Hi there, I'm Lily.

Welcome to my site! This is an ongoing diary of my backpacking trips and other life adventures. It's a fun creative outlet and personal project (if I didn't do this, I would never ever edit my photos.) Also, blogs are the primary way I get trip inspiration, so I hope my blog can be a source of that for you too.

I’m a regular at Yosemite, Desolation Wilderness, Trinity Alps, Kings Canyon, and the Eastern Sierra, and have a long list of international backpacking destinations on my mind for the future. Please feel free to leave comments and questions on my posts, or shoot me a message through the contact form below. I love hearing from you!

 

More About Me

I'm a San Francisco Bay Area local and call California my home. I didn’t discover backpacking until after college in 2019. So backpacking is far from something that I grew up doing, but it's one that I plan on doing for a long time.

Despite being pretty sedentary as a child, I’ve always had an appreciation for the outdoors. National park trips in the summer with my family were the norm, although we were the day hike and stay in a hotel kind of family. My parents bought a family DSLR camera back in 2010, and I was tasked with figuring out how to use it. I got really into landscape photography, and that motivated me to get more into hiking. Eventually, I tried backpacking for the first time. I was hooked. Backpacking unlocked a new realm of outdoor exploration, one that allowed me to explore more remote and pristine wilderness that was off limits before.

While photography may have been the catalyst for backpacking, I hike for so much more than the photo ops now. I love challenging my physical limits with longer and harder hikes, and I love the quality time (no cell-service, no distractions) that I get to spend with the people I do it with.

My appreciation for the outdoors continues to grow with each additional season that I am backpacking. It has opened up endless possibilities for backcountry adventures in national parks of which I only saw slivers of growing up. Even though I’m often stumbling into my house late on Sunday nights, exhausted and dirty and sleep-deprived, I somehow think it’s still worth it.

 

Follow along with me on Instagram!

I wrote my ultralight backpacking gear guide (second link in bio) a while back, and now I’m done with the part 2: ultralight camera gear (first link in bio)! I enjoy landscape photography and I never backpack without camera gear, but camera g
Hiked 38.5 miles on the Trans-Catalina trail (TCT) on Catalina Island this past weekend! We camped at Hermit Gulch, Little Harbor, and Parsons Landing. Make sure to make campground reservations online when they are released on Jan 1 every year for
Round 2 of sharing Wonderland Trail pics means I finally finished editing my camera photos and put up a trip guide for it on my blog! Check out the link in my bio :) The Wonderland Trail is a 93 mile loop around Mount Rainier in Washington and is ty
The weather foiled our plan to do an overnight in Aoraki/Mt. Cook, so we did the 2 most popular day hikes there instead. The weather was beautiful except that the wind gusts were SO strong that I had to crouch and hold on to rocks to stay balanced.
I did all 3 Fiordland Great Walks in the same New Zealand trip, so I thought I’d do my completely-subjective-and-conditional-on-weather superlatives, just for fun 😄 Best views: Lake Mackenzie hut to Routeburn shelter (Routeburn day 2) Best s
2 days of pure enjoyment on the Routeburn track. Routeburn is a Fiordland Great Walk and is usually hiked one-way over 2-3 days (20 miles). We hiked it west to east over 2 days, staying 1 night at Lake Mackenzie hut. Out of the 3 Great Walks we did,
4 days of rain, fog, sun, and sandflies on the Milford track. The Milford track starts at one end of Lake Te Anau and ends at Milford Sound. We started Milford the day after finishing Kepler. Milford and Kepler are both Fiordland National Park Great
3 days on the Kepler track. Spoiled by ridge views and bird sightings. 1 - sunrise from Luxmore Hut 2 - Lake Te Anau 3 - classic ridge walking with views down Iris Burn valley 4 - kea, the only alpine parrot. They are super intelligent and also lo
I wrote a trip guide for the Lost Coast Trail in the King Range National Conservation Area (first link in bio)! This bucket list backpacking trip is a 4-5 hour drive north from the Bay Area. The trail is 25 miles and usually backpacked over 3-4 days
How does one even begin to describe the beauty of the Wonderland Trail? 8 days, 93 miles, circumnavigating the iconic Mt. Rainier that can be seen all the way from Seattle, looming over the skyline. The Wonderland Trail is the longest backpacking t