52 Hikes Challenge; Hike #1

Happy New Year everyone! I am not one to make new years resolutions. But a goal, we can do a goal. I recently heard about the 52 Hike Challenge. This challenge is exactly like it sounds, you complete 52 hikes over the course of a year. All you need to do is get out once a week. This is totally doable for us! 

On New Years Day, the girls and I invited some new friends for a hike at the local Vassar Farms and Ecological Preserve. I looked at the trail maps and found some geocaches for us to find while out. We have never been to this location yet so I didn't really know what we were getting into. 

What a beautiful treat so close to home. The preserve has wide open fields that give you a glimpse of some peaks in the Hudson Valley. The weather was perfect and the first half of the hike was dreamy. All three girls were happy and finding geocaches easily. 

Our first find of the day and our friend's first find ever!

Look mom!

The girls were so excited to see what was in this geocache. Thankfully I stuffed my pockets full of random trinkets before we left. Each girl got two goods from the various caches today!

When we entered a shady area, the cold set in and some little toes began to freeze. The girls learned a valuable lesson from this first hike of 52. Don't stomp around in puddles at the beginning of any hike. But, overall it was a fun day. We are growing our tribe and introducing new friends to the love of geocaching. 

Rock collecting turned into an installation piece

A couple of tips that were highlighted today:
1. Let the kids move at their pace. Having a friend along with you to chat with helps pass the time nicely.
2. All them to create with their surrounds.
3. Always wear warmer socks then you think you will need
4. Bring a pen/pencil and a couple small toys if you are geocaching while hiking.

Here is to the best year yet and pushing ourselves to 52 hikes in 2017! Our mileage so far is 2.65 miles.

Get into Geocaching

While living in North Pole, Alaska, a friend introduced us to geocaching. We had no idea what it was, when they told us it was like treasure hunting in the woods, I had my doubts. One day we decided to try it and we were all hooked immediately. 

Geocaching is exactly like treasure hunting. We have the official geocaching app on our phones which works rather well. There are some down falls of the app such as the app does not work well in areas with minimal cell phone service which make locating the cache difficult and the app uses your battery quickly. If you are handy with a compass, you may have better luck using that. We like the app because we can look at the hints and pictures other geocachers have posted to help us in times of difficulty. Once we have found the cache, we post our own, usually super obnoxious picture. That's almost my favorite part.

Things to know before hand:

Look at the difficulty rating and size rating. When starting with children, go for the larger caches. These caches usually have small trinkets or toys your child can swap one of their own toys for. We have found some pretty cool toys in the larger caches. Before heading out plan to take a couple small toys your child doesn't play with anymore to replace in the caches. We found a stone carved moose from a cache we found in Whittier, Alaska almost two years ago. I will keep it forever.  We now carry a small latching tupperware box with us that holds items we have found and items we are willing to trade. We usually have a couple pens in the box in case the cache is missing one. Some caches are so tiny (like fits in your nostril tiny) that you will have to bring your own pen to fill out the log paper. 

Geocaching is wonderful for many reasons but our favorite reason is that when you are geocaching you are sometimes brought to a place you may not have known existed beforehand. While visiting Valdez, we tried to find every geocache hidden. This happened often when we went on vacation. There is not a lot of activities for small children. We followed the trail which brought us to this amazing view. Our youngest found the cache that day, she still talks about it.

Here she is finding this geocache. I didn't want to stick my fingers up into the opening. Little miss was braver than me!

We found this geocache while in visiting Homer, Alaska

Hey mom, look what we found!

This is not as small as the nostril sized geocaches. 

Sometimes we had to get creative to reach the geocaches.

Lastly, if I haven't convinced you about how fabulous geocaching is, here is short video about geocaching. Comment below with any questions or tips I forgot!

Slow Poke Awards

This is what hiking used to look like for us...

"hiking" to Byron Glacier (Check out our instagram page)

This was when we "hiked" to Byron Glacier on our way to Whittier, Alaska. The hike was 1.6 miles around trip. We were on our way to the glacier at this point, so maybe 0.6 miles into the trip. The hike was along a gravel, flat trail frequented by tourists from out of state. 

And this...

Lord help us, we were only geocaching. No hiking was happening this day, only short hikes around the woods. At least she makes life super interesting.

And then there is this...

I honestly, do not even remember where we were but I remember we were geocaching. We would use any excuse to get the girls outside walking around. Our thought was to build their stamina. Now a days, geocaching is one of their favorite outdoor activities. 

Just remember, we all have to start somewhere. Most likely, your child will not be a natural born hiker from the moment they get on the trail and that's ok. Over time, your child will grow to enjoy the time spent as a family in the woods.

Why Get the Girls Outdoors?

The idea to start this blog came to me Mother's Day 2016 while hiking Storm King and Butter Hill in the Hudson Valley of New York. The weather when we began was crummy, it was drizzling and cloudy. We started the hike anyway because it was the only thing I wanted for Mother's Day.

We have taken our daughters hiking many times throughout their lives and while its not always enjoyable, it makes us happy to get them outside. After our adventures I normally post pictures, I often hear from other parents of girls, "My kids could never do that" or "How do you get them to hike?" My answer is always, you have to start small. My husband has taken many videos of what he likes to call the "Slow Poke Award" from when we first began "hiking" (walking) with the girls. This went on for about 6 months before we were able to take the girls on longer hikes.We kept going, we never gave up or in to their complaining. Even now there are hikes that are simply miserable... like that time a close friend took us on a 3-4 hour hike that was "maybe 6 miles". Well, 8 hours and 12 miles later we finished. We survived, mostly because we had two other adults helping to encourage the girls along. That day we hiked up and down 4 mountains and ended with delicious tacos. We learned that DAMN our kids can hike 12 miles in one shot, though we probably will not do that again soon.

There are other hikes, like our Storm King hike, were the stars seemed to align, the clouds cleared, we find a couple geocaches along the way and its borderline perfect. Moral of the story, DON'T GIVE UP OR IN TO THEIR COMPLAINING. There will come a point in the near future that the complaining stops and the fun begins.

My goal for this blog is to encourage other parents to take their children, especially their daughters into the great outdoors and explore. I hope to take my girls up all 46 Adirondack High Peaks and I plan to chronicle our adventures here.

Thank you for your love and support of this adventure!
With Love,
The Big Girl in the Great Outdoors