Author Archives: Howie Wolke

Our Utah Backpacking treks are all in the spectacular red-rock canyon country of southern Utah. It’s a landscape like no other, with vast stretches of open desert, high juniper-dotted mesas and plateaus with great expanses of naked sandstone and sand. There are towering colorful rock formations galore, and vertical red canyon walls rising above clear […]

OK, you realize that  trip planning for Yellowstone trekking should include considerations for the tremendously varying conditions in the park, often over very short distances. That’s great. And for most folks, figuring these nuances out is a great start. And a great challenge. Of course, Big Wild Adventures schedules its Yellowstone backpacking trips for optimal time […]

Common rookie errors begin with trip planning. That’s because Yellowstone National Park includes areas of widely varying elevation and geography, and this translates to radical differences in local climate and conditions on the ground, often within very short distances.

There are so many wonderful things about backpacking in Yellowstone that it’s tough to know where to start. So here’s a quick overview that I’ll follow up on with subsequent blogs that go into more detail. But for now, suffice it to say that Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, is a unique area that […]

Why do we love backpacking trips in Montana? In Montana, there’s a really special mix of big wide-open landscapes framed by rugged and expansive forested mountains. Montana is about big designated Wilderness that protects some of the most beautiful and rugged mountain landscapes anywhere!

Wyoming is the high country, second only to Colorado in average elevation above the sea, but with a small fraction of Colorado’s human population, and with much more really big wilderness. Wyoming is big wilderness, big mountains, big vistas, and big populations of big animals including big carnivores.

It’s really quite simple: Backpacking in Utah is completely unique, particularly in the southern Utah canyon country. That’s where Big Wild Adventures runs three outstanding wilderness hiking trips: in the Escalante Canyons, the Grand Staircase Backcountry and in Canyonlands National Park.

This salient bit of advice sounds self-evident for a backpack trip, but you’d be surprised how many novice hikers on guided backpacking trips in Montana backcountry, Yellowstone or anywhere really, want to bring two pair of trousers, two pair of gloves, two sets of longjohns, two or more T-shirts, two pair of camp/stream shoes and […]

Now that you’ve read Staying Dry While Hiking, Parts 1 and 2, and you’ve learned to stay reasonably dry even in stormy weather, I’ll add a few quick words on what to look for when purchasing rain gear for backpacking. First of all, this is no item to skimp on. Buy a good rainsuit. I […]

In a nutshell, wilderness is a big chunk of undeveloped wild country that’s not fragmented into multiple smaller chunks by roads or power corridors or other imprints of humanity’s work. There are no homes or buildings, no pavement and no crops. Wilderness, by definition, is largely wild and natural.