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Most Yellowstone backpackers, particularly novices, focus their fears mainly upon bears, though driving to the trailhead is the biggest hazard of backpacking in Yellowstone. Yet one of the most underrated dangers is the park’s thermal areas. Yellowstone National Park has the greatest concentration of hot springs, geysers, boiling mud pots and other related manifestations of […]

Wait a minute. You’re going backpacking, not canoeing with the Boy Scouts. And it’s not a whitewater rafting trip, either. So why worry about drowning? Well, for good reason! Although water is an important landscape feature on nearly all of our trips, guided Yellowstone backpack trips are particularly well-endowed with rivers, streams and lakes. Sometimes, […]

It is almost counter-intuitive to consider the possibility of getting lost when you are on a guided backpack trip! After all, guides don’t get “lost”, though sometimes, in new territory, it may take them a few minutes to figure things out. Nonetheless, although we have a 100% success rate in never having lost a client, […]

Unless you are lucky enough to live literally on the border of a big wilderness area, nearly every backpack trip requires a drive to the trailhead. And while it is natural for folks to worry about bears or rattlesnakes or even falling off a cliff, the truth is that if you are careful in the […]

On most of our guided backpacking trips, you would have to really work at it to fall off a cliff! That’s partly because we avoid climbing anything that requires technical skills. It is also because we choose routes where exposure to steep dangerous drop-offs are limited or non-existent. This is particularly true on our guided […]

On any of our guided backpacking trips, your Big Wild guide will choose the campsite. On our Yellowstone backpacking treks, we will have reserved each campsite prior to the trip. But on most of our other treks, the guide can pick and choose as the trip unfolds, according to the groups’ progress, weather, animal sightings […]

Backpacking trips are undoubtedly growing more popular with each passing year. In fact, approximately 38.05 million people went on a hiking or backpacking trip between 2013 and 2014 in the United States. But if your interest in wilderness travel has just become piqued, you certainly aren’t alone. It’s never too late to try a national […]

Perhaps more than any other nature preserve in North America, Yellowstone National Park is known for its large mammals. On any of our guided hiking tours in the world’s first national park, our clients might see elk, moose, mule deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorn or mountain goats. We occasionally view predators, too, including black and grizzly […]

Of all the national parks in the lower 48 states, Yellowstone is my favorite. There are many reasons, but here are three of my top ones. First, Yellowstone has the biggest, wildest backcountry. Sure, Death Valley National Park is larger, but numerous paved and dirt roads carve its backcountry into a couple of dozen separate […]