besthike.com - the blog

The main purpose of this website is to:
list the best, most memorable hikes, long & short, in the world. Hikes that can change your life.
Most are challenging, multi-day adventures. But we also include the very best day hikes: the Tongariro Crossing (New Zealand) & Zion Narrows (USA), for example. We do not (yet) include […]

A shout out to Clara Luz Bravo Diaz of Casa de Clara Guest House in Trujillo, Peru. (Great tourist town, by the way. The north coast of Peru is wonderful.)
They emailed to let us know of a regional airline now flying to Huaraz, Peru, one of the best hiking towns in the world. If you […]

Another great post from the surprising, thoughtful As The Crow Flies blog:
Ten years ago my camera was stolen and until this winter, I didn’t replace it. A camera is nice to have for blogging but for traveling and on the trail I find it too heavy and I think it encourages a person to objectify […]

Rick McCharles
Most serious hikers who travel to Tasmania hike the Overland Track as training for the far more rigorous South Coast Track.
That adventure on the southern most shore of Tasmania takes even fast hikers 7 days, 6 nights after flying into the Melaleuca airstrip trailhead. It’s 83km (51mi) to exit at Cockle Creek through the […]

Have you heard of the Sunshine Coast Trail on the west coast of Canada?
It’s actually a series of new trails joining old existing tracks.
The name is deceptive as very little of the route is on the (valuable) Sunshine Coast waterfront.

The Sunshine Coast Trail is located on the Upper Sunshine Coast in Powell River, British […]

Of all sad extinction stories, one of the saddest is that of the Tasmanian tiger.
The Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) … is the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. …
The Thylacine became extinct on the Australian mainland thousands of years before European settlement of the continent, but survived on the island of Tasmania along with a […]

Looking for inspiration today?
I particularly like some of those featuring his son Aaron, here atop Mt. Eiffel in the Canadian Rockies.

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Aaron Climbs Mt. Eiffel, originally uploaded by Marc Shandro.

A wilderness expert already at his young […]

Tom Mangan’s Two-Heel Drive blog is the hub of the hiking blogisphere. I count on Tom to alert me what’s new and cool on the net.
I read Two-Heel Drive more often (88% of the time) than any other in my RSS reader. And I’m not the only one. Search for “hiking blog” on […]

Rogier Gruys is an expert on the West Coast Trail in Canada, the hike we rated #1 in the world. Rogier’s BluePeak Travel Photography pics of the WCT are still the best we’ve ever seen.
But Rogier likes the Snowman Trek even better.
Very few have ever done that long Himalayan trek (minimum 19 days) […]

The two most popular books on Amazon.com right now are:
1) The Ultralight Backpacker : The Complete Guide to Simplicity and Comfort on the Trail, Ryel Kestenbaum, 2001
2) Lighten Up!: A Complete Handbook for Light and Ultralight Backpacking (Falcon Guide), Don Ladigin, 2005
Of the two, I prefer the Ladigin as it is more accessible to beginners, […]