hiking with kids RSS

One of our family's favorite snacks for hiking is fruit leather.  Our two year old practically LIVES on fruit (and cheese), but bananas, berries and apples so often get squished and bruised bouncing around in a day pack or stepped on in the car before we even make it to the trailhead.  Fruit leather is the perfect way to bring fruit on the trail in a non messy way, plus it's so easy to whip up with a dehydrator.My dehydrator is an Excalibur with a temperature control, but you can use any dehydrator in any price point for easy fruit...

  I’ve been thinking a lot about safety lately.  With the wildfires in Utah, and the news story of the hikers who got stuck on a short trail when they hiked to a waterfall, and the hiker last fall in the Smokies who got lost on a short hike and died, it reinforced the importance of spreading the knowledge of the ten essentials. The Ten Essentials. It sounds complicated.  Like something you only need if you’re going deep in the wilderness, miles away from civilization, right?   Or just for those Scouts really roughing it. Wrong.  Emergencies can happen ANYWHERE.  Some of...

Our two middle kids on a short nature trail near us. I get a lot of parents asking me how I hike with kids. They say it is intimidating. They worry their kids will hate it and then they'll be stuck somewhere in the woods in misery with tantrumming kids. Or that they're just plain scared to go by themselves. Here's my advice: Start small. If you've never taken your kids on a hike and you don't walk regularly around your neighborhood, start with a short, local nature trail. It doesn't have to be a "named" miles-long hiking trail. In...