Multi-day overnight backpacking and canoe trips

As in Wyoming, backpacking in Montana usually means hoofing it through the high country. Outside of Yellowstone National Park, our guided Montana hikes include treks in the unbelievably spectacular Beartooths, the Rocky Mountain Front of the iconic Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex just south of Glacier Park, and the vast and rugged Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness on the Montana/Idaho border. Read More »

Backpacking in Wyoming usually means exploring some very high country, including the Wind River and Absarokas mountain ranges. These two ranges in particular include unusually vast areas of high alpine landscapes over 10,000 feet in elevation, punctuated by 12,000-foot and 13,000-foot peaks. Read More »

June in Yellowstone is spring, not summer, and although one might experience occasional bouts of prolonged warm sunshine, Yellowstone backpacking means that one must be prepared for rain, snow, hail, wind and warm sunshine all on any given Yellowstone guided hike — sometimes all on the same day! Read More »

A lot of novice backpackers think that once they are out in the wilds, there will be animals nearly everywhere. In Yellowstone’s world-class wildlife habitats, to a great extent, that’s true. But that does not necessarily mean that you’ll see lots of large mammals! That’s because once you leave the tourist-laden roadsides, wild animals revert to wild behavior, which means that in many situations they will avoid detection, something that they are very good at. Read More »

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 desert canyon-bottom streams flanked by lush growths of grass, wildflowers, willow and cottonwood. Read More »

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 periods to be in a given part of the park. Read More »

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. Read More »

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 includes the greatest concentration of thermal features on Earth. Read More »

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! Read More »

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. Read More »