“This hike is not recommended for young children” -– Parks Canada: Hiking the Chilkoot

A motley assortment of camping stoves roared and hissed in the open-sided shelter overlooking the lake.  Just-add-water cuisine was clearly the order of the evening, as each group concocted steaming sacks of freeze-dried sustenance. Colorful bags optimistically advertised their contents:  chicken a la king, pasta primavera, beef stroganoff.   A few clouds had rolled in, and it was starting to drizzle.  Almost all the hikers were huddled on the wooden benches.  Some of them looked distinctly foot-sore. 

Lizzy and Molly were jumping. 

“D’you see the red lights?” Molly demanded, pointing to her sneakers.  “See?  They blink!“

                I was hovering nearby, ready to employ diversionary tactics (“Gosh, kids, let’s go look for bugs under rocks!”) if any of our fellow-hikers seemed less than thrilled by my offspring.  However, the middle-aged man from Montana had time to kill while his stomach rumbled.  His own teenage kids were busy preparing something starchy and beige.  He smiled, and duly admired Molly’s shoes.  “Did you hike over the pass wearing those?” he asked.

I winced a little at the question, and tried to judge whether Montana Guy was more amused than downright horrified by such a flagrant violation of the National Park Service’s Appropriate Gear List.  I’d considered trying to obtain miniature hiking boots, but the possibility of blisters in new footwear had seemed even more likely than the chance that third-hand playground-wear might simply disintegrate atop a rocky precipice. 

“These are my Thomas the Tank Engine sneakers,” said Molly, as if that explained everything.  “The old ones with Spiderman were too little.  These ones are size ten!” 

Toddler tens – my kid was practically Sasquatch. 

Since long before we even set out on the Chilkoot Trail – in fact, ever since Jay and I first casually mentioned our plans for our end-of-summer family trip – I’d seen eyebrows skyrocketing.  Were we sure it was really wise?  How could we cover thirty-three miles of rough terrain with twin four-year-olds, carrying all our own gear, and all their gear -- including the requisite stuffed animals, bedtime stories, and footy pajamas? What about gale force winds, mud, bugs, and unceasing rain?  What about bears?  What about the notorious Chilkoot Pass that tortured the grizzly-looking miners of the Yukon Gold Rush?  And that was the reaction from our friends.  Once we were on the trail, strangers outright stared.  “You’re not going the whole way, are you?”

I pointed out that, as on other hikes, we planned to carry the kids in backpack carriers for almost half the distance, usually encompassing post-lunch nap time.  This wasn’t taken as an effective comeback.  It seemed our questioners lacked faith in the ability of a thirty-something mom to carry a bundle of gear the size of a Volkswagen with a 35-pound kid tucked amongst it. “I’m just kind of used to it,” I protested lamely, but the consensus of incredulity began to undermine my confidence. 

I was pretty sure my kids were safe from rabid wolves and August frostbite, but that didn’t stop me from worrying.  What if we ran out of M&M’s?  What if we fainted from the fumes of four pairs of wet socks in a three-person tent?  What if Lizzy woke everyone in camp at three-thirty a.m. when Lamby became temporarily lost in the abyss of her sleeping bag?  What if (oh, the horror) Jay and I -- along with Jay’s dad and forty-five total strangers -- were subjected thirty-three miles of twins-in-stereo whining? 

In the week before the hike, as I packed up six zillion miniature Ziplocs of honey roasted peanuts, dried cranberries, and Tootsie Pops, I tried to talk myself out of my peer-induced paranoia.  The kids were experienced hikers.  They liked Powerbars.  They had warm -- albeit mismatched --homemade longjohns and raingear, and I could still get away with dressing them this way because they hadn’t yet realized Mommy wasn’t cool.  Earlier in the summer, they had demonstrated that they could be entertained for four hours straight, hiking through impenetrable fog, by my attempts to narrate all of “James and the Giant Peach” and the “Wizard of Oz”.  Given that most adults would start hyperventilating after 30 seconds of my rendition of “Yellow Brick Road,” I felt like we’d done pretty well.  But still, I was apprehensive.

Once we hit the trail, the questions grew even more pressing, and I proffered my rehearsed rationale for bringing the kids on a hike that the guidebooks and websites describe as “rugged” and “very challenging”.  Their daddy grew up here, I explained.  Well, not here, in this lean-to, but in the small town of Skagway, where we all started.  Their grandpa – now sixty-eight years old, and striding along the trail far ahead of us – served as the ranger for this National Park for more than a decade.  This wasn’t just a fun jaunt, it was more of a family pilgrimage. 

Of course, the whole explanation was disingenuous, coming from me.  I’d never been to the Chilkoot before – and it was a fun jaunt.  Still, everyone seemed at least partially placated.  The downside was that they then rushed off to mob my father-in-law with questions about the park.  There are no back-woods vacations for people wearing Park Service green pants. 

The real Park Service employees were as dubious as everyone else.  “The day over the pass takes the average hiker ten hours,” one of them pronounced, looking at us meaningfully.  Cowed, we departed from camp at 7 a.m. that morning, expecting everyone else to overtake us along the way.  As it turned out, little kids are substantially more squirrel-like than are middle-aged cubicle-dwellers.   Hours went by, and no one went past us.  Rocks were fun.  Despite the fog, there was plenty to see along the way: big, rusty, exciting stuff.

“The long-ago gold miners were litterbugs,” announced Lizzy, with all the righteous indignation of a kid who has learned and internalized the rules. If children are chastised for dropping paper scraps or fruit stickers, then how did those gold-rushers get away with leaving hundreds of cans, the soles of countless pairs of worn-out shoes, and mysterious yet fascinating pulleys, winches, levers, and gears?  Ah, but this was not trash, I told her – these were artifacts.  Artifacts!  That sounded important.  “Look, another artifact!” she informed me, every three feet.  Up, up, we went.

At the summit, the ranger on duty appeared from a tiny cabin that seemed to be perched on the edge of nothing, wind-swept and wild.  News of our group had preceded us by radio.  He peered at the kids as if expecting to see open sores, blood, or signs of extreme emotional distress.  Had he been hoping for the chance to report us to Child Social Services from the mountains of British Colombia?   “We don’t usually see ‘em below eight,” he grunted.  Molly and Lizzy told him about artifacts, around mouthfuls of peanut butter and jelly.

Now we were safely on the far side of that dastardly pass, and the twins had just started a busy game of Making Pretend Stuff with Twigs and Moss in the Drizzle.  Our fellow hikers’ meals progressed from chili mac to cherry cobbler to chunks of chocolate. Latecomers, looking as if they’d spent the day with the Spanish Inquisition, staggered into camp.

 “Do you remember?” asked Molly.  She has a penchant for talking about events from a few hours or days previously as if they happened eons ago.  “Do you remember, there was a stove at the top?”

This, I had to admit, had impressed me too, because I always like finding evidence that someone else is a bigger idiot than I am.  The Klondike would-be-gold-miners hiked endlessly in the dead of the sub-arctic winter, ferrying 400 pounds of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, and dense-sounding items such as scythe stones , whipsaws, and oakum.  They hauled stoves to the top of mountains, and abandoned them.  And, almost without exception, they didn’t find any gold.  A scenic summer stroll with a couple of kids seemed positively sensible in comparison.  None of us were carrying oakum or looking for gold, which is perhaps why the hike seemed so much easier to me than I’d expected it to.  We’d been getting to camp each day by mid afternoon.  There was plenty of time left to play Make A Hat For Mommy Out of Lichen, and to pick blueberries.

A few of the less travel-worn folks wandered over to chat.  Although more than one fellow-hiker mentioned that it was a little demoralizing to struggle along the trail all day, only to be greeted by kids too short to go eyeball-to-hip-belt with you, the dubiousness and disapproval I’d sensed two days ago seemed to be evaporating.  Our new-found friends commended the kids on their hiking prowess, and took photos of them.  They asked Molly and Lizzy what they liked best about the trail. They offered more chocolate.  After twenty miles, a national boundary, and several long hours of precipitous scrambling on the misty pass, it seemed the twins had earned their stripes, train-logo-sneakers and all.  By association, Jay, his dad, and I had gained the provisional status of Maybe Not Insane Guardians.

  The dad from Montana was taking a trip down memory lane.  “This is such a great age… I remember when my kids were that small… it seems like just yesterday….”  His eighteen-year-old daughter, to her credit, was keeping her eye-rolling to a bare minimum. 

The rain was ending, and a lean grey-haired man, more energized than the rest, walked a hundred feet up the nearest hummock of rock to check out the view.  A few moments later he called down to the rest of us, “A rainbow!  Come on up and see!”

A rainbow!  The stuff of a thousand wobbly-crayoned art projects!  The kids were up the hill in a flash, leaping and shrieking their joy.  A rainbow!  With all the colors!  A moment later it dipped into a full arc.  Then a double rainbow appeared.

A few others joined us on the hilltop, but the rest stayed below, either too weary or too jaded to bother.  Those of us in the rainbow clique shook our heads at their lack of initiative.

Five minutes after it appeared, the rainbow faded.  The kids’ joy, however, did not.  They scampered from rock to rock, effervescent on excitement and chocolate.   “Do you remember?” said Molly.  “It had purple and red and orange!  Do you remember?  It was double!”

The guy from Montana smiled at me.  “Those are the happiest kids I’ve ever seen,” he remarked.

Well, they certainly weren’t the cleanest, or the most polite, and they probably weren’t the smartest or most coordinated either.  But after all my jitters, I realized I could never have asked for a better compliment.  Someday, I can remind the kids of this trip.  “Do you remember?”  I’ll say.  I hope they at least humor me by pretending that they do.