2/19/2023 0 Comments Growing up wildernessI saw only one conceivable strategy for preserving my charmed lifestyle-and my sanity: I had to raise my children to love the outdoors as much as I do. Suddenly, the cold reality of fatherhood had taken away my ability to head out anytime the desire hit me. In some ways, I think it may have been harder to surrender that freedom at that age than it might have been 10 years earlier. I’d had a good life through my thirties, working as an outdoor writer, spending more days outside every year than many avid backpackers, climbers, skiers, and paddlers spend in 10 years. I became a father at age 39, on the brink of middle age, and began playing parent by ear with only a vague sense of the melody (which inevitably means hitting a lot of bad notes before finding the right ones). Nate canyoneering in Capitol Reef National Park. Like this story? You may also like my “ 10 Tips For Getting Your Teenager Outdoors With You” and “ My Top 10 Family Outdoor Adventures.” The reasons for that derive from societal forces as much as personal values, and are as complicated and vexing as parenting itself.īut I’m still not sure what terrifies me more: knowing how close we came to tragedy, or my enduring belief that exposing my kids to this kind of danger is somehow good for them. In spite of that haunting memory of Nate’s slide and a deep understanding of the inherent risks, I continue to take my kids backpacking into wilderness, rock and mountain climbing, whitewater kayaking and rafting, and backcountry skiing. Now, several years after that beautiful, weeklong, hut-to-hut trek in Jotunheimen, my family and the friends who joined us look back on it fondly. For the rest of that trip, and occasionally since, those three seconds of horror have replayed in my mind, and I’ve chastised myself for not simply guiding my kids and my mom one at a time across that slope (as I did when we continued that descent-uneventfully-after lunch). But seeing danger suddenly grab one of my kids and hurl him down a mountainside felt like simultaneous blows to my head and heart. I’ve also seen how quickly everything can go wrong in the backcountry-a few times, in fact, which is a few too many. I’m a father (and not mentally unbalanced, honestly) I understand that protective instinct. Some parents may see it as validation for their fear of taking kids out into nature. I hesitate to share that story because some people will read it and judge me a bad parent who willingly places his children in harm’s way. My kids, Alex and Nate, trekking up the Langvatnet valley in Jotunheimen National Park, Norway. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip. Click here for my e-guides to classic backpacking trips. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. (With a little more speed, he might have slammed into that boulder, miles from the nearest road and many hours from the nearest emergency room.) I tell him to remain still, then usher everyone to the lunch spot and kick steps into the hard snow down to Nate to lead him to safe ground. Within twenty feet of the safety of the dirt where we intend to stop, I hear my wife behind me shriek, “Nate!” And I spin around to see my 11-year-old son sliding downhill, accelerating rapidly.īy sheer luck-or perhaps just because he weighs so little-he stops abruptly about 30 feet below us, caught on the lip of a moat that has melted out on the uphill side of a boulder. We inch our way across a span of snow broader than a football field is long. I turn to our little party-which ranges in age from my nine-year-old daughter to my 75-year-old mother-and emphasize that we have to proceed extremely carefully. It’s well traveled, but someone slipping in that track could rocket downhill at the speed of a car on a highway. A trench stomped into the snow by other trekkers diagonals down to our lunch spot. Blanketed in snow made firm by freezing overnight temperatures, and littered with protruding boulders, it runs hundreds of feet down to a lake choked with icebergs-in mid-July. I coax everyone to push on just a little farther, down out of the wind to a sun-splashed, snow-free area of dirt and rocks for lunch.īut I don’t like the looks of the steep slope we have to descend. Some of the troops are hungry, a little tired, and grumpy mutiny doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility, so I don’t want to add “cold” to their growing list of grievances. Virtually devoid of vegetation, the terrain offers no refuge from the relentless current of frigid air. A glacial wind pours through a snowy pass in the remote mountains of Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park.
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