Mountain Biking with Kids in Kananaskis: Canyon Creek

Unhappy Michael. Happy Mack. Indifferent cows.

This year Michael finally "got it". At the age of seven, he learned how to ride his bike. More than that, he loved riding his bike. He also loved his new mountain bike, which had front suspension and looked decided cool.

The ice cave (you can just see it through the clearing in the trees to the left.)

So on the Labor Day weekend we took him on the Legacy Trail from Banff to Canmore. He did great, as did his 12-year-old brother, Mack. On a short gravel section just past the park gates, he declared, "My bike was made for this!" He then decided he wanted to go mountain biking on a real mountain biking trail.

After much research, I settled on the old gravel road at Canyon Creek a 15-minute drive west of Bragg Creek. The road had been closed years before, and was now a favorite of mountain bikers who start on Moose Mountain and end at the parking lot. We would start at the parking lot and ride the six kilometers to the trailhead for the Bragg Creek Ice Cave, a short hike that I figured would make the perfect fun reward (see my post 7 Steps to Making Hiking Fun). Although there were a couple gentle ups and downs, the elevation gain was negligible. It seemed perfect.

Two minutes after we started up the road, Michael stopped and informed us: "I'm tired." This happened again five minutes later. And two minutes after that. And so on, and so on. Not even a small herd of cattle crossing the road at the four kilometer mark made a difference. He was decidedly unhappy. So we turned back. My inclination was to say, "You're not tired. Now don't ruin this for Mack and keep riding." But that would have ruined it for all of us. A bad first experience mountain biking, or at least a worse first experience than he was already having, would have made getting him out again torture.

Luckily, the slight decline of the road made the ride back easier and faster. He forgot that he was tired (I still don't think he was tired at all), and he had a blast. Then, as I promised, I dawned a bigfoot costume and we made a video of bigfoot attacking two kids. (Seriously. Bigfoot Attacks Children. Walking around the woods in a bigfoot costume was FUN.) By the time we got back in the car, Michael was his old happy self and all was good in the world. An ice cream cone in Bragg Creek erased any lingering bad memories.

The lesson to be learned? Even kids can have bad days, and it's no use pushing them to keep going on those days. As a parent, you have to know when to pack it in, and not try to guilt or scold the kid into meeting your preconceptions of what he can and can't do. Kids outings, within reason, should be experience oriented not objective oriented. I learned this to be true with hiking, skiing, snowshoeing and now cycling. The ice cave will still be there next year, and with any luck Michael will be having a better day pedaling to it. If not, we'll turn around and make another bigfoot video.

Mountain Biking with Kids in Banff: The Banff-to-Canmore Legacy Trail

The start of the Legacy Trail

This year my eight-year-old Michael learned to ride his bike. After much protesting that it was too hard, that he hated it, insert complaint here, he finally figured out--and he loves it. This is something I've been waiting years for: both Mack (12) and Michael being old enough to go biking as a family.

Mack, with Cascade Mountain behind.

So, on the Labor Day weekend, we loaded up the bikes and drove to Canmore. There, we caught a shuttle to Banff, where we were dropped off downtown a block behind main street. A five minute pedal down mostly back streets brought us to the start of the Legacy Trail. I've driven past the paved pathway that runs 24-kilometers from Banff to Canmore countless times. On the way to hikes and scrambles, and then back to Calgary, I've enviously watched other families enjoying summer mornings, afternoons and evenings smiling their way along the side of the highway, safely separated from the screaming traffic beside them. Now, I would finally be cycling it with my family.

We'd decided to do the trail one-way in case the round-trip cycle was too much. And we cycled Banff-to-Canmore because, although there are a couple short uphill sections, for the most part you're gliding slightly downhill with the wind to your back.

The section between Banff and the park gates, where the trail officially ends, was fun but uneventful. We made a few stops to have a drink of water and enjoy the view, and one for Michael to rescue a caterpillar that was inching its way across the pavement. At the park gates, we road a short gravel section of trail to the first overpass, and Micheal announced: "My mountain bike was made for this." He wanted to go "real" mountain biking on a real trail.

After crossing the overpass, it took us about 10 minutes on paved roads that run parallel to the Trans-Canada to reach the next overpass that would take us back across the highway and into Canmore. Another 10 minutes--and another caterpillar rescue--and we were back at the car. Five minutes after that, we were ordering ice cream cones from the side of a converted school bus. It was the perfect way to spend a sunny long weekend afternoon in the mountains with the boys--the cycling, not the ice cream, that is.

Family camp at the Royal Tyrrell Museum

It's been a hot summer in Calgary and the Canadian Rockies, which means there wasn't much time to blog and a whole lot of time to go outside and have an adventure.

Back in the last week of July/first week of August, I took Michael and Mack on our annual Adventure Vacation. Past adventures have included heli-hiking out of Cline River, the Columbia Icefields, whitewater rafting on the Kicking Horse, and soaking in the natural hot springs at Lussier River. This year we camped at Redstreak in Kootenay National Park (more on this in a future blog), went white water rafting on Toby Creek (they said it was better than the upper portion of the Kicking Horse) and visited Boo the grizzly at Kicking Horse Resort.

The boys loved camping and rafting, but the highlight was the finish: Badlands Family Science Camp at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. I'm not the most social person, and the thought of sharing a teepee with another family and spending time with other parents didn't thrill me. However, as soon as I mentioned it the kids were hooked. So we went, and we all had a blast.

A twenty minute walk from the museum, the camp is set in a bowl formed by hoodoos and consists of teepees, a fire pit and outhouses. Each day we would walk to the museum, where we had a classroom to leave our stuff, and set off on new adventures--both mental and physical. Sifting through matrix (i.e. dirt) collected by real paleontologists. Making plaster casts of fossils. Touring the fossil preparation room and the collections library, where shelf after shelf held new and wondrous finds. We touched real dinosaur bones (not the plaster casts they put on display), fitted the kids with casts of mosasaur skulls, and even saw a skull from a new species of ceratopsian that hadn't even been named yet. In the field, a 15-minute hike brought us to an eroding hillside where the three of us spent an hour uncovering a hadrosaur vertebrae, teeth, assorted fragments of bone and some skin that a garter snake shed.

All of this was fun and educational. Yet the kids seemed to most enjoy their free time back at camp, climbing the hoodoos, getting dirty and just being kids. It was my favorite part of the camp, too. Some of the kids, who were much smarter than I was at 5, 8 and 11 (and probably smarter than I am now), thrived in the class and soaked up each new fact like sponges, but Mack and Michael soaked up the opportunity to have unstructured, unfettered adventures in the badlands. They found fossilized wood and dinosaur bones, tested the pointiness of cacti, and imagined a world where kids and dinos roamed the earth together. For me, it was an opportunity to relive the freedom of camping at Dinosaur Provincial Park when I was a kid. At the age of 6, I would spend hours roaming the badlands, climbing the hoodoos and descending into gulleys where I found fossilized teeth and new found independence.

I spent some time climbing around with Michael and Mack, but for the most part I sat back in camp and watched from afar. I also watched some of the other parents hovering over their kids. Don't do that, you might get a scrape. Don't go there, you don't know what's over that berm. Don't leave my sight. While they were proud--and rightly so--of how much their kids knew in the classroom, they squandered the opportunity to let their kids apply that knowledge in the real world. And to acquire new, tactile, hands-on knowledge. The type you can only learn by scraping your knees, exploring what's over the next hill and being free from the worrying eyes of parents.

My fondest memory won't be of fossils or hoodoos, though. It will be of 7-year-old Michael and 12-year-old Mack staying up until midnight, the last kids to go to bed by a couple of hours, looking in awe at a sky with more stars than they'd ever seen along with their first shooting star. It was the type of moment that every kid should be able to share with their parents, and every parent should be able to share with their kids.

Interested in other family camps? Read this post:
Jean-Michel Cousteau Family Camp on California's Catalina Island: Reality is the Best Theme Park

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.