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Walking Familiar Ground: The Teton Crest Trail
The moose cow and her calf block the trail, staring back at us with expressions that I swear look like confusion over what to do. So the feeling is mutual. They were coming down, we were going up, and now none of us are moving. With steep, rocky, wooded terrain on either side, we backpack-carrying humans aren’t interested in an off-trail detour. The moose don’t seem enthusiastic about that option at the moment, either.
We appear to be at a standoff.
Mike Baron, one of my oldest friends and first backpacking partners—and one of the friends with whom I first backpacked this very trail to Death Canyon in Grand Teton National Park almost 20 years ago—looks at me and says, with a grin, “What do we do?”
I smile, shrug, and tell him, “We wait.”
We’re just a few miles into one of the greatest multi-day treks in America, backpacking for four days from Death Canyon Trailhead to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, a 27.1-mile traverse that takes in some of the most scenic miles of the classic Teton Crest Trail. Our group includes my wife, Penny, our 10-year-old son, Nate, and eight-year-old daughter, Alex, and another longtime friend, Diane Tompkins.
But actually, that’s just a superficial description of our itinerary. On a deeper level, we four adults are retracing old footsteps through mountains as full of memories for us as our packs are full of gear and food. Meanwhile, my kids are making new prints beside ours, embarked on a metaphorical path they will follow far beyond these four days. So in a sense, one long journey continues while a newer, parallel journey is just getting underway.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Backpacking_the_Tetons.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
We appear to be at a standoff.
Mike Baron, one of my oldest friends and first backpacking partners—and one of the friends with whom I first backpacked this very trail to Death Canyon in Grand Teton National Park almost 20 years ago—looks at me and says, with a grin, “What do we do?”
I smile, shrug, and tell him, “We wait.”
We’re just a few miles into one of the greatest multi-day treks in America, backpacking for four days from Death Canyon Trailhead to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, a 27.1-mile traverse that takes in some of the most scenic miles of the classic Teton Crest Trail. Our group includes my wife, Penny, our 10-year-old son, Nate, and eight-year-old daughter, Alex, and another longtime friend, Diane Tompkins.
But actually, that’s just a superficial description of our itinerary. On a deeper level, we four adults are retracing old footsteps through mountains as full of memories for us as our packs are full of gear and food. Meanwhile, my kids are making new prints beside ours, embarked on a metaphorical path they will follow far beyond these four days. So in a sense, one long journey continues while a newer, parallel journey is just getting underway.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Backpacking_the_Tetons.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
The Wildest Coast--Backpacking Olympic National Park
On a remote, sandy beach on Washington’s Olympic coast, we stop in our tracks and gaze up. A wall of muddy earth rises some 300 feet into jungle-like rainforest. A thick strand of hemp rope dangles down this steep, eroding embankment. A ladder of wooden steps built into the muddy ground rises in tandem with the rope.
We’re going up it.
We’ve reached this spot after an hour of stepping and clambering cautiously over a beach tiled with big boulders, each one coated with wet, slick kelp and barnacles. Our group of six—including my wife, Penny, our school-age son, Nate, and daughter, Alex, my brother-in-law, Tom Beach, and his 15-year-old son, Daniel—crossed that beach while racing the clock against an incoming tide that was rapidly transforming that rocky stretch of coast to ocean. Now, this rope ladder marks the start of a three-mile-long overland trail through the rainforest. This detour off the beach is necessary to get around Hoh Head, an impassable section of coast where cliffs rise straight out of the pounding ocean.
“Oh, there’s a slug! There’s ANOTHER slug!” Nate excitedly calls out every sighting of these slimy creatures that are as long as his hand as I follow Alex and him up the rope ladder—bracing myself to, in theory, catch a tumbling kid.
It’s early on the first afternoon of our three-day, 17.5-mile backpacking trip on the southern stretch of the Olympic coast, from the Hoh River north to La Push Road. On the outer edge of the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Park protects the longest strip of wilderness coastline in the contiguous United States. You can’t order fried seafood or buy a T-shirt anywhere along these 73 miles of seashore. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining pieces of ocean-view real estate in the Lower 48 that Christopher Columbus or Capt. George Vancouver would recognize.
It’s also one of America’s most stunningly beautiful strips of shoreline. Up and down the coast, scores of stone pinnacles—called sea stacks—rise as much as 200 feet out of the ocean, some of them topped with a copse of a few trees, others just bare rock.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Southern_Olympic_Coast.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
We’re going up it.
We’ve reached this spot after an hour of stepping and clambering cautiously over a beach tiled with big boulders, each one coated with wet, slick kelp and barnacles. Our group of six—including my wife, Penny, our school-age son, Nate, and daughter, Alex, my brother-in-law, Tom Beach, and his 15-year-old son, Daniel—crossed that beach while racing the clock against an incoming tide that was rapidly transforming that rocky stretch of coast to ocean. Now, this rope ladder marks the start of a three-mile-long overland trail through the rainforest. This detour off the beach is necessary to get around Hoh Head, an impassable section of coast where cliffs rise straight out of the pounding ocean.
“Oh, there’s a slug! There’s ANOTHER slug!” Nate excitedly calls out every sighting of these slimy creatures that are as long as his hand as I follow Alex and him up the rope ladder—bracing myself to, in theory, catch a tumbling kid.
It’s early on the first afternoon of our three-day, 17.5-mile backpacking trip on the southern stretch of the Olympic coast, from the Hoh River north to La Push Road. On the outer edge of the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Park protects the longest strip of wilderness coastline in the contiguous United States. You can’t order fried seafood or buy a T-shirt anywhere along these 73 miles of seashore. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining pieces of ocean-view real estate in the Lower 48 that Christopher Columbus or Capt. George Vancouver would recognize.
It’s also one of America’s most stunningly beautiful strips of shoreline. Up and down the coast, scores of stone pinnacles—called sea stacks—rise as much as 200 feet out of the ocean, some of them topped with a copse of a few trees, others just bare rock.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Southern_Olympic_Coast.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Excerpt from Before They're Gone
We hear the menacing snarls and let our eyes trace the sound to its source. Just a few hundred feet below where we stand at 7,050-foot Lincoln Pass in Montana’s Glacier National Park, two grizzly bear cubs tussle playfully where this open, rocky mountainside meets a sparse conifer forest. Vigilantly close by, their mom vacuums her nose over the ground, searching for tidbits. A plus-size lady, she has a weight lifter’s physique atop hips and legs that might cause a self-conscious bear to frown at her reflection in a lake. But she moves like a four-hundred-pound ballet dancer, hinting at speed and power that we cannot fathom.
Seeing her arouses a feeling so primal that few words even form in our minds or emerge from our mouths. Our skin prickles, our throats turn to sandpaper. If we possessed ears that normally drooped down, at this moment they would stand straight up. If we had the option, we would dive without further contemplation into a claustrophobic burrow and cower for a long time.
But we have no burrow. And the bears are just four or five steps off the trail we have to descend.
As any backpacker or armchair adventurer understands, this represents the worst possible circumstance. A grizzly bear alone might normally flee from the sounds and odors of humans, probably before the people even realized a bear lurked nearby. But other than a polar bear, a griz sow with cubs is arguably the most fearsome, ferocious terrestrial beast in the Americas. She may perceive any sizable creature in her vicinity as a threat to her babies. Every two or three years in the western U.S. or Canada, a sow horribly mauls or kills some hapless person guilty of no more than stumbling upon the same patch of earth at exactly the same moment as her cubs. In July 2011, a sow with cubs killed a 57-year-old man hiking with his wife in Yellowstone.
So we wait, hoping the bears will move on. There is no wind; they may not smell us. They disappear into the woods, but we periodically hear their growls, too close to the trail for us to consider venturing down there. An hour drips by like candle wax.
Read the full excerpt from Before They're Gone—A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks, by Michael Lanza, and see photos from those trips at thebigoutside.com/My_New_Book.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Seeing her arouses a feeling so primal that few words even form in our minds or emerge from our mouths. Our skin prickles, our throats turn to sandpaper. If we possessed ears that normally drooped down, at this moment they would stand straight up. If we had the option, we would dive without further contemplation into a claustrophobic burrow and cower for a long time.
But we have no burrow. And the bears are just four or five steps off the trail we have to descend.
As any backpacker or armchair adventurer understands, this represents the worst possible circumstance. A grizzly bear alone might normally flee from the sounds and odors of humans, probably before the people even realized a bear lurked nearby. But other than a polar bear, a griz sow with cubs is arguably the most fearsome, ferocious terrestrial beast in the Americas. She may perceive any sizable creature in her vicinity as a threat to her babies. Every two or three years in the western U.S. or Canada, a sow horribly mauls or kills some hapless person guilty of no more than stumbling upon the same patch of earth at exactly the same moment as her cubs. In July 2011, a sow with cubs killed a 57-year-old man hiking with his wife in Yellowstone.
So we wait, hoping the bears will move on. There is no wind; they may not smell us. They disappear into the woods, but we periodically hear their growls, too close to the trail for us to consider venturing down there. An hour drips by like candle wax.
Read the full excerpt from Before They're Gone—A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks, by Michael Lanza, and see photos from those trips at thebigoutside.com/My_New_Book.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
The Best-Laid Plans: A Ski Traverse in Yellowstone
The bison swings his massive, battering-ram head in our direction. Steam issues from his nostrils in short bursts. I’m not sure whether bison actually glare, but this 2,000-pound beef bulldozer with horns distinctly appears to be glaring at us. He looks perturbed.
Right behind me, my friends Jerry Hapgood and David Ports peer around me and try to take a measure of the first traffic of any kind, wild or human, that we’ve encountered so far, on the second morning of a seven-day, early March ski traverse in Yellowstone National Park. We are crossing an unnamed geyser basin several miles southwest of Old Faithful. The bison is grazing in grassy patches where the heat from thermal activity has melted away the snow. Then we notice two more bison lurking in the tightly spaced lodgepole pine trees to either side of the narrow trail.
So he’s brought friends. It’s three on three, but they collectively have a good 5,000 pounds on us—not a very fair fight. I silently curse the fact that I randomly happened to be the one skiing out front breaking trail through the snow at this moment.
David, Jerry, and I are each carrying a backpack and towing a sled loaded with winter camping gear, food, and—full disclosure—a survival ration of beer. (Hey, sleds have plenty of space, so why not?) We are not exactly light and nimble. Weaving through the close trees to get around the bison seems as likely as one of these beasts executing a backflip.
Fifteen minutes or more crawl past. The bison don’t move. I don’t feel like challenging them on that. From the back of the line, David suggests, “Mike, why don’t you just ski past him?”
As I’m thinking about how to suggest to David that perhaps he could come show me how to do that, the bison in front of me abruptly turns and ambles toward us.
Stumbling and tripping, struggling to backpedal with our sled cabooses, the three of us look like Moe, Larry, and Curly trying to get out of the way. But before getting close enough to trample us into the snow, the bison detours off the trail toward another patch of grass.
We hurry down the now-clear trail as quickly as we can drag our sleds, not pausing until the bison are long out of sight.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Near-Epic_in_Yellowstone.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Right behind me, my friends Jerry Hapgood and David Ports peer around me and try to take a measure of the first traffic of any kind, wild or human, that we’ve encountered so far, on the second morning of a seven-day, early March ski traverse in Yellowstone National Park. We are crossing an unnamed geyser basin several miles southwest of Old Faithful. The bison is grazing in grassy patches where the heat from thermal activity has melted away the snow. Then we notice two more bison lurking in the tightly spaced lodgepole pine trees to either side of the narrow trail.
So he’s brought friends. It’s three on three, but they collectively have a good 5,000 pounds on us—not a very fair fight. I silently curse the fact that I randomly happened to be the one skiing out front breaking trail through the snow at this moment.
David, Jerry, and I are each carrying a backpack and towing a sled loaded with winter camping gear, food, and—full disclosure—a survival ration of beer. (Hey, sleds have plenty of space, so why not?) We are not exactly light and nimble. Weaving through the close trees to get around the bison seems as likely as one of these beasts executing a backflip.
Fifteen minutes or more crawl past. The bison don’t move. I don’t feel like challenging them on that. From the back of the line, David suggests, “Mike, why don’t you just ski past him?”
As I’m thinking about how to suggest to David that perhaps he could come show me how to do that, the bison in front of me abruptly turns and ambles toward us.
Stumbling and tripping, struggling to backpedal with our sled cabooses, the three of us look like Moe, Larry, and Curly trying to get out of the way. But before getting close enough to trample us into the snow, the bison detours off the trail toward another patch of grass.
We hurry down the now-clear trail as quickly as we can drag our sleds, not pausing until the bison are long out of sight.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Near-Epic_in_Yellowstone.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Super Volcanoes: New Zealand's Tongariro National Park
We have just begun our all-day hike over some of the volcanoes of New Zealand’s Tongariro National Park when a trailside sign conveniently itemizes the life-threatening hazards awaiting us.
For starters, an eruption could eject large rocks into the air to rain onto us from the sky or release lava flows. Pyroclastic flows, which are clouds of ash, rock, and gas that can cook flesh, could come upon us at 60 mph. Just such a flow in 1975, in fact, formed the black rocks we’re standing on. Even short of a volcanic eruption, deadly volcanic gases can pool in the bottom of craters on calm, sunny days like today. And the rock on these peaks is so unstable that falling rock looms as a constant hazard.
Should we notice any signs of an eruption—an earthquake, for instance, or an ash cloud, or that other telltale indicator, rocks flying incongruously through the air—we should “move as quickly as possible down off the mountain.”
Yea, sound advice. In theory, anyway.
I find the sign rather comforting, actually: Before exploring a new place, I like knowing what could kill me there.
The warnings are not hyperbolic. Tongariro National Park looks like a place recently devastated by a very big bomb—which is, in a sense, what happened. The first volcano we will climb, Mt. Ngauruhoe, erupted 45 times in the 20th century. Red Crater, also on our itinerary today, last erupted about 130 years ago—an eye blink in geologic time. Mt. Ruapehu, dominating the horizon just a few miles to the south of Ngauruhoe, ranks among the world's most active volcanoes. Blowing its top with a major eruption roughly every 50 years for at least the past 250 millennia—including in 1895, 1945, and 1995-1996—Ruapehu has also experienced at least 60 “minor” eruptions since 1945, some of which produced ash falls and lahars, which are deadly flows of mud and rock.
Sounds like very serious stuff.
I’m spending the day hiking a 12.1-mile loop over three of the main volcanoes and craters of Tongariro, in the center of New Zealand’s North Island. Established in 1887—just five years after Yellowstone became the world’s first national park—Tongariro was New Zealand’s first national park and the world’s fourth. It is also a dual World Heritage area, recognized both for its importance to the culture of the Maori, the original people of these islands, and for its natural values. Besides prolific volcanism and associated natural features, the national park is known for its strikingly stark, colorful landscape.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Tongariro_Volcanoes.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
For starters, an eruption could eject large rocks into the air to rain onto us from the sky or release lava flows. Pyroclastic flows, which are clouds of ash, rock, and gas that can cook flesh, could come upon us at 60 mph. Just such a flow in 1975, in fact, formed the black rocks we’re standing on. Even short of a volcanic eruption, deadly volcanic gases can pool in the bottom of craters on calm, sunny days like today. And the rock on these peaks is so unstable that falling rock looms as a constant hazard.
Should we notice any signs of an eruption—an earthquake, for instance, or an ash cloud, or that other telltale indicator, rocks flying incongruously through the air—we should “move as quickly as possible down off the mountain.”
Yea, sound advice. In theory, anyway.
I find the sign rather comforting, actually: Before exploring a new place, I like knowing what could kill me there.
The warnings are not hyperbolic. Tongariro National Park looks like a place recently devastated by a very big bomb—which is, in a sense, what happened. The first volcano we will climb, Mt. Ngauruhoe, erupted 45 times in the 20th century. Red Crater, also on our itinerary today, last erupted about 130 years ago—an eye blink in geologic time. Mt. Ruapehu, dominating the horizon just a few miles to the south of Ngauruhoe, ranks among the world's most active volcanoes. Blowing its top with a major eruption roughly every 50 years for at least the past 250 millennia—including in 1895, 1945, and 1995-1996—Ruapehu has also experienced at least 60 “minor” eruptions since 1945, some of which produced ash falls and lahars, which are deadly flows of mud and rock.
Sounds like very serious stuff.
I’m spending the day hiking a 12.1-mile loop over three of the main volcanoes and craters of Tongariro, in the center of New Zealand’s North Island. Established in 1887—just five years after Yellowstone became the world’s first national park—Tongariro was New Zealand’s first national park and the world’s fourth. It is also a dual World Heritage area, recognized both for its importance to the culture of the Maori, the original people of these islands, and for its natural values. Besides prolific volcanism and associated natural features, the national park is known for its strikingly stark, colorful landscape.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Tongariro_Volcanoes.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
A Secret Kiwi Paradise: Trekking the Rees-Dart Track
We’ve hiked just thirty minutes from the trailhead when we hit the kind of view that frequently makes you stop and take a deep breath when trekking in New Zealand.
The Rees River Valley sprawls out before us, golden grasslands dissected by a braided, meandering, emerald-green river. In the middle distance, a fat and foaming Lennox Falls plunges over a cliff. Farther off and thousands of feet above us, glaciers pour off a row of sharp peaks in the Forbes Range angling into the sky.
My hiking partner, Gary Kuehn, an American who has lived here on New Zealand’s South Island working as a mountain guide for several years—long enough, apparently, to pick up that semi-intelligible Kiwi accent—looks around, grins, and mutters, “Pritty noice.”
Gary has seen a fair bit of these Southern Alps, where vistas like this are so common that they inspire an odd sort of déjà vu that you have stumbled into paradise for something like the fourth time today. And yet, he jumped at the invitation to join me here on the Rees-Dart Track because he’s actually never done this trek.
That fact affirms my impression of the Rees-Dart, most of which falls within Mt. Aspiring National Park: Although just spitting distance from the world-famous and enormously popular Routeburn Track, with scenery copied and pasted from the same Southern Alps template, the longer and more rugged Rees-Dart remains largely overlooked by the armies of international trekkers that invade New Zealand every austral summer. Other than the expected busy atmosphere at the huts, we will spend most of every day out here seeing no one else.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Rees-Dart__New_Zealand.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
The Rees River Valley sprawls out before us, golden grasslands dissected by a braided, meandering, emerald-green river. In the middle distance, a fat and foaming Lennox Falls plunges over a cliff. Farther off and thousands of feet above us, glaciers pour off a row of sharp peaks in the Forbes Range angling into the sky.
My hiking partner, Gary Kuehn, an American who has lived here on New Zealand’s South Island working as a mountain guide for several years—long enough, apparently, to pick up that semi-intelligible Kiwi accent—looks around, grins, and mutters, “Pritty noice.”
Gary has seen a fair bit of these Southern Alps, where vistas like this are so common that they inspire an odd sort of déjà vu that you have stumbled into paradise for something like the fourth time today. And yet, he jumped at the invitation to join me here on the Rees-Dart Track because he’s actually never done this trek.
That fact affirms my impression of the Rees-Dart, most of which falls within Mt. Aspiring National Park: Although just spitting distance from the world-famous and enormously popular Routeburn Track, with scenery copied and pasted from the same Southern Alps template, the longer and more rugged Rees-Dart remains largely overlooked by the armies of international trekkers that invade New Zealand every austral summer. Other than the expected busy atmosphere at the huts, we will spend most of every day out here seeing no one else.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Rees-Dart__New_Zealand.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Into the Mystic: Sea Kayaking New Zealand's Fiordland
A light mist falls as our small adventure armada of nine sea kayaks cruises along the shore of Deep Cove, the farthest inland extremity of Doubtful Sound in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park. Around us, cliffs rise straight up out of the sea to 4,000-foot summits—sheer, Yosemite-like granite walls improbably sprouting a vertical jungle of the podocarp trees and other indigenous vegetation that make these forests look like something from another planet.
The sun makes feeble attempts to break through the soupy overcast. But the clouds, mist, and intermittent rain will persist throughout our trip, as they do most days of the year here. When you head out into a place that receives upwards of 23 feet of rain annually—which is about ten feet more precipitation than falls on Washington’s famously saturated Olympic rainforest—you don’t bother looking at the weather forecast. You just bring good rain gear and think sunny thoughts.
Our guide, Simeon Grig, who goes by “Sim,” leads us to the lee side of tiny Rolla Island, to take a break out of the wind. In a pronounced Kiwi accent that could make him the star of an action movie or a really funny beer commercial, Sim tells us that Rolla, covered with a thick fur of impenetrable rainforest, is a breeding ground for native crested penguins.
I’m sharing a two-person kayak with a young Portuguese named Leonardo, whom I just met this morning. He and I paddle ahead of the others as our group circles the island. On Rolla’s opposite side, we surprise two penguins waddling along the short skirt of rock at the shore. Seeing us, the penguin pair scrabbles quickly up the wet rock and disappears into the jungle.
It’s the first morning of our guided sea kayaking trip run by Fiordland Wilderness Experiences. For two days, we will paddle around the upper reaches of Doubtful Sound, a remote, roughly 30-mile-long fjord in the vast wilderness of Fiordland, which sprawls over nearly three million acres of the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island, an area as large as Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks combined. Fiordland is also part of the Southwest New Zealand World Heritage Area, which spans four contiguous national parks (including Mt. Aspiring and the Rees-Dart Track), and covers 6.4 million acres—almost three times the size of Yellowstone, representing roughly 10 percent of New Zealand’s land area.
Read the full story and see photos, a video, and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Fiordland__New_Zealand.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
The sun makes feeble attempts to break through the soupy overcast. But the clouds, mist, and intermittent rain will persist throughout our trip, as they do most days of the year here. When you head out into a place that receives upwards of 23 feet of rain annually—which is about ten feet more precipitation than falls on Washington’s famously saturated Olympic rainforest—you don’t bother looking at the weather forecast. You just bring good rain gear and think sunny thoughts.
Our guide, Simeon Grig, who goes by “Sim,” leads us to the lee side of tiny Rolla Island, to take a break out of the wind. In a pronounced Kiwi accent that could make him the star of an action movie or a really funny beer commercial, Sim tells us that Rolla, covered with a thick fur of impenetrable rainforest, is a breeding ground for native crested penguins.
I’m sharing a two-person kayak with a young Portuguese named Leonardo, whom I just met this morning. He and I paddle ahead of the others as our group circles the island. On Rolla’s opposite side, we surprise two penguins waddling along the short skirt of rock at the shore. Seeing us, the penguin pair scrabbles quickly up the wet rock and disappears into the jungle.
It’s the first morning of our guided sea kayaking trip run by Fiordland Wilderness Experiences. For two days, we will paddle around the upper reaches of Doubtful Sound, a remote, roughly 30-mile-long fjord in the vast wilderness of Fiordland, which sprawls over nearly three million acres of the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island, an area as large as Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks combined. Fiordland is also part of the Southwest New Zealand World Heritage Area, which spans four contiguous national parks (including Mt. Aspiring and the Rees-Dart Track), and covers 6.4 million acres—almost three times the size of Yellowstone, representing roughly 10 percent of New Zealand’s land area.
Read the full story and see photos, a video, and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Fiordland__New_Zealand.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
Going Deep—Backcountry Skiing Oregon's Wallowas
We reach a high saddle between
two peaks, where the wind has sculpted the snow into stationary,
perpetually cresting waves several feet high. Treeless slopes of clean,
untracked powder fall away beneath us. Our group of several friends and a
few guides have been climbing uphill in this remote corner of northeast
Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains for more than two hours, ascending some
3,000 vertical feet under a clear, ice-blue winter sky, amid scenery
that looks like a post card from an Alpine resort, but without the ski
lifts and quaint villages.
Then we look up at the final grind awaiting us: a ridge of crusty, windblown snow rising another seven hundred feet to the 9,555-foot summit of Red Mountain, one of the highest in the Wallowas. It looks steep.
My companions all strap their skis onto their packs and begin kicking steps in the snow on a long slog that will consume almost another hour. Reluctant to carry skis—maybe reluctant to a fault—I keep mine on my feet and make hundreds of zigzags uphill, like a mechanized duck in a shooting gallery, an effort that one of the guides will later claim earns me the dubious distinction of making Red’s first ascent entirely on skis. She generously makes it sound like a proud accomplishment, but part of me prefers to believe that there must have been at least one person before me who was dumb or stubborn enough to try it.
At the top of Red, where it’s cold and breezy but not intolerably so, we hang out for a little while to soak up the views. The Wallowas sprawl to far horizons, an amazing panorama of jagged ridges capped with scalloped snow and rocky peaks jutting out of the white. Much of the range lies within the Eagle Cap Wilderness, 350,000 acres without any sign of civilization. To the northeast, the snowy and craggy Seven Devils Mountains of Idaho rise across the brown, 8,000-foot-deep trench of Hells Canyon.
It’s probably a safe bet that there aren’t another 20 people in this entire mountain range today, and possibly no one besides us. There certainly isn’t another soul in our corner of them...
[Read the full story and see a photo gallery at thebigoutside.com/Wallowa_Mountains.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.]
Then we look up at the final grind awaiting us: a ridge of crusty, windblown snow rising another seven hundred feet to the 9,555-foot summit of Red Mountain, one of the highest in the Wallowas. It looks steep.
My companions all strap their skis onto their packs and begin kicking steps in the snow on a long slog that will consume almost another hour. Reluctant to carry skis—maybe reluctant to a fault—I keep mine on my feet and make hundreds of zigzags uphill, like a mechanized duck in a shooting gallery, an effort that one of the guides will later claim earns me the dubious distinction of making Red’s first ascent entirely on skis. She generously makes it sound like a proud accomplishment, but part of me prefers to believe that there must have been at least one person before me who was dumb or stubborn enough to try it.
At the top of Red, where it’s cold and breezy but not intolerably so, we hang out for a little while to soak up the views. The Wallowas sprawl to far horizons, an amazing panorama of jagged ridges capped with scalloped snow and rocky peaks jutting out of the white. Much of the range lies within the Eagle Cap Wilderness, 350,000 acres without any sign of civilization. To the northeast, the snowy and craggy Seven Devils Mountains of Idaho rise across the brown, 8,000-foot-deep trench of Hells Canyon.
It’s probably a safe bet that there aren’t another 20 people in this entire mountain range today, and possibly no one besides us. There certainly isn’t another soul in our corner of them...
[Read the full story and see a photo gallery at thebigoutside.com/Wallowa_Mountains.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.]
The Magic of Falling Water: Dayhiking Yosemite Valley
My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, is engaged in some heavy intellectual lifting. I can tell by the way she stares quietly, her brow knitted in thought, at Upper Yosemite Falls. We’ve hiked for 90 minutes up a thousand vertical feet of hot, dusty trail above Yosemite Valley to stand below this curtain of water that plunges a sheer 1,430 feet off a cliff, ripping through the air with a sound like fighter jets buzzing us.
I can only imagine how it challenges her young sense of perspective. I was an adult when I first saw Yosemite Falls, the tallest in North America at 2,425 feet, consisting of the upper falls in front of us, several hundred feet of cascades below it, and 400-foot-tall Lower Yosemite Falls, out of sight far below us. It awed me then, as it still does. But I’m wondering what it looks like to the eyes of a seven-year-old.
Finally, Alex asks me, “How does the water go up the mountain?”
Correction: I could not imagine her perspective—I sure didn’t anticipate that question, anyway. But after she utters it, it strikes me as a perfectly logical inquiry for someone who hasn’t conceptualized that uphill from this liquid tower, beyond sight, sprawls a high country of forest and meadows. Up there, an exceptionally deep snowpack from the past winter and spring continues melting well into summer, feeding Yosemite Creek and this waterfall. To Alex, the water appears to materialize inexplicably from the top of this cliff.
We are on a family trip to Yosemite Valley to hike to some of the most spectacular waterfalls on the continent—and we’ve come in early summer, when mountain snowmelt fattens them up so much that they create something like a very localized rainstorm, even on a sunny day.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Yosemite_Valley.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
I can only imagine how it challenges her young sense of perspective. I was an adult when I first saw Yosemite Falls, the tallest in North America at 2,425 feet, consisting of the upper falls in front of us, several hundred feet of cascades below it, and 400-foot-tall Lower Yosemite Falls, out of sight far below us. It awed me then, as it still does. But I’m wondering what it looks like to the eyes of a seven-year-old.
Finally, Alex asks me, “How does the water go up the mountain?”
Correction: I could not imagine her perspective—I sure didn’t anticipate that question, anyway. But after she utters it, it strikes me as a perfectly logical inquiry for someone who hasn’t conceptualized that uphill from this liquid tower, beyond sight, sprawls a high country of forest and meadows. Up there, an exceptionally deep snowpack from the past winter and spring continues melting well into summer, feeding Yosemite Creek and this waterfall. To Alex, the water appears to materialize inexplicably from the top of this cliff.
We are on a family trip to Yosemite Valley to hike to some of the most spectacular waterfalls on the continent—and we’ve come in early summer, when mountain snowmelt fattens them up so much that they create something like a very localized rainstorm, even on a sunny day.
Read the full story and see photos and info on how to plan this trip at thebigoutside.com/Yosemite_Valley.html. For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
2011: A Year of Adventures in Pictures
From cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and paddling in the Everglades (the final two trips for my upcoming book) to backcountry skiing from a yurt in Oregon’s Wallowas (watch for a story soon), an ultra-dayhike across Zion National Park, rock climbing at Idaho’s City of Rocks, rafting Oregon’s Grand Ronde River, dayhiking in the Columbia Gorge and New Hampshire’s Franconia Ridge, a six-day mountaineering trip on the Ptarmigan Traverse in Washington’s North Cascades, and backpacking the Teton Crest Trail and in Idaho’s Sawtooths (twice), 2011 was a pretty good year.
I’ve already written about some of those trips at this site, and will write about others in coming months. Check out this photo gallery of highlights from all of those 2011 adventures.
At this time of year, I’m poring over maps, guidebook descriptions, and websites, planning adventures for 2012. I hope you are, too. Looking for ideas or inspiration? Try this gallery of pictures from outdoor adventures I’ve taken in the U.S. and around the world—all of which you can read about (and get advice on planning) at this site.
Make it a happy new year.
For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
I’ve already written about some of those trips at this site, and will write about others in coming months. Check out this photo gallery of highlights from all of those 2011 adventures.
At this time of year, I’m poring over maps, guidebook descriptions, and websites, planning adventures for 2012. I hope you are, too. Looking for ideas or inspiration? Try this gallery of pictures from outdoor adventures I’ve taken in the U.S. and around the world—all of which you can read about (and get advice on planning) at this site.
Make it a happy new year.
For more stories and images of outdoor adventures, please visit TheBigOutside.com.
About the Author
Michael Lanza is the creator of TheBigOutside.com, Northwest Editor of Backpacker Magazine, and a book author, outdoor photographer, hiker, climber, skier, and widely traveled adventurer. See more about his work at michaellanza.com.
