“Daddy, I don’t want to go to Jimingyi”. Why not, I asked my two year old over my shoulder, while dodging trucks on the backroads of Hebei Province in June 2017. “Because it’s not good to go in there. It’s very dangerous”.
Tag: hiking with baby (Page 1 of 2)
I wanted to write that a glacier is like a living thing, because of the noise it makes, that jarring, creaking sound of ice grinding against ice. But living is the wrong word because any given glacier today is dying. This was only a small one, but once it was bigger, and there is no going back.
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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).
Continue reading“Dad”, she said on a recent camping trip. “Dad, I don’t want to tent, I want to bivvy. I want to bivvy in a castle”.
Once I got over my little rush of Adventure Dad pride, I thought back to the trip she was recalling. Our last camping – I mean bivvying – trip in China at our favourite spot, a tower called Kouzilou above the mighty pass at Shixiaguan. There, in September 2018, we had a wonderful bivvy in glorious weather, and apparently set a high bar for all future Daddy-Daughter camping trips. It was official: the kid likes to bivvy.
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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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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.
Continue readingThe fastest wind speed ever recorded at Tarfala was over 180 kilometers per hour. As I leaned into it, unable to move forwards, and barely able to stand, I thought it must not be too far short of that record. Strangely, there was no howl; there was nothing for the wind to hit except me, our daughter in my pack, and Yon about twenty paces behind. No howl, just a sudden horrendous flapping as the red sheet protecting my child flew loose at one corner.
“Are you scared, baby?”, I yelled. “No”, she said. “Well just a little bit”.
We were 26 kilometers into this hike; even for Arctic Sweden it was getting dark by now, nearly ten hours since we set off at noon. I was wet through, and, as Hicks and Hudson classically exchanged, either my motion detector GPS was reading wrong, or I was reading it wrong.
Where was the damn hut?
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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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