High Sierra Topix

Harlen wrote:Thanks for the kind reply Wildhiker.
We reckon you must have started your family pretty early Phil- do you really have a 38 year old daughter?! I was 39 when we had our first son Ryan- who is just 17 today. Do you still go backpacking together? Something for Eric and me to hope for. Cheers, Harlen.

I share these sentiments of hiking together with my kids when they're older. My wife and I were both past 40 when we had our oldest one (Lee now 15) and our most epic backpacking trips together were in the decade and a half before that when it seemed like we were in the high country more weekends than not. We started our kids when they were very young (one was carried in all the way, the other would be "portaged" for parts of hikes).

This will be the 2nd consecutive summer for us when we didn't have a family (ie all-family: me, wife and both kids) backpack, but the younger one (Dawn, 11) has requested a backpacking trip, so she will go up with me next week (Lee, kinda as predicted wants to stay home in spite of the potential for big browns, big brookies, big macks, and possibly big cutts on the coming 3-day trip). Whether or not this is starting point for "two tiers" of trips for the family as happened in mine, we'll see. I was fortunate in that my dad introduced the family to hiking and peak bagging, but in the beginning it was just car camping. The first overnighter was me and my dad at age 8 (Pear Lake, Alta Peak), and things really started diverging on my memorable 10th birthday with an overnighter to Monarch Lakes and climb of Sawtooth and Mineral Peaks. Thereafter there would commonly be a fairly mellow family trip and then a harder one for me and my dad. Judy, my wife, has predicted that Dawn will be to me what I was to my dad in the backcountry. We'll see.

Anyhow, enjoy your trip with your kids, efinley. I hope it is the first of many.

Hi Harlen, GiantBrookie, and anyone else amused by this thread that has now been hijacked to family backpacking nostalgia...

We backpacked as a family pretty much from the time the kids were born (missed a couple of years when we had two kids in diapers!) until the oldest one graduated from high school. By then, we were doing pretty adventuresome hikes - the last one was a week long trip out of Granite Creek into Bench Canyon and over Blue Lake Pass in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. We had the two younger ones for a while longer, and then, starting in 1998, my wife and I got to go on an adults-only backpack trip again while the youngest (only one left at home) was at Boy Scout camp. After a few years establishing their independence, our daughters started going backpacking with us again, but our son has veered off into big-wall rock climbing, which consumes all his time and attention. And yes, Harlen, I had my oldest daughter early (age 26) and she is now 38 with a new baby of her own. I'm looking forward to backpacking with the granddaughter (and her parents) in a few years. Actually, the granddaughter has already been backpacking - in utero. Last summer I took my daughter, then 5 months pregnant, and her husband on an easy two-nighter from Tioga Road down to North Dome and Yosemite Creek. When you start them young, they can turn out pretty tough!

-Phil

Here is the link to our trip report:
http://highsierratopix.com/community/vi ... =1&t=16446

Thanks again for all the help guys. It was a huge success!