Choose Your Own Adventure: How One Family Finds Four Different Favorite Days in the Same National…
My wife leans toward summits, I’m pulled toward the rivers and the big trees, and our two kids stop for things the rest of us walk right…
Choose Your Own Adventure: How One Family Finds Four Different Favorite Days in the Same National Park
My wife leans toward summits, I’m pulled toward the rivers and the big trees, and our two kids stop for things the rest of us walk right past, and none of us has to give that up to get out together
The outdoors isn’t one experience that everyone is supposed to love the same way, and the closer you look at any group sharing a trailhead, the more obvious it gets that each person came for something a little different.
My Wife is pulled toward summits and thin air.
I’d rather be down where the rivers run, and the trees are old enough to have watched centuries pass.
Our kids, on the other hand, stop cold for things the rest of us walk right past, regardless of the trail.
You don’t have to agree on what makes a good day outside to share the same park, because the bigger ones hold every version of it at once.
None of that is a conflict to manage; it’s the reason the parks are worth the drive.
The pull of the low country: forests, rivers, and the coast
If water and old forest move you more than a summit does, the lower trails pay you back for patience instead of punishing you, and they ask for a different kind of care than the peaks do.
What the Redwoods ask of you
Among the coast redwoods of northern California, the trail is a deep duff of fallen needles and bark that soaks up sound, so you hear the creek long before the path bends toward it.
The fog drips off the canopy for hours after the rain has stopped, keeping the understory of sorrel and ferns wet through a dry afternoon and your hiking shoes damp, whether it rained or not.
Fern Canyon over in Prairie Creek humbles your gear choices, with walls of five-finger fern and a floor that’s a braided creek you cross over and over on whatever logs the last storm left behind.
By the back half of spring, those crossings are still cold enough to remind you that waterproof hiking shoes only stay waterproof until the water comes in over the top.
The coast adds the tide
The Pacific coast trails carry a hazard the forest doesn’t, and it’s the one I observe people underestimate.
The tide chart is the most important thing in your pack on a coastal hike, because a beach that looks wide open at noon closes into a cliff-walled trap as the water returns, and a headland you walked around in the morning can strand you by mid-afternoon.
I check the tables the night before and again at the car, and plan the turnaround around the incoming water rather than how good I happen to feel.
What stays with me down here isn’t a view so much as a sense of age, Roosevelt elk bedded in the dune grass at Gold Bluffs Beach, a banana slug crossing the trail at its own unbothered pace, and the reminder that this soft ground heals from a footprint far slower than rock does, which is why I stay on the tread even when the mud tempts me to walk the dry edge and widen the trail for everyone behind me.
The pull of the high country: altitude and summits
If a summit is the day you’re chasing, the mountains give back more than the forest does, but forgive far less, and a late start up high gets measured in lightning.
The afternoon storm clock
My wife is usually moving by headlamp, because in the Colorado high country, the afternoon thunderstorms build with a regularity you can almost set a watch to, and the rule she lives by is plain: start heading down off any exposed ridge or summit by early afternoon, well before the clouds stack up.
Getting caught above treeline in a lightning storm is not a story you want to be the subject of.
Thin air and fragile ground
Altitude is its own slow test, and the peaks she likes push well past 12,000 and 13,000 feet, where the air gives you a good deal less to work with.
She drinks more than feels necessary, eats before she’s hungry, and treats a pounding headache as information rather than something to push through, because the line between a hard day and a dangerous one up there comes down to whether you turn around when your body first asks.
The alpine tundra she crosses to reach those summits is the most fragile ground in the whole park, which shapes every step she takes across it.
Cushion plants and tundra grasses above treeline can take decades to recover from a single careless boot, so she stays on rock and established trail, never cuts a switchback, and where there’s no trail at all, she steps from stone to stone the way you’d pick your way across a creek.
The smallest hikers are on their own adventure entirely
Kids don’t experience a trail the way adults do, and the fastest way to ruin the outdoors for them is to make them hold your pace toward your goal.
Our seven-year-old will spend twenty minutes on one banana slug while the river waits, and our eleven-year-old wants the scramble and the boulder he can stand on top of.
We let the day bend around that, and hand them the same two rules the rest of us live by: stay on the trail so the ground behind us looks untouched, and tell someone before you wander off after something interesting.
What the different pulls are really for
Choosing your own adventure was never about splitting off from everyone else; it’s that the same patch of country can be four different favorite days at the same time.
Some adventures I’ll take my wife’s mountain hike and mean it, she’ll take a slow river walk and love it, and the kids turn a flat two miles into a hunt for frog song and elk tracks.
None of us is doing the outdoors wrong, and nature has never once asked us to agree on what it was for or how it was meant to be experienced…
Thanks for taking the time to read my article.
I really appreciate it!
Follow and subscribe to me here on Medium, and visit Adventures Backyard when you have a chance if you are interested in additional topics about U.S. National Parks and all things outdoors.
Best Regards,
***George***
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