Kids hiking gear: Do they really need it?

Mack in Gore-tex and hiking boots.

Yesterday I snuck out for an early lunch to look at daypacks at MEC (I have a 28L, a 50L and an 80L, but I could use a 40L. Sometimes the 28L is too small, the 50L is too big and something in between would be just right...but that's another blog post). While I was looking quite nerdy bouncing around with a Spirit 40 loaded with some weight to see how it fit--how does it feel if I jiggle like this? How about if I lunge?--I ran into two women from work. The daughter of one needed kids hiking gear for summer camp, but the mom didn't know anything about packs, sleeping bags and all the rest of the stuff on the equipment list. The other woman, who hikes with her kids, came along to help her out.

All went well until the boot section. The one mom simply didn't have enough money to buy the "hiking shoes or boots" that were on the required gear list for a three-day backpacking trip that was part of the two-week camp. Her daughter would have to make do with running shoes. The other woman was aghast. Footwear with the word "hiking" in the name was absolutely required. She would bring a pair of kids hiking boots that her daughter had outgrown and "should" fit the camp goer...to which I quietly disagreed. Runners that fit would be much better than hiking boots or shoes that don't. After all, the list said "hiking shoes" would be acceptable, and most hiking shoes are just gussied up running shoes. Ill-fitting hiking boots lead to ill-feeling, blistered feet. In the end, the mom was confused, didn't know what to do, and took the cheaper route. Running shoes it was.

Michael: cotton & runners. Mack: cotton & boots. Both: survived the ordeal.

I bring this up because parents often ask me about kids hiking gear: what do they need. Already tapped out by school fees, sports fees, camp fees, you-name-it fees, the thought of shelling out for kid-sized Goretex, hiking boots, packs, dry fit shirts, hiking shorts, fleece and on and on actually prevents some from taking their kids hiking. It's not necessarily that they've bought into the hype, but they walk into MEC and, if they're aren't hikers themselves, they're overwhelmed. They don't know what all the stuff is or whether their kid needs it, but one look at the price tag says they can't afford it.

My response: get all that stuff if you can afford it, but don't worry if you can't. It can be helpful, but most of it isn't essential. Lo these many years ago when I was a kid in Scouts, we regularly went hiking, backpacking and scrambling in running shoes, jeans and cotton t-shirts and hoodies (kangaroo jackets back in the day). I don't recall anyone dying of hypothermia because their cotton clothes weren't wicking moisture away, or breaking ankles because their delinquent parents were too cheap to shell out for the heavy, blister-inducing all-leather boots of the day. When I take my kids out, sometimes they wear runners and sometimes they wear their hiking boots. It's up to them. I'll pack their rain coats (my 12-year-old does have a Goretex jacket; again, that's another post, but having the same gear as their parents can help kids develop a passion for the outdoors), but if they bring a cotton hoodie instead of their fleece I don't freak out.

The point I'm trying to make is that, like many simple things in life, we've made hiking more about the cost of the gear than the value of the experience, especially when it comes to kids. Aside from gas money to reach the trail, hiking is essentially free. Whether your kids have Northface hiking pants or blue jeans from Walmart, the important thing is to get them out.

Hiking with Kids near Canmore: Stoneworks Canyon (Extreme is a matter of perspective)

Stoneworks Canyon

I stumbled across Stoneworks Canyon while researching a scramble up Squaw's Tit (seriously, that's what it's called, probably due to the nipple on top), the high point on a ridge that leads to Mount Charles Stewart. Although the route to Squaw's Tit doesn't pass through Stoneworks Canyon, the route to the summit of Mount Charles Stewart does. One website led to another, and I found myself looking at photos of a canyon that narrows to a few meters across, lots of rocks to climb on and short approach up a dry creek bed.

Click here for more kids hikes in Banff, Kananaskis, Kootenay and other areas of the Canadian Rockies.

Stoneworks Canyon, or the Stone Works as rock and sport climbers call it, looked like the perfect place for a kids hike. It didn't disappoint. On the north side of the Trans-Canada and across from Canmore, it was less than an hour's drive from Calgary. Although "Jimmy's Trail" leads to Stoneworks, our group, a dozen or so parents and kids, hiked up the rocky creek bed, which is dry except during the spring run off. Within an hour we were at the entrance to the canyon.

After dropping our packs and eating a bite, we spent an hour exploring the canyon beyond. A narrow opening led directly to an even narrower twisty slot carved by thousands of years of water cutting through the limestone. Above, the rock seemed to close over us like a convoluted roof. In the imaginations of the kids we were on another planet. Although still on earth, we were indeed a world away from the iPods and cell phones back in the cars.

One mom, who'd joined our group while on vacation from Illinois, asked if I'd been to Stoneworks Canyon before. When I told her it was my first time, she seemed amazed. How did I know about it? The answer is easy: I always keep an eye out for places that I think would look fun and "extreme" to my seven-year-old and 12-year-old boys. Sometimes I come across those places while hiking or scrambling (that's how I found the boulder field on Little Lougheed and the fossils on Burns Ridge), and sometimes I find them while researching other hikes and scrambles.

While not every parent can do this, if only because they don't go on as many hikes as I do or they don't know what websites have trip reports of likely trails, often it comes down to remembering to stop, clear your mind and look at your surroundings from the perspective of your kids. This true whether you're at the off-leash park with your dog, walking through a park or driving along the river on the way to work. Even just looking at the ground under your feet or the rocks in your backyard with the eyes of a child can reveal a hidden natural playground.

Distance: 5 or 6 km round trip
Elevation gain: A couple hundred meters
Hiking/Exploring Time: 3 to 5 hours
Directions: Take the Trans-Canada west to Canmore. Take the second exit. Rather than staying on Benchlands Trail, turn left onto Palliser Trail. Approximately 2km from the Trans-Canada turn-off, on the right, there is a gated entrance to Stoneworks Canyon (Johnny's Trail). Go through the gate and either proceed straight ahead to the creek bed or watch for the trail entrance on the left at the end of the gravel pit.

Click here for a driving map

Heading back to the car on the dry creek bed.

Even the Internet Can Get a Little Rusty

A couple years ago I put a few big sandstone rocks in my flower bed to fill holes that my dog dug up, and inadvertently created a nature play area.

Last week my seven-year-old announced he was going mining in the backyard. A couple minutes later I heard what sounded like a hammer on rock. Sure enough, he'd discovered that sandstone breaks really, really easily. My first thought was, "Those sandstone rocks were hard to find..." Then he held up a piece that had been stained red and asked, "What's this dark spot?"

That triggered a discussion of how the sandstone had iron in it and the red was rust (I held it next to the rusting grill on my fire pit so he could see they were the same color), why you can't see the iron, how they get little bits of iron out of rocks, how they get the rocks, what the hole looks like after they've gotten all the rocks they want and so on.

When we were done, he looked me straight in the eye and said, "You knew there was iron in your rocks all this time and you didn't tell me? Don't you know I mine for iron in Minecraft!?"

Minecraft is an online game he and his brother play where you build your own sort of world out of stuff that you find, mine or otherwise accumulate. I learned two things from this:

1. 1. A few rocks in a garden can be a natural play area. (He also discovered that there are bugs under the rocks, so the ones he didn't break into smaller rocks were turned over onto the flowers beside them to see what was there.)
   
2. 2. Computer games, in moderation and of the non-Grand Theft Auto variety, maybe aren't entirely evil. If I take a more active interest in them than just censoring and banning the inappropriate ones, maybe I can use them to engage my boys in the real world.
   

On the flip side, I (or more likely the rocks) infused Michael's virtual world with the real world. The fact that iron occurs in real rocks that he can touch and break into smaller rocks--in his own backyard--has led to an interest in where man-made things come from. It's also led to a new found joy in hitting hard things with a hammer to see what's inside them, but that's another blog post...or counseling session...

Hiking with Kids in Kananaskis: Burns Ridge

Over the last couple of years leading kids hikes, two of the things I learned are:

1. I don’t give kids enough credit. They can handle a lot more than I think can, whether that’s in terms of kilometers, meters of elevation gain or the steepness of a trail. Kids hikes don't have to be easy hikes.
2. Picking a trail that ends somewhere fun like climbable boulders makes the entire experience more fun for kids and helps motivate them.

I put both of these learnings into practice on Father’s Day this year. The previous Sunday I’d scrambled 700 m to the high point of Burns Ridge in Kananaskis. A little over halfway up, I looked down to find a couple of big rocks with fossilized clams in them. I checked the altimeter on my watch: we’d ascended 400 meters from the trailhead. After snapping some photos I continued up the ridge.

Click here for more kids hikes in Banff, Kananaskis, Kootenay and other areas of the Canadian Rockies.

Back home, I told my seven-year-old and 12-year-old sons about my find. They thought it was cool, wondered how clams got up on a mountain (answer: what’s now a mountain used to the seabed), then kept on playing. I knew they would have a blast searching among the rocks for fossils, but I wasn’t sure if bushwhacking and scree slogging 400 m up a steep and trail-less mountainside beneath the "ridge" part of Burn's Ridge would make for a good kids hike.

I decided to risk it. After all, if the hike/bordering-on-scramble was too much, we could turn around and find somewhere else to play. With the exception of one boy and his dad who turned around because they were freaked out by the thought of going off trail (dad had phoned 20 minutes before the hike to see if he could join, and he clearly hadn’t read the hike description beyond the title: “Kids Hike—Fossil Hunting Expedition on Burns Ridge"), all the kids seemed to enjoy the route finding and what was for them an extreme experience. Michael, my seven-year-old, looked proud of himself as he firmly planted my ice axe in the scree above him and pulled himself up for most of the way. 

After a couple hours and maybe 250 meters of elevation gain, we popped out of the trees to find a scree slope that was literally littered with fossilized clams. While the other adults ate lunch, myself and all five kids scattered across the scree, yelling when we found a particularly fine specimen. Although the boys gave me a two-way radio set that I’d been looking at for a while, their real Father’s Day gift was persevering up the side of a mountain so I could share my experience of the week before with them. The wrapping paper on the gift was watching the amazed looks on their faces as they slid down the scree on their bums, as if they were tobogganing on rocks without a toboggan. Which, of course, they were.

Distance: 7 or 8 km round trip
Elevation gain: Up to 400 m
Hiking/Exploring Time: 4 to 6 hours
Directions: Take the 22x to Highway 22 and head south. When you get to Turner Valley, turn right at the four-way stop and you're on Highway 546. Drive west all the way to the end, where you should find the Junction Creek day use area. Hike up the old logging road for 45 minutes to an hour, watching for a scree slope on the right that descends close to the road. Here, leave the road and bushwhack up and slightly to the left to follow the ridge up. You'll cross game trails that traverse across the slope but don't lead up. When you reach the treeline, start looking for fossils.

Click here for a driving map. 

Hiking with Kids: 7 Steps To Make Hiking Fun for Kids

This is boring. How much farther? Can we go back to the car?

When I first tried to introduce my two boys, then 5 and 10, to hiking, I heard those statements a lot. And let's be honest: walking through the trees, usually uphill, can be boring. I seldom hike on trails that don't get above the treeline, and the sooner those trails get into the alpine the better. When picking mountains or ridges to ascend, I look for ones that don't have long approaches through the trees. I'll drive for 1.75 hours to the Highwood Pass, home of Canada's highest highway, or 2.5 hours to the Icefields Parkway, both of which typically have shorter approach trails, to save a half hour or more of trudging through the trees.

Click here for kids hikes in Banff, Kananaskis, Kootenay and other areas of the Canadian Rockies. 

Climbing a big grey rock half up the trail to Sparrowhawk Tarns

So what can you do to make hiking fun for kids? Here are some suggestions:

On a big grey rock overlooking the Spray Lakes

1. Make hiking fun by making hiking fun--Pick a destination with something fun to do, like climbing on boulders or throwing rocks in a lake. This weekend I'm leading a kids hike halfway up Burns Ridge in Kananaskis. Last weekend, while scrambling the ridge with adults I found fossilized clams in a bunch of boulders. With the kids, we'll hike to just above the treeline, drop our packs, and start fossil hunting.
2. Don't call it hiking--Once you've picked your destination, say a boulder field they can play around on, tell them you're going to play around on some big rocks. Or that it's a fossil hunting expedition, not a hike halfway up a ridge.
3. Go at the kids' pace--Let them mosey, dawdle and do what kids do. If they stop to look at a rotting log, let them. Nothing will turn them against hiking like continually pushing them to go faster or stop taking so many stops.
4. Take an interest in the things they take an interest in--Say the words "Wow," "Cool" and "Neat" a lot when they point stuff out. You want them to engage in your love of the great outdoors, the least you can do is engage in their curiosity and encourage their sense of wonder.
5. Take other kids with you--This is probably the most important piece of advice I can give you. It was a hard learned lesson, no matter how simple or how obvious it now seems. I've seen kids go from "I'm tired. I can't go any further" a mere five minutes from the parking lot, to running down the trail with a new-found friend within 10 seconds of meeting each other. I lead kid's hikes for the Calgary Outdoor Recreation Association, so I have a constant supply of hiking buddies for my kids. If you aren't up to leading group hikes, join a group that has kid's hikes or bring one or two of your kids' friends.
6. Go for ice cream--I call it the post-hike bribe, and in the beginning it was one of the main attractions for my kids. They knew that if they humored me and made it to wherever I said we were going, we'd stop for an ice cream cone on the way home. Now that they have the mountain bug, they still want the ice cream but it's not the end of the world if we don't have time.
7. Stay off their backs--Kids get cuts and scrapes and bruises. It's in their job description. At least it used to be. These days, us parents seem to spend more time worrying about keeping our kids safe than in teaching them how to be safe. Part of learning how not to get cuts and scrapes and bruises is getting them. So let them. Try not to tell them how to do everything, or to be careful of this or to watch our for that. Unless what they're doing could end in tragedy, let them do their thing and be kids. Nothing is more fun than that feeling of being free to have fun. If your kids come away from the mountains having felt that, I guarantee they'll want to keep going back.