Trail Reports

Glacier Gorge from Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo: Daniel Mayer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Bear Lake trailhead sits at 9,475 feet, ringed by lodgepole pine and about as unassuming a starting line as you'll find for anything with a bootcamp reputation in Rocky Mountain National Park. We caught the free shuttle from the park-and-ride because there is no version of parking a minivan at Bear Lake in August, dropped in with two kids, one dog, and a truly heroic quantity of string cheese, and started up toward Glacier Gorge before the sun cleared the ridgeline.

The first two miles to Alberta Falls barely count as a warm-up — wide, well-graded, crowded with day hikers in flip-flops who clearly had not read the elevation profile. Past the falls the trail splits toward Glacier Gorge proper, and that's where the crowd thinned out and the actual climb started. By the time we hit Mills Lake, with Longs Peak and the jagged wall of the Keyboard of the Continent laid out across the water, the eight-year-old had stopped complaining about her pack and started narrating the scenery like a nature documentary. That's usually the tell that a trip is going to be a good one.

We camped that night at a backcountry site tucked below the gorge walls — permit booked months in advance through the park's wilderness office, because Rocky Mountain National Park does not hand these out casually, and for good reason. Dinner was instant noodles doctored with too much hot sauce, eaten while the light went orange on the granite above us, and by 8pm every single one of us was asleep before it got properly dark.

Day two was the push toward the higher basin and back down — call it 21 miles round trip by the time we'd wandered off-trail twice chasing a marmot and once chasing a better photo. The trail mix that failed: anything with dried mango, which apparently reads as "candy" until the first bite and then gets abandoned in a pocket for the rest of the trip. The trail mix that worked: plain M&Ms and pretzels, no exceptions, no negotiation.

We were back at the trailhead by mid-afternoon, sunburnt, out of snacks, and already talking about where to go next. That's the actual sign a family trip worked — not that everyone had fun the whole time, but that everyone wants to do it again anyway. Three more trips are already on the calendar for this season.

Vineyards near the old mill at Malfourat, Monbazillac, Dordogne. Photo: Père Igor, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The farmhouse was a twenty-minute drive from Bergerac, down a single-lane road lined with sunflowers gone brown and dry with the season, and the first thing our host told us — after showing us to a room with a genuinely medieval-looking door — was that the grapes for Monbazillac wine get picked later than almost anything else in the region, sometimes into October, because the whole point is waiting for a fungus to eat holes in them.

That fungus is noble rot, and it's the reason Monbazillac makes a rich, honeyed sweet wine instead of an ordinary table white, and it's also the reason we spent twelve hours over two days picking through rows of vines on a hillside above the Dordogne river, sorting shriveled, ugly, thoroughly disgusting-looking grape clusters into buckets because those were, somehow, the good ones. The kids thought this was the best joke they'd ever heard: get paid in farmhouse breakfast to pick grapes that look like they've already gone bad.

Nobody warned us that grape picking is stoop labor, full stop — no romantic wandering through vineyards with a wicker basket, just hours bent at the waist with secateurs, sticky hands, and a growing appreciation for anyone who does this for a living instead of a week. By the second afternoon our nine-year-old had gone from "this is fun" to "my back hurts" to, somehow, back to "this is fun" once we let her run the sorting table instead.

We ate dinner outside every night — bread, unlabeled wine our host swore was "not for selling, just for us," and a tomato salad that put every tomato we've bought at a grocery store to shame. On the last evening we walked up to the old mill at Malfourat, above the vines, and watched the light go copper over the whole valley, château rooflines poking up out of the trees toward Bergerac.

It was not a relaxing vacation, and the kids will tell anyone who asks that vineyard work-cations are a scam invented by adults who like wine more than they like children. We're going back next year anyway.

Wailaki Campground, King Range National Conservation Area, California. Photo: Rachel Sowards / Bureau of Land Management California, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Packing two kids, three dogs (yes, really), and a dream into one SUV seemed crazy until we actually did it — four days into the King Range National Conservation Area on California's Lost Coast, a stretch of shoreline so remote that the highway builders gave up on it entirely and just left eighty miles of coastline without a road.

We based out of Wailaki Campground on Chemise Mountain Road, in the southern end of the range, mostly because it's one of the few sites back there you can actually reach in a regular car instead of something with real ground clearance. From camp it's a few miles of switchbacks down through second-growth forest to Chemise Mountain and the black sand beaches below, which is exactly as far as an eight- and a ten-year-old can go carrying their own packs before the complaining starts sounding sincere instead of theatrical.

What survived the first four days: string cheese (always), one dog who refused to walk uphill on principle and had to be carried twice, and a truly stupid amount of trail humor about elk poop, which the King Range has an abundance of thanks to a healthy Roosevelt elk population nobody warned us about.

What didn't survive: the tent, briefly, at 11pm on night two, when a gust off the ocean collapsed one pole and dumped the rainfly on all four of us mid-sleep. There is no better lesson in patience and humor than restaking a tent by headlamp while your kids narrate the disaster like sports commentators. We were laughing by the time it was fixed, which felt like the actual milestone of the trip — not the miles, the laughing.

No cell signal for four days straight, which nobody missed once we stopped reaching for our pockets out of habit. Already planning the version of this trip where we push further north along the coast next time.

Abbey Island at Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington. Photo: Ron Clausen, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

We spent a week driving the Washington and Oregon coast testing every beach we could reach by 10am nap time, and Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park was the one that made the whole trip worth it — a short, easy quarter-mile walk down from the parking lot to a shoreline stacked with driftwood the size of furniture and sea stacks rising straight out of the water offshore.

Abbey Island sits just off the beach, a chunk of forested rock that turns the whole scene into something that looks more like a movie set than an actual place you can just drive to. The kids spent an hour building a fort out of driftwood logs bigger than they were while we sat on a downed tree trunk and watched the tide pull back to reveal tide pools full of anemones and hermit crabs — no wetsuits, no swimming, just cold water, sand, and enough driftwood to build a small village.

That's the pattern we found up and down the coast: the beaches that actually work with young kids are not the wide, warm, swim-friendly ones — this water stays cold enough to make swimming a bad idea most of the year — they're the ones with something to do that isn't swimming. Tide pools, driftwood forts, agate hunting, a fire pit at the end of the day.

We found five that fit the bill along the Washington and Oregon coast: calm-enough water, easy parking, food within a short drive, and enough sand to bury the world entirely. One of them — we're keeping the exact spot to ourselves for now — has a fire pit right on the sand where we made s'mores every single night without fail.

Bring layers no matter the month, bring shoes that can get wet, and don't bother packing swimsuits unless your kids run warmer than ours do. We'll take driftwood forts over a swim day any time.