notes and images
Let’s face it, camping rules. Once you get away from the city and everything that comes with it – work, devices, lattes – and sink into the nature around you, the rhythm of early starts and early nights, waking to the noise of birds and bugs, you’re always glad you’re there. It doesn’t matter if you’re bivvying solo on a high ridge in winter or with other people at a beach. The beauty is getting out there and leaving everything behind.
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“When I first met you, you were expecting your kid”, he laughed, this guy I know who came hiking last weekend with me, my wife, our two year old and some friends. “I remember you telling me you hoped to continue hiking as much as you could, and I went home thinking, ‘nup, won’t happen'”.
“But here you are, hiking with your kid”!
Here I am. But the truth is, when we were expecting our child, I did have darker moments where I imagined all that really was over. That my hiking-most-weekends lifestyle was over; that I wouldn’t get to go wild camping again for a long time. Determined not to let this happen, I started hunting around for gear that could help me take a small child into the hills. Somewhere on youtube – and I can’t find it anymore – was a Dad who took his one year old into the mountains using the baby carrier I ended up buying. He really inspired me. It’s fair to say, he changed my entire attitude to impending and subsequent actual fatherhood. From the moment I saw that clip, I wanted to do the same: solo camping with my little kid (my own youtube clip is at the very end of this post).
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Our preparation for the nearly 4,000 meter Wheeler Peak in Nevada was not nearly as detailed as many people, including us, do for Borneo’s Mt Kinabalu. This was mostly because Mt Kinabalu is a high volume tourist machine, and Wheeler is happily remote and undeveloped, so you’re not forced to stay at a hostel overnight and make your summit push at 2am. You just wake up and climb it. This probably explains why I was so puffed on the last push to Wheeler’s summit. That, and the 15 kg child on my shoulders.
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I didn’t get a minute of sleep, not one. Even with the bare minimum of stuff I still had a huge load to carry – including a three year old and all our water – and there wasn’t room for a sleeping mat. So it was a long, hard night on the bare ground underneath a tarp flapping in very strong winds.
Once the kid was down, I lay there listening to the cacophony, counting down the moments until it rained, and waiting for dawn to break. She slept like a log under the faintly ridiculous shelter I built from a tarp, two tent pegs and her baby carrier. Not bad for her first ever bivvy.
Click through for a video and stills of our first Daddy-Daughter Bivvy.
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Sadness pervades the whole story of Skarð. A hundred years ago, 1913 to be precise, it was a hard-scrabble fishing village like so many on the Faroes. No roads linked it to larger settlements, just a dangerous walk over the rocky mountain ridge to Kunoy on the other side, or a path down the fjord to Haraldssund several miles south. The land scarcely supports the grass the sheep graze on, so fishing was the villagers’ main source of food and income. Just 23 souls lived here, and only seven were fishermen.
Two days before Christmas that year, the seven set out in their boats as usual. In those days of course, fishing boats were sailed or rowed. There was no radio, radar, GPS or EPIRB. Just a man, his wits, and his raw strength stacked against what Shackleton called “the ocean that is open to all and merciful to none, that threatens even when it seems to yield, and that is pitiless always to weakness”.
They never returned. Lost with all hands.
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Summit fever is usually a dangerous phenomenon that kills climbers. High on the flank of some improbable peak, overcome by the desire to reach the top after all that effort, time, and money, the climber ignores the safety rules, continues well past the turnaround time, and ends up dying because there’s not enough time, energy, or both, to get back down. It seems to happen on Mt Everest a lot.
That fine sunny day near the top of Mt Asahi on Hokkaido I had summit fever too. The difference? About 6,500 vertical meters. Mt Asahi is a modest peak, and although in late Autumn it was already covered by a surprise coat of snow, it’s a simple walk to the top. A wind was picking up, blowing hard above the last shoulder of the mountain. I didn’t want our daughter, sleeping soundly in my backpack, to be woken by that blast. Yon suggested that she and our two friends could wait at the shoulder if I thought I could be back quickly.
Summit Fever!
Rain. Of course it’s raining. Because it’s the last day of what could be our last trip to Hokkaido for a long while. So, of course, it’s raining. I get up anyway, still dark at 5am, quietly so I don’t disturb my wife and kid (who’s bunking with us this holiday). Just alert enough to drive, I head out of the village fully expecting to be back in bed in 20 minutes. But suddenly, around the corner, I see Yotei. It’s a giant triangle looming over everything. Dark, dominating, and really big.
And its summit is clear. Not a low-level cloud in sight. I speed up, just a little. Alone, early, clear summit. Rain or no, it’s time, at last.
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One hundred kilometers in ten days through Arctic Sweden, with full camping gear and a three year old. Sounds like a good plan right? Hmmm, maybe not so much. Sometimes – just sometimes – the determination not to be those people who gave up everything they loved after having a child in favour of the Eternal Lightness of Brunch can go just a little bit too far. In this case, 42 kilometers of painful load carrying too far.
But seen another way, we pulled off a five day, 42 kilometer trek through Arctic Sweden with our three year old. She, and we, actually had a blast. Mission accomplished. Just.
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If you like hiking and you have a child, well, the good news is you can keep hiking. I did a lot of research online before our kid arrived about the best heavy duty child carrier. I wanted something that could conceivably support an overnight camping hike. The Osprey Poco gets a lot of love online, and deservedly so.
This thing transformed my life, because it showed me you can take your kid anywhere.
The first time I took my daughter hiking without her mother, she was just learning to walk (the kid, I mean!). Because this was a test run, I brought my sister along (now a new mum herself). But the challenge arose from the fact little W was still breast-feeding. My sister’s great, but (back then) she couldn’t help with that. Instead, I had a bottle of frozen milk and my PocketRocket…
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