Home » Latest » Outdoors » Hiking 70 Miles Alone on the Sawtooth Loop Trail in Idaho

Hiking 70 Miles Alone on the Sawtooth Loop Trail in Idaho

1

InfoSearched 54 0 Outdoors

8.8

SaveSavedRemoved 3

Three days, 70 miles, and nobody else on the trail to talk to.

Kraig Adams doesn’t do easy itineraries. In late July 2020, the minimalist adventure filmmaker set out to hike the entire Sawtooth Wilderness Loop in central Idaho by himself, then cut the footage into the kind of quiet, observational film that’s become his trademark. The result, “Hiking 70 miles Alone in Idaho,” follows him across nearly 70 miles of granite passes and alpine basins in a fraction of the time most backpackers would budget for the same ground.

• The Sawtooth Wilderness Loop runs roughly 68 to 70 miles with close to 13,000 feet of total elevation gain through the Sawtooth Range.
• Adams completed the entire loop solo in three days, averaging more than 23 miles per day, on a route most backpackers stretch across five to seven days.
• The video splits into largely silent hiking footage focused on the isolation and sound of the wilderness, followed by post-trek commentary on his route, pace, and gear choices.

A Loop Built for a Week, Compressed Into Three Days

The Sawtooth Wilderness Loop isn’t a casual weekend circuit. Threading through jagged granite peaks, deep canyons, and a string of alpine lake basins, the route packs nearly 13,000 feet of climbing into its 68-to-70-mile span — steep switchbacks, scree fields, and multiple river crossings included. Most hikers who take it on treat it as a five-to-seven-day trip, pacing themselves through the passes and camping at the lake basins along the way.

Adams didn’t camp much. He moved through the loop in three days flat, which put his average pace above 23 miles a day on terrain that would wear down a fully rested hiker carrying half his load. That kind of mileage on a trail with this much vertical gain means long hours of movement with little margin for recovery — a deliberate contrast to the leisurely, scenery-first approach most backcountry itineraries in the Sawtooths are built around.

Actual Camera Footage Analysis

True to his style, Adams lets the wilderness carry most of the runtime. Long, largely silent stretches of hiking footage dominate the film — the wind through pine forests, footsteps on scree, the ambient hush of an empty alpine basin — before he breaks into commentary once the trek is done. It’s the same structural approach viewers of other solo-backcountry content have come to expect, the kind of pacing that shows up in projects like Solo Overnight Building a Sandbag Shelter In the Woods, where the isolation itself becomes part of the story rather than a backdrop to it.

The visuals lean into what makes the Sawtooths distinct: wildflower meadows at elevation, canyon walls dropping away from the ridgelines, and alpine lakes that show up one after another as the loop winds through the range. None of it is narrated in real time — Adams saves the explanation for after the fact.

Three days. Seventy miles. No one else on the trail.

The Post-Trek Breakdown

Once the hiking footage ends, Adams shifts into the practical half of the video — walking through why he chose the route he did, how he managed his pace to hit three days instead of the standard week, and what gear made an unsupported, fast-and-light traverse of this scale possible. It’s the same blend of cinematic footage and gearhead detail that runs through his other solo trips, and it puts the Sawtooth Wilderness Loop in the same conversation as other minimalist, lightweight-focused backcountry content, including projects like Cattail Down Jacket Solo Overnight, where equipment choices are treated as central to the story rather than an afterthought.

His tips cover the unglamorous realities of moving that fast through wilderness this remote — how to time river crossings, where the scree fields cost the most energy, and how much margin an unsupported hiker actually has when three days is the entire schedule.

What Adams pulled off isn’t a record attempt or a competition — it’s one guy deciding a week-long trail could be done in three, and then filming exactly how that went. The Sawtooth Wilderness Loop will still be there for hikers taking the standard seven days next season; Adams just proved it doesn’t have to take that long if you’re willing to average 23-plus miles a day with a camera in your pack.