Passing Through: Four Days, Four Passes, and a Family of Four Backpacking on the Colorado Trail

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In other places, I have talked about how I used to not like camping. I felt it was a necessary part of getting to big mountain objectives, but it wasn’t something I would seek out for it’s own virtues. Well, way back when, I used to feel the same way about hiking.

From a purely mountaineering perspective, we are often (not always, but often) doing an out-and-back: starting at a basecamp and then making our way up the peak to the actual climbing, making our descent, and then hiking back to camp. The same ground is covered, just in a loop. Plus, you can add in the psychological dynamics of being fairly focused on the increased risk of the climb and the approach hike is just some thing that you do on the way to the part “that counts.”

Well, I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I came around to hiking long before I came around to camping. But what I haven’t done is a heck of a lot of thru hiking, or even point-to-point hikes, for the reasons I just described. I’ve done some of it, sure, but not a lot.

My wife, on the other hand, used to do a reasonable amount of backpacking, and she much prefers point-to-point hikes and thru hiked backpacking trips than any sort of loop. It keeps it fresh for her.

Now, as the boys have been getting older, the simple pleasures of camping have become something of a ritual. It’s taken longer to get the boys exposed to backpacking. They needed to be big enough to at least help carry some of the gear (doctors recommend that kids only care about 15% of their body weight in a pack) and they needed to build the endurance to be able to cover enough miles to make point-to-points possible.

Plus, like everything we do with them in the outdoors, we needed them to want to do the trip. The motivation had to come from them, not from us. Sure, we need to expose them to the idea, but it is always posed as a question. We usually get questions back from them. That’s pretty reasonable, if you think about it. How else can they evaluate if something they have little-to-no experience with might be something they want to try. So, we watch videos; Mom and Dad tell stories about their experiences; we try to relate the activity to things that they have done, by analogy.

Well, this summer they were physically and mentally ready. This ended up being one of my favorite experiences with them in the outdoors. No, it wasn’t adrenalin pumping. It wasn’t supposed to be. No, it didn’t push our bodies or our emotions to the limit. It didn’t need to do that, either. What it did do is provide a walking meditation and a shared experience that could be savored.

Not every one of our adventures need to push our limits.