The Play List

This month’s top trips and picks.

Hang onto hiking season.

TWIN PEAKS WILDERNESS, UTAH

Fall in the mountains is glorious and bittersweet. The bugs and crowds have abated and the weather is stable, but that’s how you know the end of hiking season is coming. Make it last in the Wasatch Range, where the aspens are starting to light up like Christmas trees. By mid-October, entire slopes will transform overnight. Catch the show by taking the 3-mile Lake Blanche Trail to its namesake tarn, tucked below 10,320-foot Sundial Peak. Photographer Cole Gleave suggests camping here and allowing time to summit Sundial via its east face. It’s about a mile of nontechnical scrambling, but there’s a 300 yard knife-edge ridge at the top. It might slow you down, but that’s OK—if this is the end of your season, you don’t want to hurry.

Boundary Waters Done Right

Venture deep into the heart of this paddler’s paradise for the best fish-and-foliage adventure in the Lower 48. By Jonathan Dorn

YEARS FROM NOW, Abby will chuckle at the father-daughter “bonding” we enjoyed on Ogishkemncie Lake in the Boundary Waters last September. As Minnesota’s late-afternoon winds turned a mild rain squall into survival-mode canoeing— with horizontal hail and 4-foot whitecaps—my earlier insistence on fishing just a little bit longer was starting to look like another one of dad’s overambitious miscalculations. We’d enjoyed a successful day hunting walleye, small mouth, and northern pike with our group of four, but now faced miles of open water to reach camp, an effort that felt as long and arduous as the big lake’s tongue twister of a name.