In 1996, when I was 22, my boyfriend, Curry, and I set off on the 471-mile Colorado Trail. Over nine grueling, awe-inspiring, and life-changing weeks, we hiked most of the way from Denver to Durango, only to be snowed out 60 miles before the finish by an October blizzard. Three years later, we returned to hike the final segment on our honeymoon.

In 2016, exactly twenty years after we started that first CT hike, we hiked it again, this time with our three sons: Milo, age 15, and the twins, Zephyr and Emmet, age 11. It was the kids' first thru hike and only their second backpacking trip. Hiking the trail, now 485 miles long, was a daunting proposition for them, but I knew they were up to it, and in six grueling, awe-inspiring, and life-changing weeks, we made it from Denver to Durango.

Many people have hiked long trails with kids, as documented in books and blogs, including Cindy Ross's Scraping Heaven, which chronicles her multi-year CDT hike with two kids and a herd of llamas. But these types of families are the exception and kids are still a rare sight on trails. During our time on the CT, all of the thru-hikers we met were adults, solo or in pairs or small groups, the vast majority of them young men. We met a only a couple of day-hiking and overnighting families, a few parents who had escaped their kids for a weekend adventure, and some empty nesters who were thru or section-hiking the trail now that their kids were grown.

It's understandable that more families with young kids don't get out on long trails; every challenge a solo hiker faces in preparing for such a trip is compounded exponentially. But the rewards of a summer spent hiking and camping with your kids make every hassle worth it. Here are a few of the biggest obstacles to thru-hiking as a family and some of the ways we overcame them.

Hiking the Colorado Trail: Finding Time

Finding the time for an extended trek is a challenge for any hiker, but kids these days are even busier than adults, with school, sports, clubs, lessons, and friends. Choosing a shorter long trail, like the CT, allowed us enough time to complete the trail during summer vacation, including driving from Maine to Colorado and back and some adjustment time at both ends. More shorter long trails are popping up around the country, creating more options for school vacation-length hikes.

For parents, the challenge is finding a way to take time off of work and still be able to pay the bills and provide a stable home life for the kids when you get off the trail. Some families have managed this by only one parent hiking with the kid(s) while the other one stays home and works, as chronicled in Paul Molyneux's book, A Child’s Walk in the Wilderness.

But both Curry and I wanted to share this adventure with the kids, and we needed two adults to distribute the physical and emotional load. Others have careers that allow for extended leaves of absence. Still others quit, tighten their belts, and hope for the best. I was ready to leave my job anyway, so I took that option and Curry left his business in the hands of his employees while we were gone. A shorter trail and/or one closer to home, such as Vermont's Long Trail, would have made for a less drastic, life-altering choice, but a 20-year reunion with the CT was integral to our decision to spend the summer hiking and so we courted financial disaster to make it happen.

Colorado Trail Expense

Backpacking is a lot less expensive way to travel than most. Once you get to the trail, there is no cost for hotels, meals out, transportation, or souvenirs, unless you choose such luxuries on occasional town visits. But there is a huge outlay up front for equipment and food. We managed the expense of gear for five by spreading out our purchases over three years, looking for clearance and sale items, and shopping outlet stores and discount retailers. I also made some gear, including sleeping quilts, stuff sacks, rain covers, and beanies.

To minimize food costs and maximize nutrition, I bought most of our food through a natural foods buying club, spreading out the purchases over several months. I also bought bulk foods from the local health food and grocery stores. To save money on shipping our resupply boxes, we brought them with us to Colorado to have them mailed from closer to our pickups.

Weight Carried

Back in 1996, our packs were so heavy – Cordura with internal frames and countless buckles, zippers, and straps, filled with all manner of extraneous items. This time around, Curry and I planned on carrying most of the gear and food, while each kid would carry his sleeping bag, sleeping pad, clothes, ditties, snacks, and water. I wasn't sure how much weight the boys would be able to handle and I was not about to carry a pack that heavy again, so we needed to lighten up as much as possible.

I took as much advantage as I could, within our budget, of the advances in lightweight backpacking that took place since our last CT hike. I saved money by buying from small-scale lightweight gear manufacturers whose products are often less expensive than the big names. Our tent came from GoLite (which unfortunately went out of business right after we bought it) and our packs from Gossamer Gear and Equinox Ltd. The boys had Therm-a-Rest foam sleeping mats, bought at a discount as "seconds." As matriarch of the family, I allowed myself to splurge on an inflatable Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite (also bought at a discount). Our sleep quilts I made from kits sold by lightweight backpacking guru Ray Jardine.

Our biggest weight-saving concession was to leave stove, gas, and pot behind and eat cold, reconstituted food for our morning and evening meals. Our plastic containers and bamboo spoons weighed a fraction of what our cook set weighs, we didn't have to try to find fuel in town, and we saved time each day by not having to tend a stove. But there's nothing more disheartening than eating cold, rubbery rice noodles in a cold, wet tent, and it's probably not a choice we'd make again.

Before food and water, our packs weighed 18 pounds (Curry), 15 pounds (Andrea), and 9 pounds (each of the boys). Once I added a week's worth of breakfasts, half the lunch food, and a couple liters of water, my pack weight doubled to 30 pounds. Over time, as the boys proved themselves to be strong, swift hikers and I a plodding slowpoke, more and more of the food made its way from my pack into theirs.

Miles a Day

We weren't sure how far the kids could hike in a day, but we knew we had to average more than 12 miles per day to complete our hike in the six-week window we had. The kids surprised us, hiking more than 12 miles on our second day and three 16-milers in a row during the second week. Our longest day was a little more than 19 miles. To get the miles in, we started fairly early in the morning (we aimed for seven, but sometimes didn't get moving until eight). On a good day, we'd be in camp by four or five and tucked into bed before the sun went down, but some days found us slogging until seven or eight at night. We took two days off trail (one zero and one day spent attempting to climb of Mt. Elbert) and for most of our resupplies, we hiked part or most of a day, then went to town or met family at a campground where we did all our resupply business before hitting the trail later that same day or the next morning.

We started our hike with a "stay within sight of an adult" rule, but soon found that everyone's hiking style varied so much we spread out over several miles of trail, with Milo taking the lead and me bringing up the rear, sweeping up anyone who fell behind. Curry would either cruise ahead with Milo or staying in camp to dry out the tent. The twins would fall somewhere in between, depending on their energy level or mood for the day.

Entertainment on the Trail

We seem to take it for granted that our children need to be entertained. But it's amazing how, when you take the electronics, events, and activities away, they figure out how to entertain themselves. Milo listened to music on his iPod and Zephyr took pictures with his, but otherwise they were electronics-free. The kids instead turned to their imaginations. Milo composed songs, Emmet read books and wrote the first chapter of his own, Zephyr designed his dream home in Norway. Each morning they would set out together, telling stories and inventing worlds. I would catch only snippets – “El Loco,” “Tom Lighthouse’s World,” “Camper Bob and Camper Joe” – before they disappeared around a bend in the trail, out of earshot. Even after helping with camp chores, they had plenty of time to goof around in the tent or spread out their sleeping mats in the sun to wrestle, play poker with a tiny deck of cards, or invent games like Harry Potter Trivia or naming a fish for every letter of the alphabet (I=“interesting purple jellyfish”). The soft football and folding nylon Frisbee we brought along never came out of the packs.

Out in the backcountry, with no stuff or territory to defend, they got along better than they ever do at home, while each boy's unique strengths shined. Milo gobbled up the miles, flying down the trail ahead of all of us, his good cheer counterbalancing the rest of our more volatile moods. Emmet showed an infinite capacity for discomfort, wearing his clothes inside-out and backward, keeping his pack diagonal across his back (the better to tilt his head up), and stuffing granola bar wrappers inside rain pants worn on a hot day. He bought mini Twix bars and Jolly Ranchers to hand out to other hikers and was the only one of us to climb Cony Summit, a 13,334-foot mountain whose peak the trail skirted past. Zephyr’s sharp eyes spied hawks on the wing, bighorn sheep on top of distant ridges, and, once, a weasel catching and killing a pika. He encouraged me up switchbacks to saddles with cries of, “Nearly there!”

The Colorado Trail as a Family: In Conclusion

It takes 18 long years to raise a kid, which is way too long to stay off the trail. And though parenting, like a long, grueling climb, sometimes feels like it will go on forever, what everyone says is true: it goes by so fast. Hiking a long trail, with nowhere to go but the next campsite and nothing to do but walk, slows that pace down to two miles per hour. Out in the woods, you get a chance to really pay attention to your kids, and they to you, a rare gift in an ever-distracting world. So why not get out the maps, round up the family, and start planning a long hike?

Maps and Books

National Geographic offer a Trails Illustrated set of maps that cover the Colorado Trail. For reading and guides, see the Colorado Trail Guide as well as the Colorado Trail Data Book.

Editor's Note: This article by contributor Andrea Lani originally appeared in Issue 35 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here for additional photos and content.