By Michael Lanza
Everyone loves a good picture—it’s worth a thousand words, right? At this blog, I’ve now posted hundreds of stories with photos about outdoor adventures I’ve taken, many of them with my family. What better way to begin exploring ideas for your next trip than by scrolling through 20 inspirational images from stories at this website?
The pictures below are all from stories at The Big Outside; click on any photo or the link in its description to see that story, with more photos and trip-planning information.
Start planning your next big adventure now. Or your next 20.
David Ports hiking the Tonto Trail at Salt Creek in the Grand Canyon.
Backpacking in the Grand Canyon
I think it’s fair to say that you cannot call yourself an accomplished backpacker until you’ve backpacked in the Grand Canyon, simply because it’s one of the few places so geologically unique, challenging, and mind-boggling beautiful and vast that every serious backpacker should get there. Every hike there has only fueled my appetite to explore more of its 1.2 million acres (America’s fourth-largest national park outside Alaska). See my stories about several trips in the Big Ditch, including hiking across the Grand Canyon; backpacking 29 miles from Grandview Point to the South Kaibab Trailhead; the 25-mile hike from Hermits Rest to the Bright Angel Trailhead; a rugged, 15-mile trek from the New Hance Trailhead to the Colorado River and up to Grandview Point; and backpacking the experts-only, 34.5-mile Royal Arch Loop. Or visit my All National Park Trips page and scroll down to Grand Canyon for a menu of all of my stories.
On the John Muir Trail overlooking Half Dome, Liberty Cap, and Nevada Fall.
Bag Yosemite’s Best Dayhikes
Half Dome, Clouds Rest, Mount Hoffmann, Mist Trail, Upper Yosemite Falls—these names are nearly as famous as the park that harbors them. Still others, like Matterhorn Peak, Cathedral Lakes, and Dewey Point, are comparably scenic if not as well known. Among the myriad ways to explore Yosemite, ticking off some of its finest dayhikes offers a varied sampler of this flagship national park that’ doable no matter how much time you have there: a week, three days, or one. See my story “The 10 Best Dayhikes in Yosemite.”
Backpacking the Welch Ridge Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Backpacking in the Great Smoky Mountains
You’ve seen photos of classic Great Smoky Mountains National Park scenery, with overlapping rows of blue, wooded ridges fading to a distant horizon. But on a 34-mile hike from lower elevations near Fontana Lake up to the park’s crest, traversing a stretch of the Appalachian Trail, I enjoyed a grand tour of this half-million-acre park’s wonderful variety. I sat beside rocky streams tumbling through cascades; walked through forest that harbors 1,600 species of flowering plants (76 listed as threatened or endangered in North Carolina and Tennessee) accompanied only by the sound of birds; and, of course, looked out over an ocean of blue ridges from 6,643-foot Clingmans Dome and the park’s highest bald, 5,920-foot Andrews Bald. I also found a surprising degree of solitude, even in the popular fall hiking season. I’ll post a feature story about that trip later this year at The Big Outside. Meanwhile, see my “3-Minute Read: Backpacking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.”
Gunsight Pass Trail, Glacier National Park, Montana.
Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Gunsight Pass Trail
Glacier National Park is one of my favorite places to backpack, but much of it is quite remote and challenging. My family’s three-day hike on the Gunsight Pass Trail, when my kids were nine and seven, was just as scenic as any trip I’ve done there, without the physical and logistical difficulties. Read my story about it and see more images, and see all of my stories about Glacier National Park. (I also write more about that trip in my book Before They’re Gone.)
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David Gordon in The Subway, Zion National Park.
Exploring Zion National Park
Tick off the best dayhikes and backpacking trips in Zion—Angels Landing, The Narrows, The Subway, the West Rim Trail, the Kolob Canyons—and you’ve named some of the most scenic pieces of wild real estate in the entire National Park System. I’ve been there several times and still have adventures on my to-do list for that park. See all of my stories about Zion, including a photo gallery from all of my hikes there, and my stories about a family backpacking trip in the Kolob Canyons and West Rim Trail, hiking The Subway, and dayhiking 50 miles across Zion, and watch for my feature story about backpacking The Narrows later this year at The Big Outside.
Score a popular permit using my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”
Ponytail Falls, in the Columbia Gorge, Oregon.
Hiking in the Columbia Gorge
Very cool waterfalls, wildflowers, and rainforest reachable on family-friendly dayhikes—that’s the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Washington in a nutshell. Walk behind Ponytail Falls and Tunnel Falls with your kids and you’ll instantly cement their enthusiasm for hiking. But the Gorge is a great destination for the most hard-core hikers, too, with rugged trails that get little traffic and serious vertical relief. See my story about dayhiking to some of the Columbia Gorge’s highlights, and this photo gallery, with trip-planning details, about a 20-mile, 5,000-foot dayhike in the Gorge.
The view from Johnson Point, above the Middle Fork Salmon River, Idaho.
Whitewater Rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River
One of the most scenic, remote, and thrilling adventures my family has ever taken was whitewater rafting six days down Idaho’s classic Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Flowing like an artery through the heart of the second-largest federal wilderness in the continental United States, the nearly 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the Middle Fork is about a far off the grid as one can get in the Lower 48. And there’s a lot of whitewater—300 ratable rapids, a number of them class III and IV—plus beautiful side hikes to overlooks and waterfalls. See my story “Big Water, Big Wilderness: Rafting Idaho’s Incomparable Middle Fork Salmon River.”
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