The Outdoors Journal
Field-tested guides and trail stories.
Trip reports, gear reviews, and how-tos from the Outdoors team. Plan smarter, explore further.
Subscribe via RSS
Featured story
The Ridge Is Named After The People Who Turn Around
Borah Peak is the highest point in Idaho, and the standard route gains more than five thousand feet in three and a half miles. Most of that is just steep. Then the trail ends, the ridge narrows into rock ribs, and you reach the part the whole climb is named for — Chicken-Out Ridge, and the snow bridge on the far side of it.
Everyone Climbs This One The Easy Way
Grays and Torreys are the most popular pair of fourteeners in Colorado, and almost everyone links them on a Class 2 trail. Kelso Ridge climbs the other side of Torreys — Class 3, a thousand feet of scrambling, and a fin of rock a few hundred feet below the summit that you either hold onto or straddle.
The Last Two Miles Have No Trail
Camp Muir is the highest place on Mount Rainier you can stand without a climbing permit — 10,188 feet, 4,788 feet of gain, and a final two miles across a snowfield with no tread, no markers and nothing to follow but a compass bearing.
The Mountain Is Upside Down
Every other famous day hike in America starts at the bottom. This one starts at 6,860 feet and falls away, and the climb you have to do is the one you do last, tired, in the heat, with 3,080 feet above you and no way around it.
Six Miles In, The Trail Ends
Longs Peak is a hike for six miles. Then the maintained trail stops at a notch in a wall, and what is left is a mile of painted bullseyes across rock that has killed more people than any other standard route in Colorado.
The 99 Switchbacks Are Not 99 Switchbacks
The highest summit in the lower 48 is a walk-up. That is exactly what makes it dangerous.
Katahdin's Knife Edge Is a Mile of Trail the Width of a Sidewalk
Maine's highest mountain ends at a sign that says the Appalachian Trail is over. The hard way there crosses the Knife Edge: 1.1 miles of granite ridge between Pamola Peak and Baxter Peak, narrowing in places to the width of a sidewalk, with the ground dropping away more than a thousand feet on both sides. There is no bail-out once you start. How the loop works, what the Chimney asks of you, and why Baxter State Park's own warning about this ridge is the bluntest sentence it publishes.
The Franconia Ridge Loop Is a Mile and a Half of Open Sky Over New Hampshire
New Hampshire's classic loop climbs a staircase of waterfalls to Little Haystack, then runs a mile and a half along the open crest of the Franconia Range — over Mount Lincoln to Mount Lafayette — before dropping past an AMC hut and Eagle Lake. It is routinely ranked among the best day hikes in the Northeast, and among the most dangerous when the weather turns. How the loop works, what the exposed ridge asks of you, and why hypothermia is a summer risk up here.
Grinnell Glacier Is 10 Miles of Trail to Ice That's Half Gone
Glacier National Park's signature day hike crosses two boat-served lakes, climbs a ledge on the Garden Wall, and ends at a turquoise lake that barely existed a century ago — because the glacier feeding it has lost nearly half its area since 1966. How the hike works, what the historic boats actually save, and why 2026 is the easiest Many Glacier summer in years.
Half Dome Is 14 Miles of Trail and 400 Feet of Cable
Yosemite lets 300 people a day past the base of Sub Dome, and the last 400 feet of Half Dome are climbed between two steel cables bolted to bare granite. How the preseason and two-day lotteries actually work, what the Mist Trail delivers on the way up, and why a rock once declared 'perfectly inaccessible' now has a queue.
Angels Landing Is Half a Mile of Holding On
Since April 2022, Zion has run a lottery for the right to climb the last half mile of Angels Landing — a sandstone fin a few feet wide, with drop-offs of as much as a thousand feet on either side and a chain bolted along its spine. How the permit actually works, and what the two miles below the chains deliver even if you never draw one.
The Other Way Up Mount Whitney
Almost everyone climbs Whitney from the east. The John Muir Trail arrives from the other side, and it ends on the summit.