Member-only story
Hiking Quandary With Kids
Tips to make your time on the mountain more fun!
If you’re taking a family vacation with, say, six or so kids, you’re probably looking for fun and inexpensive things to do. And if you just so happen to be visiting Colorado, you’ll probably find “hiking” topping your list of (mostly) free, fun, and relatively painless excursions you can take as a family.
My husband and I took a quick trip to Colorado last fall, and while we were there we hiked Quandary Peak, one of Colorado’s easier 14ers (mountain peaks that exceed 14,000 feet). When I say “easier” what I mean is that it probably didn’t suck as bad as it COULD have; however, it was still hard!
We wanted our kids to experience it, but asking them to hike the full 6.6 miles felt like a bit much, especially when we were coming from a city with an elevation of around just 1,000 feet. We’re not acclimated to the altitude and, even if we had been, our kids aren’t used to scaling mountains or hiking for 6 miles at a time!
So we compromised: we decided to hike just to the tree line and back. It ended up being a little over 3.5 miles. Long enough to be a challenge, high enough to see some really cool stuff, and yet short enough that we didn’t all hate our lives by the end of it.
