avalanche Divide and the long cliff band named The Wall, Snowdrift is not reached by any official park trail.

But there is an unofficial, unmarked, rough, and strenuous user trail that climbs up Avalanche Canyon; it branches west off the Valley Trail just north of Taggart Lake. It’s a hard trail to carry a pack up, and not much easier to carry a pack down (and finding the easy, safe way through the cliffs below Snowdrift Lake is trickier going downhill than uphill; I’ve done it in both directions). The easiest access to Snowdrift is hiking the good trail from South Fork Cascade Canyon up to Avalanche Divide, then hiking cross-country, over easy terrain, down to the east end of Snowdrift. The campsite is exposed, so don’t go if it’s windy or in bad weather.

See all of my stories about Grand Teton National Park, including this story that describes how to hike to Snowdrift Lake in Avalanche Canyon.

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the best short backpacking trip there.

Phelps Basin and Spider Gap route, Glacier Peak Wilderness

On the first afternoon of a spectacular, five-day family hike of the Spider Gap-Buck Creek Pass Loop through Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness—among my favorite wild lands—we camped in a spacious, established site in the woods above Spider Meadow and minutes below Phelps Basin. Two other parties had already grabbed the available sites in Phelps Basin (photo above), as I discovered, to my dismay, when we took an evening stroll up there.

The next morning, we carried our packs up the trail to Spider Gap, passing more campers perched on the bench atop a steep wall of earth high above Spider Meadow (photo at right). Whenever I get back there again, it will be exceedingly difficult to choose between these two spots.

See my story, with lots of images, about our five-day, family-backpacking trip in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness.

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Arrowhead Lake, Sawtooth Wilderness

Since my first of now many trips into Idaho’s Sawtooths, I’ve often marveled at how these toothy, granite peaks remind me of the High Sierra—without the crowds of hikers found in parts of the Sierra. My friend Jeff Wilhelm and I hiked past Arrowhead Lake on the second morning of a four-day trip and immediately agreed we needed to return with fishing poles and stay longer. I snapped this photo when Jeff walked out onto the granite spit jutting into the lake.

See my story about that backpacking in the remote southern Sawtooth Wilderness and my story “The Best Hikes and Backpacking Trips in Idaho’s Sawtooths.”

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

The Wind River High Route

When three friends and I set out on a seven-day, 96-mile traverse of the Wind River High Route—65 miles of which is off-trail, including nine of 10 named alpine passes between roughly 11,000 and 13,000 feet—we expected to be dazzled by one of the very best wilderness treks any of us had ever taken. And it exceeded expectations.

Inevitably, we hiked past many spots we’d love to have set up camp for the night. But two spots, in particular, stood out for me. One was in the valley of the East Fork River, where we hiked below a long chain of towering cliffs and soaked in frigid pools between cascades that tumbled over granite slabs in the shallow river. The second spot was in the long valley of the Alpine Lakes—one of the most starkly beautiful places I’ve ever seen. High above one of those lakes, we crossed a wide, grassy shelf sprinkled with rocks that looked like a little piece of the Scottish Highlands transported to the Wyoming mountains. It pained me to not stop there.

Read my story about that trip, “Adventure and Adversity on the Wind River High Route.”

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Hance Creek, Grand Canyon

This is another success story. The camping area on Hance Creek, on the east side of Horseshoe Mesa, earned a spot on this list when I backpacked past it with my then-10-year-old daughter on this three-day hike. That’s my justification for keeping it on this list—even though I’m happy to report that I’ve since returned and spent a night there (photo above) on a six-day trip that I’ve described as “the best backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon.”

Not to be confused with the beach at Hance Rapids on the Colorado River—which is several trail miles from and a couple thousand feet below the camping area at Hance Creek—the camping zone at Hance Creek is flanked by sheer, vibrantly red walls that by late afternoon cast a long, blessed shadow to give us relief from the sun.

See my story “The Best Backpacking Trip in the Grand Canyon,” which includes a potential night at Hance Rapids.

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

Upper Boulder Chain Lakes, White Cloud Mountains

On a 28-mile, one-day loop hike through the heart of one of the most scenic Western mountain ranges that most hikers have never heard of, Idaho’s White Clouds, two friends and I scrambled off-trail up a very steep headwall, passed through a notch in a row of pinnacles, then picked up a trail and descended into the valley of a string of pearls known as the Boulder Chain Lakes. While we would run into backpackers camped at the lower lakes, we saw no one at three of the highest and most remote of the chain, Headwall Lake, Scoop Lake, and Hummock Lake, perched amid copses of conifers beneath peaks of unbelievably white rock that give these mountains their name.

Read my story about a 28-mile dayhike through Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains, with more photos and trip-planning info.

That White Clouds hike is featured in “Extreme Hiking: America’s Best Hard Dayhikes.”

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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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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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.

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

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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On a morning when the late-summer sunshine sharpens the incisor points of every peak and spire in the jagged skyline of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, Nate and I step inside the Sawtooth National Recreation Area ranger station, south of the little town of Stanley, population sixty-three. I chat with the ranger behind the counter, mentioning that my son and I are heading out to backpack the 18-mile loop from Pettit Lake to Alice and Toxaway Lakes.

The ranger sizes up my six-year-old, 40-pound kid, and frowns skeptically. “You know, that’s a pretty rugged hike,” he tells me.

Over the years to follow, I would become accustomed to seeing that expression on the faces of well-intentioned people worried about what I was planning to do with my children. I would also get used to hearing the tone of voice someone uses when what they really want to tell me is: “You, sir, are a crazed lunatic, and coyotes will pick your child’s and your bones clean before we even find you.”

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I try to explain that I know these trails and the little boy with the stuffed dolphin has done a fair bit of hiking already—for someone who weighs less than the backpack I’ll carry for the next three days. But as we leave, I doubt I’ve allayed that ranger’s concerns. He’s probably made a mental note to check for my car at the trailhead in a few days, to make sure that the overzealous dad and his bear-snack-size kid made it out of the wilderness alive.

On the trail a little while later, Nate and I set out at a very casual pace, slowed by the frequent demands of important business like stopping to eat more chocolate or throw rocks at trees and boulders. Nature, it turns out, is conveniently well stocked with excellent throwing rocks and worthy targets.

That first evening, I hurriedly throw the tent up just before a violent thunderstorm rents the sky open. Then Nate and I huddle inside, warm and dry in our bags, listening to the pounding of rain on our nylon walls and repeatedly exclaiming, “Wow, did you hear that one?!” after each tectonic rumble of thunder quakes the air around us.

The next morning, we spend close to an hour slam-dunking rocks into Alice Lake. Each time, Nate erupts with a heartfelt belly laugh over the concussive effect of the rocks on the water’s surface. I laugh almost as hard at his laughter. After a difficult hike over a pass around 9,200 feet, we descend to Toxaway Lake with Nate looking bleary-eyed at mid-afternoon. But when we find a campsite in the woods with a small creek gurgling nearby, he revives as suddenly as if he were Superman and I had just tossed the Kryptonite it into the lake. Nate passes the next couple of hours quietly constructing stone dams in the creek.

In the evening, we hurl rocks into Toxaway, and then sit together atop a big granite slab on the shore, talking about space travel and which dinosaurs would beat other dinosaurs in a fight. On our third and final day, my first-grader cranks out nine miles with more stamina than many adults—although, by the end, he’s so punch-drunk tired that the sound of air shrieking through the pinched neck of a balloon sends him into paroxysms of hysterical laughter that make me double over laughing, too. I’d actually planned on four days, but he comes up with the brilliant plan to finish in three, get milkshakes to celebrate, camp another night nearby, then rent a two-person, sit-on-top kayak to paddle around Redfish Lake tomorrow morning, before heading home.

That was our second outing in what has become an annual, multi-day, father-son adventure together. We call it our “Boy Trip,” a term coined by Nate years ago. He’s now a teenager, and for both of us, the Boy Trip has risen to a status among the most exalted events on the calendar. Partly that’s because we always get outdoors on a fun adventure. But mostly it’s because we love carving out time for just the two of us.

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Idaho’s Smoky Mountains

Fast-forward several years. Sunset looms but the air has hardly cooled in this August heat wave as we start the roughly two-mile hike to the Norton Lakes in central Idaho’s Smoky Mountains. My nine-year-old daughter, Alex, and I are backpacking in to spend two nights at the lakes with our friends Gary Davis and his girls, Mae, 11, and Adele, who’s eight.

Alex and Adele have been BFFs since they were old enough to comprehend that the world offered other children to play with besides the older siblings who snatched toys from them and occasionally dropped something on their head. As we hike, they walk side-by-side as if joined at the hip, talking constantly, which helpfully distracts them from the uphill effort.

Wildfires have been burning across the entire West for weeks. Temperatures at home in Boise have been hitting 100 too much lately, and the air quality is approximately as healthy as putting your mouth over a running car’s exhaust pipe. Gary had suggested we take the girls out to the mountains, where the smoke is at least more dissipated.

As it happened, Alex and I had set aside this same weekend for our Girl Trip—the name she gives to our annual father-daughter getaway, as a counterpoint to Nate’s and my Boy Trip. Alex generously grants me a waiver for my inferior gender to enable our Girl Trip.

Just before dark on this calm and mild evening, we reach the lower Norton Lake, its shore mostly ringed by ponderosa pines, with a steep scree slope rising from one side. While Gary and I pitch our tents, the girls scout the night woods around us with headlamps until everyone’s tired enough to head for our sleeping bags. Alex and I do a Sudoku puzzle together by headlamp in the tent. She somehow thinks she solves much more of it than I do. To protect her self-esteem, I don’t contest her claim.

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In the morning, we all hike a trail through numerous switchbacks up to a pass several hundred feet above our camp, looking back down at the Norton Lakes. After a lunch capped with copious helpings of chocolate, we follow a steep, fainter user path up onto a narrow ridge crest of broken rock. (Early tomorrow, before anyone else is awake, I’ll make a quick, dawn hike up here again and surprise three mountain goats on this ridge.) Moving carefully through a few exposed spots, we scramble along the ridge to the summit of Norton Peak, at 10,336 feet the second highest in the Smoky Mountains. Although the air remains hazy with wildfire smoke, we can see most of this range of 10,000-footers, and across the Wood River Valley to the even more severely vertical and rocky Boulder Mountains.

At the summit, the three girls pump fists in the air. Then we carefully backtrack over the ridge and quickly descend the trail back to camp, where our expedition’s real celebration of our epic achievement ensues over s’mores.

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Never Easy to Make Time

It’s never easy to cram the Girl Trip and Boy Trip into any summer, when we usually take them. Our summers are consistently chock-full with outdoor travel either as a family or me going out sans family for my work. I’m usually away for upwards of half the summer—so much that, by fall, I’m burnt out on packing and unpacking gear and ready to stay home (a feeling that I get over within about a week, actually—but that’s another story).

Still, I’ve always committed to fitting in our Girl Trip and Boy Trip every year. Nate and Alex both considered it non-negotiable, as mandatory as celebrating their birthdays. I just love that they feel that strongly about it.

I’ve always tried to steer us toward outdoor adventures that are age-appropriate for my kids—who started young enough that they were always, admittedly, fairly advanced in their abilities, stamina, and confidence for their ages. And I have deliberately avoided pushing my own agenda. I wanted them to feel we share the decision on what we’re doing.

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Sawtooths to Grand Canyon and Mount Whitney

Our annual Boy Trip and Girl Trip don’t have to be major expeditions. We rarely leave our home state. The first, when Nate was five, consisted of him and me backpacking about a mile (he carried only a tiny daypack and his dolphin) to camp beside a creek in the Boise Foothills, a 10-minute drive from our home. To the occasional hikers and trail runners passing by, our campsite may have looked rather uninteresting; but to Nate, it felt as wild and remote as the Himalayan Mountains. Besides, we had enough sticks to launch into the creek and rocks to bomb them with to keep us occupied for hours.

Nate and I have backpacked to the Big Boulder Lakes in Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains, rock climbed at Idaho’s City of Rocks National Reserve and Castle Rocks State Park, and backpacked into the southern Sawtooths with one of his buddies and that kid’s dad, camping by the shore of an unnamed lake, fishing, and exploring off-trail around a little-visited lakes basin. When he was 15, we climbed the highest peak in the Lower 48, California’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney together—raising the bar for Girl Trip and Boy Trip destinations.

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When Alex was younger, our first Girl Trips consisted of spending weekends skiing, biking, or dayhiking together. I didn’t push backpacking with her, waiting for her to welcome that idea. When she was 10, she and I joined two families I know on a three-day, Grand Canyon backpacking trip. When she was 14, we went to Costa Rica—again raising the bar for Girl Trip and Boy Trip destinations.

These outings deliver multiple benefits. The adventures always forge memories. They give me an excuse to get out. Plus, I’m hoping to nurture in my kids a love for the same activities I enjoy. But I have a broader agenda than all of those things.

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On our first trips, when they were little, my one-on-one conversations with each of them focused on such weighty matters as their favorite toys and games. But as they have grown older, we talk about their relationships with their friends, how much freedom and responsibility they want to have, those odd creatures making up the opposite gender, and how they navigate the mysterious and confusing waters of growing up.

Always, our conversations focus on whatever’s on Nate’s or Alex’s mind and consist mostly of me listening with deep interest. I want them to remember these experiences not just for the fun we had together, but as times when we could talk about absolutely anything, and I would listen and care.

And, of course, we talk about what new adventures we want to take together in coming years—because one goal of any trip should be figuring out where and when you’ll take the next one.

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and “Why I Endanger My Kids in the Wilderness (Even Though It Scares the Sh!t Out of Me).”

I continued these father-son and father-daughter trips right through their high-school years and beyond; Nate and I rock climbed the Elephant’s Perch in Idaho’s Sawtooths together the summer he was 19. We have created a tradition that I hope my kids see as critical to continue now that they’ve become young adults, on the brink of leaving to build their own lives. Just like they hold me to it now, I intend to do the same.

But the only payoff I really need from these experiences are the moments like one when Nate reached high to throw an arm around my shoulders and told me, “I love these trips we do together.”

That’s enough right there.

Tell me what you think.

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The annual tradition began when my son, Nate, was five years old, and we hiked about a mile up a trail in the Boise Foothills, starting at a trailhead a 10-minute drive from our house, and camped beside a creek small enough to step over. It was the most mellow trip we’d take, and the closest to home, on the annual father-son outdoor adventure that we’ve come to call our “boy trip.” My daughter, Alex, two years younger, adapted that name and gave me a pass for my inferior gender when we began taking an annual “girl trip” together. Now it has grown into something bigger than any one, individual outing.

It’s never easy to cram the Girl Trip and Boy Trip into any summer, when we usually take them; but I commit to making time for both of them every year. Nate and Alex both consider it non-negotiable, as mandatory as celebrating their birthdays. They will both ask me repeatedly when we’ll take our trip and what we’ll do. The fully expect that each adventure will grow bigger, leading up to a major trip when each of them graduates from high school. Personally, I hope the tradition continues well beyond.

The photo gallery below conveys some of the fun of these annual outings—and shows the beauty of the places where we take them. See my story “Boy Trip, Girl Trip: Why I Take Father-Son and Father-Daughter Adventures.”

See also my “10 Tips For Keeping Kids Happy and Safe Outdoors,” my popular “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids” and “10 Tips For Getting Your Teenager Outdoors With You,” and all of my stories about Family Adventures at The Big Outside.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, the creator of The Big Outside, recognized as a top outdoors blog by USA Today and others. I invite you to get email updates about new stories and gear giveaways by entering your email address in the box in the left sidebar, at the bottom of this post, or on my About page, and follow my adventures on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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I’ve been checking out your excellent backpacking posts and think you may be the right person to help me out with my search. My partner and I have taken a year off work to travel around the U.S. We had a great time hiking and canyoneering in Escalante. So now we’re in the Northwest, and want to find a great wilderness base camp where we can set up for a few days and explore the surrounding area. I’ve heard great things about Idaho, but Washington, Montana and Wyoming are all within striking distance, too. So much choice! If you have any recommendations for us—even if it’s just a wilderness area to hone in on—they would be most gratefully received.

Thanks,
Brian
London, England

Hi Brian,

Thanks for writing and for following The Big Outside. Wow, that’s a sweeping question! I guess you’re asking me to suggest some of my favorite places if I had to narrow it down to a few within the states you mentioned.

In Washington, one of the best states for wilderness and mountains, I’d say Olympic National Park (lead photo, above), and start with the trails beginning from the Sol Duc campground, like the loop on the High Divide Trail. Also the Olympic coast. And North Cascades National Park is another favorite place.

In Idaho, check out all of my stories about the Sawtooth Mountains and neighboring White Cloud Mountains. In Montana, there are many options, but my first choice would be Glacier National Park. And you’ll find lots of stories at my site about Yellowstone, the Tetons, and the Wind River Range in Wyoming.

I hope that helps get you started. Good luck.

Best,
Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks so much for the advice. We are looking at your options with much anticipation!

Brian

In Ask Me, I share and respond to a reader question. Got a question about hiking, backpacking, gear, or any topic or trip I write about at The Big Outside? Send it to me at mlanza@thebigoutside.com, message me at facebook.com/TheBigOutside, or tweet it to @MichaelALanza. I will answer the ones I can in a post, using only your first name and city, with your permission. I receive a high volume of questions, so I cannot always respond quickly.

—Michael Lanza

We gaze up at a wall of shattered, crumbling gray and white rock rising several hundred feet above us, a barrier of cliffs separated by severely steep gullies of loose stones. The gullies offer the only remotely feasible routes up or down, but they look about as stable as a mountain of marbles. We’re debating which gully to climb up, and it feels a little like choosing which heavy, hardcover book you want to use to smack yourself in the head.

It’s still early on a July morning, and my friends Chip Roser, Scott White, and I are about five miles into a 28-mile, one-day hike through the White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho. On the surface, our goal is simple: a big tour of peaks with national park scenery and remote, national forest obscurity. As it turns out, though, a huge dayhike through one of the largest remaining, unprotected roadless areas in the contiguous United States will also provide fertile mental terrain for contemplating the meaning of wilderness in today’s world.

The White Clouds, as Idahoans know them, may be the most spectacular range that most hikers and backpackers in this country have never heard of. Located across the Sawtooth Valley from the more-famous Sawtooth Mountains, the White Clouds lie far from the highway, behind foothills, largely hidden from view unless you wander into them. So unlike the Sawtooths, which shoot up Teton-like in full view of Highway 75 and the no-traffic-lights town of Stanley, the White Clouds retain a high degree of anonymity in part because you can’t step out of your car and snap a selfie in front of them.

[NOTE: In August 2015, less than a year after this story was first published, President Barack Obama signed a bill designating 275,000 acres of new federal wilderness in Idaho’s Boulder and White Cloud Mountains and Jerry Peak area.]

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Many Idahoans consider that anonymity a good thing—it means plenty of opportunity for solitude in a range that harbors about 150 peaks over 10,000 feet and scores of lakes, many of them above 9,000 feet and a few over 10,000 feet. You can sit by the shore of the highest salmon-spawning waters in North America here, perhaps feeling a little bit envious of the mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, black bears, and wolverine who call these mountains home. The highest peak in the White Clouds, 11,815-foot Castle Peak, towers above its surroundings, including the Chamberlain Basin—a beautiful backcountry spot to camp, and a valley we’ll pass through later today.

For decades, advocates have proposed designating the White Clouds as federal wilderness, the highest level of legal protection, ensuring they remain for future generations in the wild condition that we enjoy them today. But the White Clouds, despite being cherished by backpackers, fishermen, and others for their pristine beauty, exist in a sort of political limbo between their current status as part of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA)—which includes only part of the range—and either of two higher levels of protection.

So today, one of the largest roadless areas in the Lower 48 still lacks permanent protection.

Boulder Chain Lakes

Scott, Chip, and I look up at our dubious choices of routes up between the cliffs above us. Earlier this morning, we hiked over the day’s first pass, between Fourth of July Lake and Ants Basin; two more passes await us later this afternoon, the highest at about 10,000 feet. But the off-trail scramble up and over this wall of cliff bands represents the crux of today’s adventure. Once on the other side, we will walk trails the rest of the way along this 28-mile loop back to our car—and then it’s just a question of whether we have the stamina to make it.

Although at least one guidebook suggests ascending an obvious gully that leads up to a notch in the low point on the ridge above the Born Lakes, we instead decide to scramble up the first gully immediately north (left) of the most prominent pinnacle topping the wall. Scott recommends it to us; he has been through here before, though in the opposite direction (counter-clockwise, while we’re hiking it clockwise). He says we’ll hit an unmaintained user trail as soon as we crest the ridge above the gully he’s suggesting, whereas if we take the gully to the low notch, we would have to pick our way down through cliff bands on the other side to reach that user trail.

No need to make this harder than it has to be.

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We commence an arduous exercise in patience, clawing our way up nature’s version of a gymnasium stair machine. Frequently using our hands, we slide back downhill on every other step uphill. Gullies on steep mountainsides represent the fast lanes on the highway of erosion—every stone and clump of earth seems hell bent on reaching the bottom first. Occasionally, one of us dislodges a bowling ball-size rock, and it tumbles downhill, cracking against other rocks and smashing into a hundred pieces of geologic shrapnel—good incentive to avoid climbing directly above or below one another.

Of course, even on nature’s stair machine, with perseverance, you do eventually reach the top. Cresting the ridge, stepping from the shadow of its west side into the sunlight bathing its east side, we see what Scott promised: a fairly obvious footpath snaking downhill toward the pass called Windy Devil. Beyond that pass, we drop into one of the gems of the White Clouds, the Boulder Chain Lakes valley, speckled with 14 named lakes—the highest, Lonesome Lake, nestled in a bowl of rock at 10,449 feet. The lower lakes sit mostly in green nests of pine forest, some of them partly hemmed in by tall cliffs.

I make a mental note to return here to backpack with my kids and camp at one of these upper Boulder Chain Lakes—although I may take a different route here than the one we’ve taken today.

Castle Peak

The Wilderness Act’s definition of wilderness may be the most-quoted words in the law, calling it “an area where the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The “untrammeled” bit engenders lively discussion about whether there’s much of the planet that truly remains largely untouched—especially in the era of rapidly advancing climate change. But the spirit of the law inspires people from all over the world because it sets a high bar for society to maintain these special places just as they are.

The White Clouds are currently the object of two separate conservation efforts: the first a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, sponsored by Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, to designate more than 330,000 acres of wilderness in the White Clouds and neighboring Boulder Mountains. That bill has stalled in Congress for more than a decade and appears as likely to become law in the foreseeable future as salmon are likely to rock climb the face of a dam. The second, newer effort is a campaign to persuade President Barack Obama to declare a 571,276-acre Boulder-White Cloud Mountains National Monument, including areas not contained within the SNRA—expanding protection from uses like mining and off-road vehicles.

While there’s no one at the upper Boulder Chain Lakes when we walk by them, the lower lakes are popular—belying the argument that designating lands as wilderness shuts them off from the public. On this particular summer morning, we pass at least a couple dozen men and teenage boys who are camped and fishing at the lower lakes. But increasing distance from roads almost always means fewer people: Later, we will cross paths with just two other hikers as we’re descending into Chamberlain Basin, and then not see anyone until we reach popular Washington Lake and Fourth of July Lake, both within a few miles of the end of our hike.

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At midday, about halfway through our loop, we’re ascending Trail 47 on the east side of Castle Peak toward a 10,000-foot pass known as Castle Divide—one of the high points of our day. And even though we’ve already walked some 14 miles, we’ve hardly broken a sweat all day, thanks to starting in the chilly temps of early morning, cool daytime breezes, the regular shade of pine forest along the way, and trails that never get very steep. In fact, with the exception of the off-trail scramble over the ridge separating the Born Lakes basin from the Boulder Chain Lakes (which can be avoided; see The Itinerary in the Make It Happen section below), much of this hike is only moderately hard—especially if you spread it out over three or four days.

We break out of the forest into alpine meadows carpeted with purple lupine and other wildflowers and march steadily upward through numerous switchbacks. A starkly barren slope of Castle Peak, a massive pile of shattered rock, soars more than two thousand feet overhead, capped by dark, jagged spires.

The Wilderness Act

This year, on the 50th birthday of The Wilderness Act—which established our first 54 wilderness areas and the process by which Congress could create more of them—there are about 30 bills proposing new areas, from Idaho’s Boulder-White Cloud Mountains to the Columbine-Hondo in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Unfortunately, those bills sit before a Congress in which too many members cynically perceive collaboration and leadership as failure.

The original nine million acres of wilderness in 54 areas created in 1964 have since grown to almost 110 million acres spread over 758 areas in 44 states, more than half of that acreage in Alaska. California places second on the list, with almost 15 million acres of land protected in pristine condition in perpetuity. The state I live in, Idaho, comes in third with about 4.5 million acres, followed by Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, all with more than three million acres each.

I’ve hiked, backpacked, climbed, paddled, and skied in many of those wild lands, along with innumerable Americans and people from all over the world, all of us drawn to a unique experience that’s available to us because of the foresight of leaders in conservation and politics. An old friend of mine back East is making plans to visit me in Idaho so he can hunt his first elk—something he will have the opportunity to do because we have wilderness where elk thrive.

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But if the public demand for wilderness has not diminished, political support for it has gone soft. While nearly 15 million acres of wilderness were designated in the Lower 48 in the 1980s, the number fell to under 10 million in the 1990s, less than five million in the first decade of this century—and only 32,500 acres since 2010, in one place, the Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness on Lake Michigan.

Federal politicians have also all but abandoned their obligation to manage existing wilderness: Years of inadequate funding have amassed a $314 million maintenance backlog on the 32,000 miles of trails that crisscross the nation’s 758 wilderness areas. I’ve hiked trails that are maintained on a 10-year cycle. In 10 years, a lot of trees fall down and vegetation overgrows trails.

When three friends and I kayaked the remote canyons of the Upper Owyhee River in southwestern Idaho and southeastern Oregon weeks after much of that area was designated as wilderness and wild and scenic rivers in 2009, the value of that protection seemed no less urgent to us than it must have seemed to the authors of The Wilderness Act a half-century ago.

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In the long dusk that prevails in the shadow of tall mountains, we hike steadily uphill through pine forest broken by an occasional meadow with views of distant, rocky peaks. When dark falls, we don headlamps and continue hiking into the night.

My backpacking partner, my 12-year-old son, Nate, has never hiked late at night. For him, this is a new and mildly thrilling experience—it feels a little like breaking a rule without consequences. After all, there are wild animals out here, including bears and mountain lions that wander nocturnally in search of something to eat—such as a large, slow, two-legged creature with poor night vision and a useless sense of smell.

But Nate seems unafraid. Maybe it’s because he’s with me. Or maybe he figures the bear or cougar wouldn’t waste its energy on a skinny, virtually meatless human like him and would go straight for me instead.

Nate and I are backpacking roughly 22 miles over three days to the Big Boulder Lakes, a cluster of more than a dozen bigger lakes and tiny tarns well above 9,000 feet in the White Cloud Mountains, in central Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area. It’s our annual father-son adventure. We’re buzzing with anticipation for the simple fact of having a solid three days of uninterrupted “boy time” together, but also because we are exploring a place neither of us has seen before.

At 11 p.m., after hiking more than five miles and almost 2,000 feet uphill, we pitch our tent on a patch of flat, bare ground, leaving the rainfly off on this clear, mild night. A short walk downhill from us, Big Boulder Creek murmurs at just the right volume to quickly lull us into a deep and uninterrupted sleep—but not before we gaze for a while up a coal-black sky liberally salted with stars, excitedly pointing out to each other the shooting stars we glimpse.

Big Boulder Lakes

The sun hitting our tent wakes us at 7:15 a.m. to a clear and mild morning with birds singing. Within two hours, we’re on the trail, soon passing a 20-foot-high cascade, and ascending steadily through pine forest. We follow the north shore of Walker Lake, a long, wind-rippled body of water below tall cliffs, to where the trail shown on my map terminates at Walker’s western end. There, we locate an unofficial, intermittent “use trail” climbing more steeply toward the Big Boulder Lakes.

The footpath emerges from forest and leads us through switchbacks up an open mountainside of broken stones and dusty dirt. Peaks rising to well over 11,000 feet scrape jagged edges against a brilliantly blue sky. At a pass, standing in impressive blasts of wind, we get our first stop-in-your-tracks view of the basin cradling the Big Boulder Lakes. Behind it rises the long ridge of unusually pale, chalk-like rock called the White Cloud Peaks, which gives its name to the larger mountain range around it. The trail guides us down to Hook Lake, a narrow, water-filled slash in the earth shaped like a fishhook, and then to bigger Cove Lake.

Nate’s a chatty trail companion, able to hold up a conversation for as many hours as we’re hiking. While mostly telling me about his friends and classes at school or his new, favorite video game, he also says, “So, what are you excited about these days, Dad? What do you want to talk about?”

At Cove Lake, we find a spot away from the water, put the tent up, and mostly laze around reading and relaxing for the rest of the afternoon. Nate’s tired after our late night and today’s hike. But we have no agenda, anyway, which is sometimes a good thing in the mountains—and a lesson it took me many years to learn. One thing my kids have taught me is this: Sometimes you should just lie back and watch the clouds drift past.

I watch my 12-year-old, on the doorstep of his teenage years, competently and confidently helping set up the tent and then firing up our stove, just as I’d watched with pride as he carried a full backpack on the rugged hike up here. When my kids were little, I believed getting them outdoors would imbue them with self-confidence and perspective that transfers benefits in many ways into other aspects of their lives. But I mostly took that on faith, based on personal experience. Now that they’re getting older, though, I see them demonstrating the things I’d hoped they would gain from these sometimes difficult, often transcendent experiences in the backcountry.

All afternoon, the wind blows 40 mph or stronger; even in the warm alpine sunshine, with the temperature around 60, we’re wearing jackets. And it’s welcome, because on this early-July weekend, in the midst of several acres of standing water, the wind provides our only respite from
dense clouds of ravenous mosquitoes that emerge every morning and evening.

That evening, with the wind still scouring the earth, we walk up onto a low spine of rock just above our campsite that gives us a 360-degree panorama of our surroundings. The Big Boulder Lakes lie scattered like a handful of seeds cast to the ground, in a basin where copses of spruce and fir trees speckle an otherwise barren landscape of rock and dirt. I’ve heard other avid backpackers talk about this area, always with superlatives and awe. Now I see why.

Nate points out potential routes to the summits within view. “We gotta plan a trip to come back here and scramble some of these peaks,” he tells me, and I agree.

Backpacking the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains

I remember my first view of the White Clouds, looking across the valley from high in the Sawtooth Mountains. It was late summer, and I saw a row of white peaks and thought, “Could that actually be snow?” It wasn’t, and realizing that left me wondering what form of black magic these mountains possessed.

The White Clouds, a cluster of rocky mountains east of the better-known Sawtooths and southeast of the tiny town of Stanley, remain off the radar of most backpackers outside Idaho. That’s unfortunate for backpackers who don’t know of the White Clouds and the good fortune of locals who revere these peaks.

The White Clouds and neighboring Boulder Mountains are prized not just for rugged alpine scenery and outstanding backpacking, fishing, and mountain biking—although that would be enough reason to protect them. Visitors to the resort towns of Ketchum and Sun Valley know the Boulders as the towering wall of stone rising alongside ID 75 north of town. The White Clouds, which sit too far from roads to be visible to car-bound travelers, harbor scores of sub-alpine lakes and some of the highest salmon-spawning waters in North America, as well as mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, and wolverine.

The White Clouds have places so achingly beautiful that people who know them utter their names in the way Nepalis and Tibetans speak the names of holy mountains: Chamberlain Basin below massive, 11,815-foot Castle Peak (highest in the White Clouds and strikingly prominent from surrounding mountain ranges); Ants Basin below the stark, bleached White Cloud Peaks; the string of gorgeous Boulder Chain Lakes; and the high basin of the Big Boulder Lakes.

Sadly, an effort to protect the Boulder-White Clouds with federal wilderness designation has stalled for more than a decade in a Congress so dysfunctional that, these days, the word “Congress” rarely appears in a news story without the adjective “dysfunctional.” Lately, conservationists and others have shifted their focus to persuading President Barack Obama to designate almost 600,000 acres in the area as a national monument. Wilderness designation could still follow, overlaying more protections atop national monument status, should our Congress someday drop its “dysfunctional” label.

Anyone opposing the preservation of these mountains should just take a hike in them.

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Cove Lake, Sapphire Lake, Cirque Lake

While Nate sleeps in on our third day, I wander the vicinity of our campsite with my camera as dawn light creeps across the pale mountains and the broken clouds overhead. Walking along the foaming outlet creek bursting out of Cove Lake, I notice motion on the periphery of my vision, but at first ignore it as imagined—until I see it a second and third time. Several fish, each maybe six inches long, leap from the roaring whitewater while swimming upstream against the current, driven by some ancient impulse to reach Cove Lake.

On our last morning, the sky looks brown with smoke from distant wildfires, the sun a red orb burning through that thin layer. We hike 30 minutes over to Sapphire Lake and leave our packs on a low ridge above it to walk across mostly bare, open terrain to Cirque Lake, near 10,000 feet, sitting up hard against the rockpile of 11,342-foot David O. Lee Peak.

In strong gusts that seem like they could carry my 75-pound kid away, Nate and I explore the shore of Cirque Lake. Then we retrace our steps to our packs and start the long, downhill hike back to our car—in daylight this time.

As we’re walking together, Nate and I talk about our father-son trips, coming up with ideas for future adventures. I point out that we just have six more years before he’s grown and off to college, and there are a lot of big trips I still want to do together, including a major one when he graduates from high school.

Nate responds: “Oh, we won’t stop then! We’ll keep doing these trips because after I’m grown up and out of college, I’ll still want to do this.” And he promises to carry most of our gear weight when we’re both older.

So my master plan has ancillary benefits, too.

Note: See my story “Boy Trip, Girl Trip: Why I Take Father-Son and Father-Daughter Adventures,” and my very popular story “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids,” as well as my “10 Tips For Keeping Kids Happy and Safe Outdoors,” and “My Top 10 Family Adventures.” See also my story “Going After Goals: Backpacking in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.”

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THIS TRIP IS GOOD FOR reasonably fit backpackers who can navigate cross-country by map and compass or GPS when necessary, and follow somewhat obscure trails.

Make It Happen

Season The White Cloud Mountains in central Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area are often sufficiently free of snow for hiking by late June or early July and remain so until snow starts accumulating in late October or November.

The Itinerary From Big Boulder Creek Trailhead, follow trails 47, 680, and 601 a total of about seven miles to Walker Lake, where there are plenty of nice campsites, and then continue around the right (north) side of the lake. Trail 601 terminates at the far end of Walker Lake. Look for a use trail leading north up an open, rocky slope; the trail is intermittent, at times a clear path and sometimes marked by cairns. It eventually swings left (west) onto the steep ridge only a few hundred meters distant.

That use trail becomes better defined as it climbs switchbacks up an open mountainside to a pass above Hook Lake, a small, fishhook-shaped tarn. From there, you have a view of several of the Big Boulder Lakes, including Cove Lake about a quarter-mile south of the pass. Unofficial trails lead to several of the lakes, but all are reached by fairly straightforward, cross-country hiking, and there are scrambling routes to the nearby summits. Return the same way to the trailhead.

Getting There The Big Boulder Creek Trailhead is a 4.5-hour drive northeast of Boise. From Stanley, follow ID 75 north for about 45 minutes; a few miles beyond Clayton, turn south onto East Fork Salmon River Road. It’s paved for about 16 miles, then becomes a good gravel road, passable for cars. Two miles past the end of the pavement (18 miles from ID 75), at a T-intersection, turn right onto Big Boulder Creek Road, which is narrow and slow but also passable for cars (at 15-20 mph). About four miles up you’ll reach a parking lot at Big Boulder Creek Trailhead.

Permit No permit is required.

Map Sawtooth and White Cloud Mountains, $12.99, Adventure Maps, (503) 385-8023, adventuremaps.net.

Contact Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Ketchum, ID 83340; (208) 727-5000, fs.usda.gov/sawtooth. The Idaho Trails Association helps maintain the trails, idahotrailsassociation.org.