Tips, Tricks, and Sanity Saving Advice to Make Hiking with Your Kids Doable and Enjoyable

Figuring out how to hike with kids was a big learning curve for me. As a child I loved outdoor exploration, but my parents weren’t into hiking so my adventuring was generally done alone within the vicinity of home or wherever we were traveling. 

As a young mom, it hadn’t occurred to me that hiking would be a good family activity. I loved the outdoors and missed things like outdoor exploration, climbing trees and finding hidden treasures. But the only things I saw other moms doing were short trips to the zoo, local playgrounds, or maybe a walk at the bay. No one was tromping through the woods. No one was finding caves, or hidden treasures. No one was looking for new places to play with creeks, frogs, and mud. Everyone seemed to be gravitating toward man-made fun where kids were told to wear shoes, never go up the slide, and douse themselves in hand sanitizer before snacking on their organic puffs.