Writer and photographer Michael Lanza is the creator of The Big Outside, which has made many top-blog lists and where he writes about his outdoor adventures, including many with his wife and children. His book Before They’re Gone—A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks,winner of a National Outdoor Book Award honorable mention, chronicles his wilderness adventures with his wife and their young son and daughter in national parks imperiled by climate change. A former Northwest editor of Backpacker magazine, he lives with his family in Boise, Idaho. REI Member since 1987.
Patagonia’s new Micro Puff is available as an insulated jacket (women’s and men’s, $249) and insulated hoodie (women’s and men’s, $299). Our testers tried out t...
As we hiked uphill toward Gunsight Pass in Glacier National Park, on a three-day family backpacking trip, a couple in their 50s stopped to talk with us. They sm...
On a cool, dusky evening in October, deep in the root cellar of a thickly forested, tightly hemmed-in Southern Appalachian valley—a place where you could forget...
Arctic blasts of wind slam us as a nuclear sun reflects off the snow to create an intense solar oven: At 12,000 feet in California’s High Sierra in mid-April, w...
If only sandals worked as footwear for any and all outdoor situations—we’d wear them all the time, right? Alas, this is not the case. But all sandals are not cr...
As the mountain evening slowly descended on our campsite high in the Panamint Range of California’s Death Valley National Park, the wind picked up volume, swirl...
With no water available anywhere along the route of my family’s late-March, overnight backpacking trip into the canyon of Utah’s Dirty Devil River–except the he...
So you want to backpack Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, or the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier, raft the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, or paddle the Evergl...
With more and more people taking devices into the backcountry that will likely require recharging before the trip’s over, manufacturers are introducing more cho...
Those of us who love nature bear the biggest responsibility—and stake—in combating the myriad threats posed by climate change.
With the smartly designed and s...
What do you want from your hiking boots? I wonder how many consumers consider that question before purchasing boots.
I doubt that I did before I’d been hikin...
The rain in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park would make fans of the Pacific Northwest climate grin like idiots. Receiving weather that has blown across tho...
