Mother’s Day Hiking
This is another post that never got published, that I’m just finding 14 months later.
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I had a hot latte waiting for me when I woke up on Mother’s Day this year. Nathan had gotten up with Rosalind an hour earlier, and they walked out to the little coffee stand together. It was a lovely start to the day, but it got much better.
We drove out to Wallace Falls, a hike about 1.5 hours from our house on Route 2. We found the hike in our current favorite book, Best Hikes With Kids: Western Washington. We both thought it sounded familiar, but we didn’t recognize anything when we arrived. Contrary to our expectation (and hope), Rosalind fell asleep in the car on the way over, sleeping the last half hour. There went her nap for the day and, we thought, any hope of making a lot of progress on foot. We didn’t think she’d accept being in the backpack for too long if she wasn’t asleep.
But Rosalind blew away all our expections on this hike. Not only did we complete the entire route, 5 1/2 miles and 1200 feet of elevation, but she must have walked at least a mile and a half of it or more. She made tracks! And she enjoyed nearly every second. What a great hike this is for kids. We were never far from water, or from the rocks necessary for throwing into it. The trail itself was a little rough for a toddler, and there were certainly places where I guarded Rosalind when she walked to keep her from tumbling down a steep bank. But there was so much to keep her interest. She was astonished to see the grand middle falls. At first all she could say was “Uh-oh! Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” When she gathered her senses to explain: “Waters fall down!” (Very true, of a waterfall.) “Waters fall down! Splash! Waters hurt? Waters tying! (crying)” We reassured her that the waters were “O-tay!” and she repeated that to herself a number of times, to ease her mind.
When we finally got to the top, after several wonderful hours, Nathan and I got a surprise. There was a sign up there regarding some missing hikers from some years back. And with that sign, it clicked–we *had* done the hike before. But although today I was in a state of happy awe at its loveliness, the *only* thing I remembered from the previous time was mocking the old newspaper article. (In my defense, it is hard to imagine how those women were so helpless.) I’m quite sure that the last time we were on the trail we did the whole thing in a couple hours, probably thinking black thoughts at the slow families crowding the trail, and at the end I probably just wished we’d driven further out to something a little more off the beaten track. What a difference, now that I’m sharing Rosalind’s perspective, and her joy.
Enthralled by the waterfall