Alpine scrambles and beach-front strolls; multi-day singletrack adventures and quick urban escapes; soaring trees and rolling sand dunes—every state in the country has something to offer intrepid hikers.
Springtime in northern Albania sparks the herding of goats from the lowlands up to the towering mountainsides. Follow Prek Gjoni and his 160 goats on a grueling four-day journey across the spectacular Valbona Valley, a land that seems to exist out of time.
The Bomber Glacier is aptly named. It comes from the wreckage of a TB-29 Superfortress that crashed on the glacier at the end of a training mission in 1957, killing six of the 10 crewmembers. The airplane, strewn across the ice, has sat where it touched down for more than 60 years ago.
It’s among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula.