Twenty Secret Great Places Revealed!

Backpacker magazine’s cover immediately grabbed Bill Stall’s attention. “The Last UNKNOWN Places,” it screamed. “5 Hidden Paradises Where Nature Still Rules.” He bought the magazine in a millisecond. And then, as he writes in a thoughtful op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, he began questioning the whole enterprise—the cover’s promise, the story inside by Tracy Ross. [W]ait a minute,” he writes. “Ross and Backpacker were tipping off the crowds, weren’t they? Hidden paradises aren’t hidden once they’ve been touted to the whole world on the cover of a magazine.”

Of course, it’s the oldest trick in the magazine editor’s book: promising to reveal top secret places, often in the form of a list.

Yet Stall doesn’t come down too hard on the publications.

You can’t blame magazines for compiling lists of the last, best places, or, as in the current issue of Outside magazine, “20 Dream Towns, Fit, Healthy, and Full of Adventure,” or “Top 100 Campsites in the U.S.A.” in CampingLife or, in National Geographic Adventure, “America’s Best Hikes & Drives, 11 Undiscovered Trails, 4 Energy-Smart Adventure Road Trips.” Americans have long loved lists—the best dressed, the best movies of all time, David Letterman’s nightly Top 10.

Ranking geography got a huge boost with the publication by Rand-McNally in the 1980s of the famed “Places Rated Almanac,” which tests cities on a variety of criteria, including available healthcare, the cost of living, educational facilities and recreation. (Pity Yuba City, Calif.—it tends to place at or near the bottom of the heap.)

But “the last unknown places”? There’s always been something of an ethical question about revealing such secrets, which really aren’t secrets, just spots known mostly to locals. From fishing holes to rock-climbing routes, anyone already in the know doesn’t always look kindly on tattletales. Once the list comes out, either in book form or a magazine (or in the case of climbing routes back in the day, by mimeograph), the hordes could descend. Paradise lost.

But Stall finally concludes:

“[D]espite what the magazine headlines say, there are hundreds or thousands of pristine unknown places left in the American wilderness. For now.”

Personally, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of magazine stories that tell you exactly where to go and what to do when you get there. To me, that just sucks the sense of adventure and discovery out of the whole travel experience. Maybe that’s why, although I’ve backpacked throughout the Southwest and love hitting the trail for days, I’ve (sadly) never found much of interest in Backpacker.

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