A spur of the moment weekend in Westport, on the west coast of Ireland. The weather was typically “Irish”, i.e. pretty terrible, but this is still a wonderful part of the country to explore. The road along the coast here is dubbed the “Wild Atlantic Way”, and for once the tourist designation is spot on.
Doolough valley, County Mayo
Coast, County Mayo
The wildest hiking in North America is surely to be found in Alaska and northern Canada. There are plenty of challenging hikes in the mountains and canyons of the lower 48 states too, of course, but in most cases the difficulties owe a lot to either the length of the trail or the need for technical climbing or canyoneering skills. In the icy north, by contrast, the sheer remoteness is such that only a handful of hikers tackle even the easiest non-technical hikes in some of the region’s National Parks.
My own experience in Alaska and northern Canada is limited to day hikes and short backpacks in Alaska and the Yukon. In the course of planning those trips, however, I’ve read of plenty of other hikes that piqued my interest. Here are five that – although I may never get around to them – look like incredible adventures that could be tackled by mere mortals with appropriate planning…
Kluane National Park, in Canada’s Yukon, is a park I’ve actually been to. With my brother we hiked the park’s most popular trail, the Slims West route to Observation mountain. The scenery was outstanding, the level of adventure (mostly arising from the unbridged crossings of glacial creeks) significant but manageable, and it remains the best hike I’ve done to date. The video below (refresh the page if the embed isn’t visible) gives a taste of the terrain.
The Slims West trail, however, is not even close to being the most adventurous thing to do in Kluane. There’s exceptional rafting on the Alsek river, while staying on foot the Donjek route to view the Donjek glacier may well be one of the best backpacking trips in North America. The route is only about 60 miles, but it’s recommended to plan for 8-10 days in the wilderness. There are no major technical difficulties, the main challenge is the remoteness and the need for careful route finding in the trail-less portions of the hike.
The day hikes out of McCarthy in Alaska’s Wrangell-St Elias national park have been on my to-do list for many years. Going beyond those, there’s what looks to be an excellent short backpack that crosses the Root glacier and returns to town via the Kennicott glacier. That looks doable, but I’d want to have more experience on the ice than I have right now to feel comfortable planning it. Easier in some respects (though not in others!) is the The Goat Trail, probably the best-known longer hike in the park. It’s a fly-in / fly-out route between two bush airstrips that looks to access spectacular scenery, and which for the most part is relatively easy. There are, however, some potentially tough creek crossings, along with the route’s signature difficulty of a scree slope traverse that requires finding the right trail to accomplish safely. I’m confident we could do this hike, though it would be a step up in challenge compared to anything we’ve done up to now.
The closest you can get to Denali along the park road is near the Eielson visitor center. If the weather is favorable – often it’s not – a short hike to the top of the ridge above the visitor center affords an amazing vista of North America’s premier mountain.
Denali from the Eielson Ridge
It’s hard to see that view and not want to get closer! It doesn’t even seem that hard. From the visitors’ center, it looks like you could simply hike down to the valley bottom and climb up the other side to get a better view. There’s no trail, however, and experience elsewhere in Alaska and the Yukon makes me think that such a plan is likely foolhardy
An admittedly cliched Alaskan scene, from our trip to Wrangell in 2013.
Sunset, Wrangell island, Alaska
We hold an annual departmental graduation ceremony for our majors and Ph.D. students in Fiske planetarium. It’s a great venue, but a challenge for photography because even when the house lights are on, they’re not very bright. At all! Shooting with the 70-200mm f/4 wide open I was pushed to ISO 12,800 on the 5D3. Pretty crazy if you still have any memory of film days, but plenty usable with only a moderate amount of noise reduction in Lightroom (luminance = 30). Congrats to the graduating students!
Celebrating an astronomy degree with a look to the heavens
Newly minted Ph.D.
The Salmon glacier, in British Columbia (though you have to drive a dirt road from Hyder, Alaska, to get there!). A strong contender, in my opinion, for the title of best “drive-up” viewpoint in North America.
Salmon glacier, Stewart, British Columbia
Last week I got an email from a Brazilian conservation group asking for permission to use one of my images as part of the graphic design for a book cover (in Portuguese only!). Of course this was OK, since I explicitly waive the copyright of the images I post to Wikipedia and the web, but still I had to sign a copyright form
In my first few years living in Colorado I made several brief hiking and photography trips exploring the corners of my new home. This was back in the days of film (typically Provia 100), and I have a modest collection of slides only some fraction of which were ever scanned. There are plenty of locations I really ought to return to for longer visits: here are three of the best.
Electric Pass, Maroon Bells-Snowmass wilderness
It’s a short but steep hike to Electric Pass, in the Maroon Bells wilderness just outside Aspen. The trail here reaches higher than any other in the state not headed for a mountain peak. Although not a national park, the Maroon Bells are quite possibly the most impressive part of the Rockies in Colorado. Get an early start if you attempt this hike, as it’s not named “Electric Pass” without good reason.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison
The Black Canyon is a national park, but it’s far enough away from any tourist route as to be sparsely visited. The South Rim is best for photography, the North Rim (to which there’s no paved road) better for hiking and extremely quiet.
Chasm Lake, sunrise, Rocky Mountain National Park
Chasm Lake, with the Diamond Face of Longs Peak as a backdrop, is spectacular at any time of the day (or year, though an ice axe and crampons are recommended to get there safely in winter). The classic sight though is sunrise, which on a clear day turns the Diamond Face a glorious shade of orange (on a not-so-clear day, which I’ve also experienced, there’s nothing to see!). Get a very early start and join those attempting to summit Longs for the 2-3 hour pre-dawn hike to the lake.
Heading upstream near the start of the Narrows, Zion National Park
The deserts of the American southwest, and southern Utah in particular, are probably my favorite hiking area. It’s just a day’s drive, or less, from my home in Boulder, Colorado, and I’ve lost count of the number of hiking trips I’ve made there. Although I’ve only seen a fraction of this vast region I reckon I’ve seen enough to offer some recommendations to my top day hikes. In that spirit, this post includes some (newly reprocessed!) photos, videos, and short descriptions of the hikes I’ve enjoyed most in the parks and wilderness areas of southern Utah.
Click on any of the photos for large versions
Overview of Utah’s desert hiking areas
Moab, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks – bring a bike
The hike to Grizzly Lake in the Yukon’s Tombstone mountains is, to say the least, a bit out of the way. The trailhead is at the 58.5km mark (about 36 miles) along the Dempster Highway, an unpaved road notorious for cracking windshields, whose start is some 300 miles north of Whitehorse. If you do find yourself in the wilds of the Yukon, however, the Grizzly Lake hike (and its extensions to Divide Lake and Talus Lake) makes for an outstanding and surprisingly moderate short backpack through incredible scenery. The photos and brief description below are based on a two day trip my brother and I took in summer 2010, camping for one night at Grizzly Lake.
Approaching Grizzly Lake in the Tombstones
The 11.5km (7 mile) long trail to Grizzly Lake starts with a climb through the forest to Grizzly Ridge and a viewpoint down the valley toward Mount Monolith. It’s pretty much the only maintained trail in Tombstone Territorial Park, and although labeled as “very difficult” in the park literature it’s a very clear route whose only challenge comes from a decent amount of climbing
I’ll be headed back to Santiago in May, though for a work trip that won’t afford much time for photography. This image is from Valparaiso a few years back.
Industrial beach, Valparaiso