Top 10 three-day hikes in the US, and how far ahead you have to book each one

New England's big one, and the answer to anybody who thinks a serious three-day route has to be booked in February. The standard version starts at Lincoln Woods on the Kancamagus, climbs onto Franconia Ridge, runs the crest north over Lafayette, crosses Garfield and the Twinway, and comes back down over the Bonds. Bondcliff comes last, a bare rock prow with the whole Pemigewasset Wilderness falling away underneath it. The Forest Service puts that loop at 31.2 miles.

Check the front door before you plan around it. The Lincoln Woods Trail is closed from 15 June through November 2026 under Forest Order R9-22-26-02, from the Kancamagus junction as far as the Osseo Trail, while contractors stabilise a stretch of riverbank that a decade of flooding has undercut. The Forest Service says in as many words that the typical Pemi Loop hike is not available during the closure.

Parking, the suspension bridge and the East Side Trail stay open, and the forest lists five other ways in: Greenleaf at 36.2 miles, Gale River at 37.8, Skookumchuck at 38.4, Garfield at 39.4, North Twin at 41. Every one of them makes it a longer trip.

The Forest Service asks for no permit and sets no quota; you only need one if you're guiding somebody. It does ask that you camp legally, and in the Pemigewasset Wilderness that's more restrictive than it sounds: no camping and no wood or charcoal fires within 200 feet of any trail, none within a quarter mile of the Franconia Brook, Thirteen Falls or Guyot sites, a group-size limit of ten, and no camping in the alpine zone, which the forest defines as anywhere the trees are eight feet or less.

On a route that spends miles in the open, you have to plan where you'll drop back into the trees before you stop for the night.

A rule changed here recently, and it trips up returning hikers as much as newcomers. Since 1 May 2026, under a Forest Order that runs until 2031, every overnight camper in the Pemigewasset Wilderness must store food, refuse and scented items in a cylindrical, hard-sided, non-pliable IGBC-certified canister. A hang is no longer compliant, and neither is an Ursack, which the forest rules out by name.

The only exception is the supplied food boxes at the Thirteen Falls tentsite. Canisters are free to borrow at the forest's visitor centers in Lincoln, Campton, Conway and Gorham.

Weather is the thing to plan around instead. Franconia Ridge is exposed alpine ground, and the White Mountains are notorious for turning a summer afternoon into something else entirely. Read the Mount Washington Observatory's higher summits forecast the morning you leave, not the valley one.

A creek that has cut itself a hallway through the Escalante sandstone, with arches, a natural bridge and a cottonwood floor. It's the rare desert route where water is the least of your problems. The stream in Hurricane Wash starts about three and a half miles in and runs from there, so you get one dry stretch at the beginning and a treatable supply the rest of the way. From that trailhead the Park Service puts it at 12.3 miles one way to the Escalante River.

Getting a permit here is as easy as it gets: you self-register at a trailhead, or collect one at the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center, and neither agency lists a fee for it. The surprise is which agency you've just agreed with. The approach is Bureau of Land Management ground inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, but the canyon itself lies inside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, so the National Park Service writes the rules you actually camp under.

Those Park Service rules are strict. The Glen Canyon compendium requires every overnight backpacking group to carry an engineered solid-waste bag system or a portable toilet with capacity for the whole party for the whole trip, and it names Coyote Gulch as one of the places a cathole is not an option, because you cannot get 300 feet from water. A plain plastic bag is explicitly not enough, and toilet paper comes out with you.

Dogs are banned outright, including as pack animals. Group size is capped at twelve. Campfires are prohibited throughout the watershed drainage of the Escalante River inside the recreation area.

Then there's the drive in. Hole-in-the-Rock Road is graded dirt, and the BLM's road report — normally weekly, though the bureau currently warns it is updating less often than it would like — rates it two-wheel-drive high clearance with four-wheel drive recommended for the last seven miles. The Park Service is blunter about weather: don't take the unpaved roads if it's raining or snowing, or if either is forecast.

The northern half of the park's Appalachian Trail, walked in the direction that puts Charlies Bunion in the first morning and a long descent on the last. Pecks Corner on the first night, Cosby Knob on the second, though there are five shelters on this stretch and more than one way to divide it. It's the most sociable route here, because you sleep in stone shelters with other people instead of alone in a zone.

One caveat about the numbers, since this is the only entry here where we can't hand you the manager's own. The park publishes no mileage for this section, and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy keeps official A.T. distances in its printed Data Book rather than on its website, so the thirty-one miles you'll see quoted is not a figure either body puts online. The one leg the park does publish is the first: eight miles there and back from Newfound Gap to Charlies Bunion.

The park moved its permits onto Recreation.gov on 30 April 2026, and the numbers changed with the move: $8 per person per night, a $6 non-refundable fee per permit, and the old $40 cap on the total is gone. The booking window is short. Permits go on sale one month before your first night, which makes this the easiest trip here to arrange late.

Read the shelter rules before you pack. Backpackers holding a shelter reservation have to sleep inside the shelter, and pitching a tent outside it isn't allowed. You can't book consecutive nights at the same shelter. Party size is capped at eight, and dogs aren't permitted in the backcountry at all.

The food rule here is unusual enough to trip up experienced backpackers. Everything scented goes on the shelter's cable system, whatever container it's in. If you've carried a bear canister, the park's own wording is that the canister goes in your pack and the pack goes on the cable.

The best-known backpacking loop in Colorado, and a seriously hard three days: twenty-six miles by the Forest Service's own reckoning, over West Maroon, Frigid Air, Trail Rider and Buckskin. The Forest Service doesn't publish the four passes individually, only that all of them clear 12,000 feet. Counterclockwise puts two passes in the first day and one on each of the others.

Permits are required year-round and sold on Recreation.gov only; ranger stations won't issue them. They come out in three waves a year at 8am Mountain Time, each covering about four months, and they're first-come rather than a draw. The fee is seasonal even though the permit isn't: $10 per person per night from 1 May to 31 October, under-sixteens free, plus a $6 non-refundable reservation fee on every permit.

You book a zone for each night rather than a numbered site, so a two-night loop is two zone-nights on one permit. Crater Lake, Capitol Lake and Conundrum Hot Springs are the exceptions, where you camp in the numbered site you reserved. There's a limit of two permits per person per calendar year.

A bear-resistant container certified by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee is required by forest order across the entire Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, which spans two national forests: at night whatever you are doing, and by day whenever the food is unattended or out of your sight. The permit conditions say visitors without one will be ticketed and required to leave. Campfires are banned above 10,800 feet, which covers most of this route, and in a dry summer a forest-wide fire ban goes on top of that.

Getting to the trailhead is its own booking. The Maroon Bells scenic area is closed to inbound private vehicles from 8am to 5pm between 22 May and 18 October, so anyone driving in arrives before eight or after five on the first day of the trip. Book the parking at the same time as the permit, or you'll be standing at a closed gate with a valid wilderness reservation in your pocket.

The classic corridor trip, and the direction the Park Service itself recommends: down the South Kaibab, up the Bright Angel. The South Kaibab has no water on it at all, and it's the trail you least want to be climbing in heat.

The lottery runs on a fixed monthly rhythm. Applications open on the 16th, about five months before your trip month, and close at 5pm Mountain on the 1st four months out. Winners get a date and time to log in and book, and everything left goes to the general public on the 1st three months out. Winning gets you a place in the queue. You still have to book once your slot comes up.

Missing the lottery is where this trip usually dies. The park does issue a small number of last-minute permits in person, but only for Havasupai Gardens and Cottonwood, one night at a time, and it states plainly that no last-minute space is held for Bright Angel Campground. If sleeping by the river is the point, you plan ahead or you don't go.

Two nights is the maximum at any one campground per hike, which is exactly what this trip needs. Four are allowed in the corridor between 15 November and the end of February, but the rest of the year it's two. Splitting them, one night by the river and one at Havasupai Gardens on the way out, breaks the 4,400-foot climb in half and puts you on the rim early on the last morning.