Our Story
About Arizona Backpacking
Guiding Arizona's backcountry since 1992. Gear reviews, trip planning, and field-tested knowledge for the desert backpacker.
Arizona Backpacking Project started with a simple idea: the desert backcountry deserves the same quality of guidance that people expect in the mountains. After more than three decades of leading trips through Arizona's most rugged terrain, we've built a team and a resource that serves everyone from first-time backpackers to seasoned thru-hikers.
We're a small guide service and educational resource based in Arizona. We lead guided backpacking trips, publish gear reviews grounded in desert reality, and provide trip planning resources that account for what actually matters out here - water scarcity, extreme heat, monsoon storms, and terrain that doesn't forgive careless decisions.
The Team
Arizona Backpacking is led by Bruce Leadbetter, who has been guiding in the Arizona backcountry since 1992. What started as solo trips into the Superstition Wilderness grew into a guide service, and eventually into the educational resource you're reading now.
We're a small team - deliberately so. Every guide who leads an AZBP trip has been personally vetted, trained in our methods, and spent significant time in Arizona's backcountry before carrying a client load. We're not a large outfit that hires seasonally and hopes for the best. We know our guides, and they know the terrain.
Our guides hold current Wilderness First Responder certifications and bring backgrounds in outdoor education, search and rescue, and wilderness leadership. When you hike with us, you're with people who take your safety as seriously as your experience.
What We Do
Guided Backpacking Trips
We lead small-group backpacking trips through Arizona's most iconic backcountry - Aravaipa Canyon, the Superstition Wilderness, the Grand Canyon, and beyond. Every trip is led by experienced guides with full safety kits, group gear, and meals included. We handle the logistics so you can focus on the experience.
Gear Reviews & Recommendations
Our gear reviews aren't based on unboxing videos or spec sheets. We research what actually holds up in desert conditions - UV exposure, abrasion from cactus and basalt, performance in 110-degree heat and monsoon wind. We pull from long-term field reports, owner discussions, and our own experience to give you recommendations you can trust.
Trip Planning Resources
Permit guides, packing lists, regional breakdowns, and skills training content - all built from decades of actual Arizona backcountry experience. We publish what we wish we'd had when we were starting out.
Our Approach
We believe in honest recommendations. If a piece of gear is excellent in the Pacific Northwest but falls apart in Arizona UV, we'll say so. If a popular backpack has a recurring zipper failure that the manufacturer hasn't addressed, that goes in the review. We're not here to sell you everything - we're here to help you make good decisions.
We also believe in transparency. When we recommend a product and include an affiliate link, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That helps keep this resource running. But editorial integrity comes first - if a product doesn't earn our recommendation, no affiliate relationship changes that.
Our content is built on a hierarchy of evidence: manufacturer specs for objective data, long-term field reviews for real-world performance, failure reports for reliability concerns, and owner discussions for consensus trends. We flag anything we can't confirm, and we never invent specs, prices, or test results.
Why Arizona Deserves Its Own Resource
Most outdoor content is written for the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, or the Appalachian Trail. Arizona is different. The desert demands different gear, different skills, and different planning. Water carries that would be absurd in Montana are routine here. Fabric that lasts a decade in Oregon delaminates in our UV. A tent that handles Colorado wind might collapse in an Arizona monsoon.
We built Arizona Backpacking Project because we were tired of seeing generic advice applied to terrain that doesn't work that way. This is a resource built by people who actually hike here, guide here, and test gear here.
Whether you're planning your first desert overnight or your tenth thru-hike, we're here to help you do it well and do it safely.