Best Hiking Trails For Backpackers – What makes for a great backpacking trip? Top-shelf landscapes are certainly mandatory. In my opinion, an element of adventure enhances a walk. While there’s certainly something inspiring about a big walk in the wild, some of the most beautiful hikes in the country can be done in a few days and half of the hikes on this list are less than 50 miles. Another factor that really matters is a wilderness experience: all ten are in national parks or wilderness areas.
I’ve probably thought about this more than any mentally stable person should, having completed many of America’s (and the world’s) most beautiful multi-day hikes during over thirty years (and counting) of wearing a backpack, including my 10 years as a field editor for Backpacker magazine and even longer responsible for this blog. Ultimately, however, the criterion that matters most is simpler and more intuitive: that it is undeniably a great trip. And that character shows up again and again in my picks for the country’s 10 best backpacking trips.
Best Hiking Trails For Backpackers
Hello, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside and get full access to all the stories from my blog. Click here for my e-books about classic backpacking trips. Click here to see how I can help you plan your next trip.
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Todd Arndt backpacks the Teton Crest Trail. Click on the photo for my full e-book on backpacking the Teton Crest Trail.
Every walk here deserves a 10 for landscape. The longest trips on this list can be broken down into smaller portions. Each description below includes a difficulty level on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most difficult in terms of effort and challenge. I’ve listed them in no particular order, which is not intended as a quality assessment; I think that’s impossible. I update this list regularly as I make new trips that belong to it.
Every walk in my top 10 includes Close Runners-Up, trips that are just that. My advice: do all these top 10 and runner-up hikes if you can, when you can – many of the top 10 are harder to get a permit for than the runner-up, so the last group ensures good backup plans. You won’t be disappointed with any of them.
Pam Solon backpacks the Dawson Pass Trail in Glacier National Park. Click on the photo to read about this trip.
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The descriptions and photos below link to stories on The Big Outside with more images and information about these trips (most of which require a paid subscription to read in full) – including detailed tips on how to plan them all yourself and when to can apply for a backcountry permit, which is usually months before a trip in the spring or fall.
To learn how I can help you plan these classic adventures, variations on them, or any trip you read about in The Big Outside. You might also like my stories: “How to plan a backpacking trip – 12 tips from experts” and “How to know how difficult a hike will be.”
If you’d like to suggest a trip, tell me in the comments section at the bottom of this story. I hope to reach them all. It’s a difficult assignment, but I’m working on it.
Todd Arndt is backpacking in the Grand Canyon of Yosemite’s Tuolumne River. Click on the photo to view all my expert ebooks on backpacking Yosemite and other parks.
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Mark Fenton hikes above the Lyell Fork of the Merced River in Yosemite at sunrise. Click on the photo for my e-book “The Best Backpacking Trip in Yosemite.”
John Muir saw more than a few world-class wilderness areas, and he devoted much of his time and energy to exploring and protecting Yosemite. Many people would rightly argue that this is the best national park for backpackers. After several trips there, I thought I had seen the most beautiful corners of Yosemite, including many of the trails in the park’s core, the portion of the John Muir Trail, and the peaks of Half Dome and Clouds Rest.
Then, in two trips totaling seven days spread over two years, I traveled 150 miles through the park’s largest tracts of wilderness, south and north of Tuolumne Meadows, and discovered the true soul of Yosemite, a vast range of deep, granite-walled canyons. , peaks rising to over 12,000 feet, and one beautiful alpine lake after another dotting the landscape. And in September 2021, I returned again to take a 45-mile hike with my backpack, which I subsequently dubbed “Yosemite’s best-kept secret backpacking trip.”
See my stories “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows,” about the 65-mile first leg of that 150-mile Grand Tour of Yosemite, “Best of Yosemite: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” about the nearly 80-mile second leg leg, “Backpacking Yosemite: What You Need to Know,” and all the stories about backpacking in Yosemite at The Big Outside.
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Get my expert ebooks for backpacking the 65-mile hike south of Tuolumne Meadows and the 85-mile hike through northern Yosemite (including shorter options).
Want more of a less challenging, introductory backpacking trip in Yosemite? See my story “Where to Backpack in Yosemite for the First Time.” The trip I propose in that story is described in much more detail in my book “The Best First Backpacking Trip in Yosemite.” That ebook provides planning tips and suggested daily itineraries for a primary route and alternate routes for backpacking trips in Yosemite’s spectacular core, between Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows.
See “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in Yosemite” and “Heavy Lifting: Backpacking Sequoia National Park,” about a 40-mile family backpacking trip with campsites that made both my top 25 all-time favorites and my list of the most beautiful campsites in the backcountry I walked past, plus all the stories about backpacking in the High Sierra at The Big Outside.
Jeff Wilhelm backpacks the Ptarmigan Tunnel Trail above Elizabeth Lake in Glacier. Click on the photo to see how I can help you plan your glacier trip.
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Backpackers hike the Piegan Pass Trail in Glacier National Park. Click on the photo for my ebooks about backpacking Glacier and other parks.
With rivers of ice flowing from steep mountains and cliffs, deep green forests, more than 760 lakes that offer mirror reflections of it all, megafauna such as bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, moose, grizzly bears and black bears, and more than a million hectares of The Northern Montana’s Rockies consist largely of wilderness. No wonder the glacier is so popular with backpackers.
Two major hikes over 90 miles – both of which have several possible shorter variations – rightly grace this top 10 list. At both sites, my companions and I saw all those sights and big beasts described above – yes, including grizzly bears – and enjoyed a surprising degree of solitude even as we visited many of the park’s highlights.
One, a 90-mile Northern Glacier trek, split into 65- and 25-mile legs, was a variation on a walk known as the Northern Loop, following a route I modified to take in some of the best scenery of the glacier, including the entire Highline Trail. , the Many Glacier area, Piegan Pass and Stoney Indian Pass, the Ptarmigan Wall and Tunnel, and some of the park’s most beautiful lakes and most remote wilderness.
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On the second hike, three friends and I backpacked about 94 miles across Glacier, from Chief Mountain Trailhead on the Canadian border in the northeast corner of the park to Two Medicine, covering parts of the primary and alternate routes of the Continental Divide Trail combined and the high alpine trail from Pitamakan Pass to Dawson Pass above Two Medicine (main photo at top of story). Once again we saw bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, elk and a griz, and heard elk almost every morning and evening (because it was September) – not to mention views unlike anything else in America.
Check out all the stories about backpacking Glacier in The Big Outside, including my story about the two legs, 90-mile hike “Descending the Food Chain: Backpacking Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop,” my story “Wildness All Around You: Backpacking the CDT Through Glacier” about the 93-mile hike, and “Déjà vu All Over Again: Backpacking in Glacier National Park,” about my most recent weeklong hike in Glacier on a variation of the CDT trail.
Think of the Canadian Rockies this way: they are similar to glaciers, but with more and larger glaciers and cover a much larger area. For most of its distance, the 35-mile Rockwall Trail in Kootenay National Park passes beneath a long chain of steep cliffs and mountains that conjure up images of countless El Capitans lined up in a row, but with thick tongues of glacial ice flowing from them . And the 27-mile Skyline Trail in Jasper National Park remains above treeline for more than half its distance, with near-constant panoramas of massive rock walls and a sea of mountains in every direction.
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Jeff Wilhelm backpacks the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park. Click on the photo for my Teton Crest Trail e-book.
One of my first major western backpacking trips was
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