AMC's Great Kids, Great Outdoors

"Free-Range Kids" Part 2: When Kids Don’t Roam

2012-02-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

In the nearly three years that I’ve written the “Great Kids, Great Outdoors” blog, I’ve read many studies relevant to children and families in the outdoors. Some have changed the way I think. A smaller number have changed the way I parent.

One in that latter category wasn’t even a report. It was a map showing four circles around areas in which children freely roamed on their own at age 8, one for each of four generations in one British family. The widest circle, belonging to the generation born in the early decades of the 20th century, was roughly 12 miles in diameter. The smallest belonged to the generation born at the turn of the 21st century: a mere 600 yards in diameter.

That map got under my skin, partly because it could have been the map of my own family. My grandfather, born a century ago, roamed many miles from his home as a child, nearly always on foot. My father, living in a Midwestern city, roamed just as far as a young boy using public transportation and walked up to 4 miles in any direction as part of his daily routines. At age 8, I lived in a newly constructed apartment complex in a different Midwestern city. The school bus I took every day traveled just-built thoroughfares four lanes wide. The school itself had also just sprouted up out of former farmland. My roaming was bounded by the new mall at the entrance to the apartment complex and the buildings where my friends lived. A few years later when we moved to a smaller town, I walked to school and to the park, about a mile each way.

And what about my own children? When I first saw that map, Ursula was 10 and Virgil was 6. How far did they roam in their everyday lives?

The short answer is only about as far as Edward Grant, the 8-year-old in the Natural England study who roamed just 300 yards from his front steps. We had our reasons for having Ursula and Virgil on a similarly short leash: no near neighbors to visit; a 40-minute drive to school; activities in towns 15 to 60 miles away. During the school week, we often didn’t return home until after dark. It shocked me to realize it, but without planning to, we’d made our children captives of the car.

Since then, we’ve established giving Ursula and Virgil more “room to roam” as one of our family goals. I’ve discovered that it’s easier to give them that space and freedom in town. The nearby college town where we do most of our errands and where the kids study in the library after school has become a good place to roam, even though we don’t live there. It’s taken work, both psychologically and in terms of our schedules. I need to remind myself that it’ll be good for the kids to pick up something we need at the store, or to buy a gift for a birthday party, on their own, without me. And I need to give them time to complete “walking” errands.

We’ve taken our goals on the road, too. We travel regularly to see family members and friends and have enlisted them in our efforts to give Ursula and Virgil roaming room. At Grandpa’s house, they take the dog on walks around the neighborhood. When we visit other friends, Ursula and Virgil join their kids on forays to parks, neighborhood stores, and schools. Just last month in one of those cities Ursula, now 13, made her first solo trip using public transportation.

It’s hard to put a name to what children get when they’re able to roam their communities. Eric Stones, longtime trip leader for AMC’s Connecticut Chapter, considers that it might be “maturity.”

Like me, Eric sees his own family story in the map from the British study — even more so since he grew up in England. “I was a big roamer as a kid,” he told me the other day. At age 7 he took public transportation to school; at age 10, when he got a bicycle, he regularly rode 10 to 15 miles along a fairly busy road to go to train yards (he had a special passion for trains), watch cricket matches, or meet up with friends.

“Now I have a 9-year-old,” he said, “and I wouldn’t dream of having him do that.” What changed from Eric’s childhood to his son Roderick’s? Eric grew up in a small town with few cars; his son is growing up in suburban Connecticut. “I think suburbs are part of the problem,” Eric said. “There are no sidewalks here. I don’t feel comfortable with him walking along the road. The cars just whiz by.”

Eric’s sense that cars are faster now is borne out by numerous studies showing that most children today contend with more vehicle traffic and higher vehicle speeds in their neighborhoods than their parents did. “I’m not sure people have the same approach to time now,” Eric said. “People’s lives are so rushed and pressured. So instead of driving 25 miles an hour, they drive 45 or 50.” Like many other parents, Eric responds by keeping his son off the streets.

Like Ursula and Virgil, Roderick’s activities are spread out over a broader geographic area. “When I went to piano lessons, I walked,” Eric said. “We drive Roderick to piano and to gymnastics. But we’re traveling suburban distances. He couldn’t walk to those lessons even if he wanted to.”

There are other changes. “I roamed because I didn’t have a TV.” Eric said. “We lived in a small house.” All his friends were outside, too. Together they played soccer in the streets, roller skated on the sidewalks, and rode bikes into town. As for Roderick? “I think computers and the Internet coming into homes made an even bigger difference than TV,” Eric said. Roderick has his own TV, Nintendo DS, and iPad. “He loves to spend time on those.”

Considering the benefits of roaming as a child, Eric thinks that he and his friends gained a lot of confidence and acquired a certain amount of savvy, too, about safety and limits and how to maneuver in the world. Even as a young boy, Eric was able to pursue interests in trains and photography that were not laid out for him by his parents. The time he spent outside led him to hiking and climbing. Eric considered his son’s experiences at a comparable age and said, “I don’t think he’s as mature as I was at his age because of the different experiences.” I would say the same of my own children.

What if we want our children to develop that maturity? We can work to make our neighborhoods and towns “room to roam” communities. In my next post, I’ll describe the steps some communities have taken to make childhood roaming easier and safer.

Learn more
- Read the first post in this series: “Room to Roam: Encouraging ‘Free-Range’ Children.”
- Read another post about Eric Stones and his family: “Out there on the trail, we’re together” (June 2009)

Photo of children walking from Transportation for America (courtesy April Bertelson).

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Kristen wrote this post.

Room to Roam: Encouraging “Free-Range” Children

2012-02-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

If you want a sure-fire indicator of the divide between generations, ask people how far from home they could walk at age 8 without an accompanying parent.

The British organization Natural England gave a striking example of that generational divide in a 2007 report by researcher William Bird. In 1926, George Thomas was 8 years old and walked everywhere, including 6 miles each way from home to a fishing hole. His son-in-law, Jack Halliday, 8 years old in 1950, walked to and from school and about a mile each way to play in the local woods. In 1979, Jack’s 8-year-old daughter, Vicky, also walked each day to school and in warm weather walked on her own as far as the swimming pool, about half a mile from home. Vicky’s son, Edward Grant, 8 years old in 2007, roamed no more than 300 yards from his front steps. He was driven to and from school, driven to safe places to ride his bicycle, and seldom took part in an activity without adult supervision. Edward would like to have played on the street by his house, his mother said in the report, but “he doesn’t go out because other children don’t.” Edward’s great-grandfather was then 88 years old and still, he said, “a keen walker.”

This severe contraction in children’s room to roam has occurred in the United States, as well. Reasons given for the shift are many and intertwined: low-density suburban development, the rise of car culture, fewer stay-at-home parents, increased homework, fears about children’s safety. Not long after the Natural England report was published, an American mother let her 9-year-old son take the New York City subway home from Bloomingdale’s department store, alone. In a column for the New York Sun about her son’s foray into subway independence, Lenore Skenazy wrote that he’d been begging her to “leave him somewhere” and let him find his own way home. So she gave him “a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.”

To someone from an older generation, that Skenazy’s 9-year-old son took a 45-minute subway ride by himself probably wouldn’t seem unusual or surprising. But when national TV and radio shows picked up the story, the response of many parents was that Skenazy was guilty of neglect or child abuse. One talk show identified her as “America’s worst mom.” Yet as Skenazy pointed out in her column and in other articles since then, New York City is safer now than 40 or 50 years ago, as are most U.S. cities. The media’s constant stream of bad-news stories, in her view, has skewed the perspective of America’s parents, schools, and communities. The risk, she argues, of protecting children from childhood — of putting knee pads on toddlers, of prohibiting free play at recess, of refusing to let children talk to strangers or walk to a friend’s house unaccompanied — is that they won’t learn crucial skills for navigating the world as adults.

Skenazy has joined a chorus of researchers, educators, and community members calling for more room for children to roam — and added “free-range children” to their phrasebook. Her blog and book of the same name debunk fears and what she calls “worst-first” thinking, or “taking the worst possible outcome and acting as if that’s likely to happen.” The blog and the book highlight the benefits of letting children roam, such as increasing children’s creative problem-solving abilities and independent thinking, and offer statistics to ease parental anxiety about children’s safety.

I recently spoke with Skenazy, who offered the following advice for creating “free-range” children and communities:
- Turn off the TV. As TV viewers, we’re riveted by bad news; in fact, as human beings, we’re wired to pay attention to bad news, so we can avoid it for ourselves. Constant media coverage of rare occurrences, however, makes us think that the world is scarier than it actually is. The best way to counteract this tendency, Skenazy says, is simply to ignore the temptation to overreact. And the best way to do that may be turn off the television when — or before —such stories come on.
- Counter “worst-first” thinking with real-world numbers. If your child’s school bans children from snow play or throwing balls or playing tag at recess — all actual cases — ask the school to put numbers to the risk involved and challenge them to weigh that risk against the developmental benefits of play.
- Let children play together without you around. “Kids play differently on their own,” Skenazy says. She points to a recent study that found that children at a playground played less when their parents were present. “Without you there,” she says, “they get bored. Boredom is good. It’s so painful that they’re forced to do something to relieve the boredom. Now they’re problem-solving. Let’s say they decide to throw a ball around. They have to figure out the rules, negotiate, compromise, exercise creativity.”
- Give children opportunities to practice self-regulation. Learning how to control emotions and play with a group of peers is an important skill, and in Skenazy’s view best learned away from interfering adults. “If I’m your mom,” she says, “I’m going to let you take a fourth swing at a ball, because the sun was in your eyes. But if you’re playing with a group of kids, they’re going to tell you you’re out, go to the end of the line. When you go to the end of the line, that’s self-regulation,” she says. “Nature made play so much fun that kids stick with it,” even as they’re learning to deal with inevitable disappointments and defeats.
- Create communities that support free-range children. “One of the antidotes to fear is community,” says Skenazy. “You can tell the health of a community by how many children are outside.”
o Join together to create safe environments for free-ranging children. “I’m not against safety,” Skenazy says. “I’m all for seat belts and food regulations and bike helmets,” she says, but notes that numbers back up those safety measures. “Kids need sidewalks and stop signs,” people who obey the speed limit, and people they know in the community, she says.
o Encourage children to talk to strangers. Children need to know the adults in their community, and know that they can rely on them. Trick-or-treating at Halloween, selling Girl Scout cookies, collecting money for good causes, or simply greeting neighbors on the way to and from school are all ways that children can become acquainted with the adults in their community.
o Build trust. If you’re at the bus stop or the playground with a group of other parents, Skenazy suggests offering to watch all the other kids. “Our kids don’t each need individual bodyguards,” she says. “You’re saying, ‘We can help each other, and our kids can rely on any one of us.’ You’re saying, ‘I trust you, and you can trust me.’”

Learn more
Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog has a link to “How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations,” an article about the Natural England report.

Flickr photo taken in Castle Combe, England, March 2011.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Kristen wrote this post.

Outdoorsy Kids Have Better Eyesight

2012-02-04T11:00:00.001-05:00

Need another reason to get outside with your kids? It’s good for their eyes!

Children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to be near-sighted. This is a correlation, not proven cause-and-effect; my grandmother would tell you the real cause for better eyesight is that the outdoorsy kids spend less time reading books in dim light. Still, it seems like a good reason to put on the snow boots and head outside.

I learned this tidbit from the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, by neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang (Bloomsbury, 2011). Here’s how they summarize the research:

“One study compared six- and seven-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity living in Sydney, Australia, with those living in Singapore. The rate of myopia was more than eight times lower in Sydney (3.3 percent) than in Singapore (29.1 percent), despite similar rates of parental myopia (about 70 percent in at least one parent). Children in Sydney spent fourteen hours per week outside, on average, compared with three hours per week for children in Singapore.”

The authors also cite a U.S. study that found that “two hours per day of outdoor activity reduces the risk of myopia by about a factor of four compared with less than one hour per day.”

The incidence of near-sightedness has been on the rise over the last few decades in many countries, suggesting that something more than genetics alone is at work, Aamodt and Wang say. Although the reason for the positive association between time spent outdoors and good eyesight is unknown, they offer the hypothesis that bright outdoor light may provide better conditions than dim indoor light for the development of the correct distance between a child’s pupil and retina. Since earlier generations spent many hours outside every day, Aamodt and Wang say, our eyes may develop better if we spend more of our childhood outdoors.

Playing armchair neuroscientist, I wonder if spending time outside also helps because kids are focusing on objects at a range of distances, rather than staring for long periods at a book or computer screen at the same distance from their eyes. Aamodt and Wang don’t address that question, but I know where my grandmother would stand.

Learn more
- Check out Aamodt and Wang’s blog, Welcome to Your Brain.

Great Kids, Great Outdoors is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Heather wrote this post.

Children and the Revolution in Outdoor Clothing

2012-01-31T11:02:00.007-05:00

When I was a little kid, getting dressed for a winter’s day outdoors started with putting on a union suit. My father bought us full-body long underwear, complete with buttoned “trap doors,” from an Army-Navy surplus store. The suits were red, made of wool, and — at least on my skin — terribly scratchy. “If they’re good enough for the 10th Mountain Division,” my father said whenever I complained, “they’re good enough for you.”

If you’re of a certain age, the outdoor clothing you wore as a child may also have had a World War II lineage. Which may mean that you, too, were present at the revolution in outdoor clothing that took place in the latter decades of the 20th century. As we grew into young adults, new petroleum-based fabrics — stretchy, breathable, water-resistant, warm when wet — transformed the outdoor experience. From base layers to outerwear, from our feet to our heads and hands, we bought “technical” clothing that kept us warmer and drier, weighed less in our packs, and didn’t restrict our movement on the slopes or cliffs.

One of the companies in the “technical” clothing vanguard was Patagonia, whose founder, Yvon Chouinard, had revolutionized climbing gear in the 1960s. In 1980 the company introduced long underwear made from polypropylene, a synthetic fiber that had been used in marine ropes and disposable diapers. “Polypro” insulated without absorbing moisture. And though it acquired a fearsome stink after a season of hard use, it didn’t itch. In its company history, Patagonia calls itself “the first company to teach the concept of layering to the outdoor community,” and my consumer’s experience backs up their claim.

As revolutions often do, this one moved down to children. Again, Patagonia led the way, designing outdoor clothing out of its new fabrics for babies and children. “No union suits for this one!” I wrote to a climbing friend after her daughter was born in the early 1980s, attaching my note to a soft fleece bunting.

Three decades later, families reap the benefits of ongoing research in outdoor fabrics. The clothing we buy for our children to wear outdoors comes from a wide variety of manufacturers in many styles, sizes, and price points. We are the beneficiaries, as well, of a continuing search for what Patagonia calls “the cleanest line” — the most sustainable approach to the environment, including the gear and clothing that we purchase and use. Companies use recycled plastics in their synthetic fabrics, work with cotton growers to reduce and eliminate pesticides, and track the environmental impact of their products, from the manufacturing process to our front doors.

So I was intrigued when someone from Icebreaker, a company I hadn’t heard of before, contacted me a few months ago. The company, based in New Zealand, has manufactured outdoor clothing in merino wool since 1994. They offered to send me some samples and to talk to me about the development of their children’s clothing line. After speaking with Michelle Mitchell, the general manager of Icebreaker’s kids business unit, I have a sense that the revolution is continuing — but also circling back in interesting, even surprising, ways.

Like U.S. companies Ibex and SmartWool, which also started in the 1990s, Icebreaker is pursuing research in non-synthetic fabrics such as wool. “In New Zealand, everyone grew up wearing traditional itchy wool long underwear,” Mitchell told me — and moved away from it, just as I did, with deep relief. But recent advances in fiber technology mean that the merino wool used by these companies is not the same stuff that raised red welts on my skin. I was able to see the advances with my own eyes. Virgil, who also has sensitive skin, wore the shirt that Icebreaker sent him for several days in a row without complaint and without an itch. And the socks didn't stink after even days of wear. Now that’s progress.

High-performance clothing for children is also high-cost, however, and children can outgrow clothing in one season. Buying large works especially well for base layers, giving children several years of use before they outgrow an item. We’ve also been the grateful recipients of hand-me-down synthetic long underwear, fleece, and outerwear for our children since they were born, and we make a point of hitting local ski and gear swaps. The long underwear that Virgil is wearing this winter was worn by four kids before him, and it’s still good enough to pass along to a smaller child.

I wasn’t surprised to learn from Mitchell that Icebreaker created its children’s line after the people who worked there started having children. At first, employees sewed baby versions of the company’s merino wool tops and bottoms out of sample fabric and gave them as baby presents. Getting a “baby Icebreaker” became something of a company tradition.

Mitchell admits that Icebreaker’s kids’ line is a small part of the company’s overall business. But she believes that the benefits of high-quality outdoor clothing are even greater for children than for adults. “Good gear makes a huge difference if you’re taking kids outside on adventures,” she said. “Kids overheat so easily and get so miserable if they’re too hot or cold. You want them to stay warm even if they’re wet.” If children are comfortable, she believes, they’ll enjoy being outside — “and we’re passionate about getting kids outside.”

Getting children into the outdoors, keeping them safe, taking care of the environment. That's a revolution I can join.

Learn more
...about children's clothing and environmental initiatives at
- Patagonia
- Icebreaker
- Ibex (no separate children's line)
- SmartWool (check out "our values" in the "Discover" section of the website)

Photo: Virgil, dressed in hand-me-down synthetic long underwear, fleece-lined water resistant ski pants, a wool shirt, wool socks, and fleece mittens — and happy even when down.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Kristen wrote this post.

Fun on skis — on the flats, on the slopes, and even in slush

2012-01-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last winter, for a post here on teaching cross-country skiing, I interviewed a coach in our area Bill Koch League (BKL), an after-school and weekend Nordic program for more than 400 local kids. The program impressed me, and it seemed like fun. Virgil thought so, too, especially after hearing me describe the skills games the kids played. He didn’t know that “gorilla walking” — striding forward in a slight crouch and swinging arms “like a gorilla” — helped kids learn a classic cross-country ski technique or that playing ski-tag helped them become comfortable moving in many directions on skis. He just thought it was something he’d like to do, too.

We were too late for last year’s program, but throughout the winter I’d often see kids wearing the program’s hats or jackets out on the trails. This year we signed Virgil up early for the one-day program on Tuesdays. I volunteered to be a parent coach, too. We splurged on new skis and poles for Virgil, plus a hat with the program logo. Then we waited for the snow to come.

In late January, we’re still waiting for decent snow. I won’t lie: I’ve dreaded many a Tuesday since late November. What can you with a group of a dozen 8- and 9-year olds when there’s no snow? When it’s raining out? When the snow that we did have, briefly, is now mostly natural slushee?

This past Tuesday, after a warm front carrying heavy rain had blown through, I arrived at the practice with Virgil, our gear, and a healthy dose of skepticism. “There’s hardly any snow,” Virgil moaned. “This won’t be any fun.”

I didn’t think it would be any fun either, but I couldn’t tell him that. Instead, I told him to get dressed. I gave myself the same command, and we joined our little group, where a high school skier would be helping me coach that day.

As soon as I was out there, though, surrounded by the other kids, some of them looking as reluctant as Virgil, I stopped noticing the bare patches of ground and started focusing on what we were going to do. The remaining snow, saturated with water, offered easy gliding. Relatively warm temperatures meant that a sideways tumble into a slush puddle was all wet silliness and no risk of hypothermia. When we sent the kids down a short little hill and their skis sent out sprays of slush, we knew enough to send them down into the slush pool again, and again.

“I’m completely soaked!” Virgil crowed happily back in the car, as he pulled off each item of wet clothing and let it fall to the floor with a liquid thumph. “I’m not sure that was skiing,” he said. “But it sure was fun.”

He and I both learned (or re-learned) a classic lesson on Tuesday: You don’t need much to have fun outdoors, even in the winter, even in a sloppy, messy winter. You just have to open the door and get out.

Here are some more ideas and tips for fun on skis, whether they’re Nordic or downhill, in good snow years or bad.

At home
- Let kids wear their boots (Nordic or downhill) and play “space adventurer” even before you leave for the slopes, says Billie Munro Audia, a Safety Ambassador on the ski patrol at Vermont’s Okemo Mountain Resort who has also taught skiing to children in Colorado and elsewhere in New England. Becoming familiar with the equipment is the first step toward becoming comfortable with the sport.
- Celebrate snow, or pray for more, by doing a “snow dance” in your yard. Encourage kids to put on their skis for the celebration.

In the car
- Keep a bag of spare clothing in the car with hat, mittens, socks, extra mid-layers, and underwear (both the long and regular variety). It can come in handy when you arrive at a ski area and realize that you've left the mittens behind, or at the end of a day of skiing, when everything your child is wearing is soaked. You can also keep snacks and juice boxes or water in the bag, for quick pick-me-ups.

On the snow
- Children love humor, songs, silly word play. Put that fun to use teaching the basics of skiing. When Audia teaches downhill skiing to children, she encourages them to “walk like a penguin” (ski tips turned out, walk forward by bringing one ski tail forward at a time); make “French fries” (skis pointing forward and parallel, about shoulder width apart); and a make a “slice of pizza” (aim ski tips together and widen the distance between the ski tails). The vivid images stick with kids even better than pizza and French fries at lunch.

On the mountain or trail
- Falling happens. It helps kids to know that falling down is part of learning. “Blaming snow snakes for falls works wonders,” says Audia. “You know snow snakes, right? Those hard-to-see white snakes that pop up from the snow, grab your ski pants, and make you fall?” Keep the light touch by making a game out of getting up.
- Play games. Children learn by playing. To help kids practice transferring their weight on downhill turns, Audia plays Follow the Leader. We ended our practice on Tuesday by playing Capture the Flag. Ski poles stuck into the soggy ground served as our flags. Virgil and the others moved tentatively at first, but quickly forgot that they were on skis. I watched Virgil glide past the sentries (he was imagining himself a Viking warrior, he told me later), capture the other team’s pole and make a dash for safety. It was the most confidently he had skied all day. And he was smiling.

Photos courtesy of Ford Sayre Nordic Program and Mt. Snow Ski Resort.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Kristen wrote this post.

Sledding, Snow Forts, and Massage for Mom

2012-01-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

Snow conditions at the Highland Center were perfect last weekend for kids to sled and play in the fort outside the lodge, and perfect for parents and older children to snowshoe Mount Willard and cross-country ski at nearby Bretton Woods. But the icing on the cake for me was a 50-minute massage (on a heated massage table, no less) at the lodge Saturday afternoon.

We brought our daughter’s trusty purple sled from home, but I noticed a toboggan in the entryway of the lodge, ready to be borrowed. I was also grateful for the snow fort right across from the entrance. We stumbled upon it by chance while exploring the mountains of snow left by plows that clear the path, and our 2-year-old loved peeking through the window slots at people walking by. On the final morning of our visit, she also enjoyed a hike around the lake behind the lodge, mostly being carried in the backpack, but hiking some on her own, checking out tracks. (Child carriers, hiking poles, and snowshoes are among the items available for guests to borrow for free from the lodge’s L.L. Bean gear room.)

On this visit, we stayed in the Balsam Fir room, the name of which was a bit of a mouthful for our daughter. I suggested we call it the Christmas tree room. The name was fitting, for it gave us a great gift: the perfect mix of introducing our daughter to the pleasures of the natural world in winter and giving ourselves a treat at the same time.

If you’re dreaming of a getaway, check conditions at AMC’s lodges.

Great Kids, Great Outdoors is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Heather wrote this post.

AMC's Summer Offerings for Families and Teens

2012-01-21T11:00:00.002-05:00

My daughter first visited an AMC hut when she was in the womb, prompting slightly nervous questions from the croo about my due date. Now that she can hike in on her own two feet, we’ve revisited that hut—the family-friendly Lonesome Lake—and we’re eager to explore new options.

AMC offers many opportunities to arrange your own outdoor summer traditions, like hiking to the huts. But it also makes the planning easier with programs for families and teens and volunteer-managed family-friendly camps. Here’s a quick summary of what’s available.

Notice that for Teen Wilderness Adventures, a special discount is being offered through the end of January, and for Three Mile Island, applications are due by February 1.

AMC Family Adventure Camps
AMC offers two types of family adventure camps, focused on children of different ages. The five-day outdoor adventure programs, designed for families with children ages 5 to 12, are based at AMC lodges in New Hampshire and Maine, and offer guided daily activities like hiking, paddling, and nature study, with meals, lodging, and evening programs included. This year, AMC’s Cardigan Lodge will host a new two-night series for families with kids ages 2 to 5. It too will include nature exploration, meals, and lodging.

Teen Wilderness Adventures
For older kids (12 to 18), consider these 4- to 20-night backcountry hiking, paddling, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, and rock climbing adventures. Choices include trips organized by age, activity, and location. If you book by January 31, you can save 20 percent (in addition to your member discount if you’re an AMC member).

Teen Trail Crews
AMC offers teenagers the chance to learn new skills while working on trails for one to four weeks in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the north woods of Maine. Many crews camp in the backcountry near the trails.

Three Mile Island
This volunteer-managed shorefront camp on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire has a main lodge building and 47 kerosene-lantern-lit cabins. It offers meals, weekly conservation speakers, and a wonderful spot to swim, canoe, kayak, sail, and hike with your family. The season is from June 23 to August 25, and all applications postmarked by February 1 receive equal consideration. Kids must be at least 4 years old.

Echo Lake Camp
This volunteer-managed waterfront camp near Acadia National Park in Maine has a main lodge building and platform tents. It offers day and evening programs, meals, and a great location to swim, canoe, kayak, sail, and hike with your family. The season is from June 30 to September 1, and all applications postmarked between March 1 and April 1 receive equal consideration. Kids must be at least 4 years old.

Cold River Camp
This volunteer-managed camp in the beautiful, undeveloped Evans Notch area of the White Mountain National Forest has a central lodge and single, double, and family cabins (most with fireplaces or wood stoves and kerosene lamps). From here, you and your family can go hiking, canoeing, kayaking, biking, and swimming; meals and programs are included, and a nature trail leads to a tea house perfect for reading and painting (if your kids will slow down for such activities). The season is from June 30 to September 1, and applications are considered by lottery on April 1 and thereafter. There is no minimum age for kids.

Great Kids, Great Outdoors is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Heather wrote this post.

It's January: Have you planned for summer camp?

2012-01-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

Summer may seem a lifetime away, but super-organized parents are reserving camp spots already. If you’re like me and still wondering what you’ll do this weekend, though, don’t worry; there’s time to make a plan. But more options are available if you start soon.

Here are a few resources to help you:

· find summer day camps and overnight camps near you

· evaluate whether a program is a good fit for your child.

In an upcoming post, I will provide a list of AMC’s offerings for families and teens.

Finding A Camp

When I think about summer options, I start by asking friends and looking at the websites of organizations I know. These are still tried and true methods. But if you’re looking for a more comprehensive way to identify possibilities, the nonprofit American Camp Association offers an online tool to search for ACA-accredited day and overnight camps. You can search by program focus, affiliation, child’s age, location, and other criteria.

Evaluating A Camp

Once you’ve identified a day or overnight camp that seems interesting, here are some issues to research as you consider it for your kids. It’s always a good idea to talk directly with someone involved in the program, including a parent of a past participant, and to visit if possible.

Philosophy and Program

· What’s the larger goal of the camp, and how does the daily schedule serve it? Is there chapel, or competitive sports, or other elements you want to include or avoid? What’s the food like? How will you be able to communicate with your camper? How is homesickness handled? What about discipline? Does the length of the camp (one week, two weeks, or more) seem like the right fit for your family?

Accreditation and Training

· Is the camp accredited? If not, why not? What is the counselors’ average age, education level, and training in first aid and other skills related to the camp’s offerings? Does the camp conduct criminal background checks on staff?

Health and Safety

· What is the medical staff on site, and nearby? What are safety procedures (near water, for example)? If the camp transports children, how often are vehicles inspected and what is the drivers’ training?

Ratios and References

· What is the counselor-to-camper ratio? What percentage of counselors and campers returns each year? Can you talk with parents and kids who attended the camp last year?

Fees

· Make sure you understand the full fees, and ask about financial aid if you might qualify.

What other questions do you think are helpful to ask?

Great Kids, Great Outdoors is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Heather wrote this post.

Two Great Family Outings West of Boston: deCordova Sculpture Park and Punkatasset Conservation Lands

2012-01-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Looking for a quick idea for an outing around Boston this weekend? Last Sunday, my family took advantage of the current discounted rates at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln and spent a great morning wandering the grounds. And the previous weekend, we saw lots of signs of beaver at the Punkatasset conservation land in Concord.

DeCordova is a 35-acre park with more than 60 modern and contemporary sculptures to view. While signs ask visitors not to climb on the art, a few pieces are interactive: You can make music by dragging a stick across a large set of chimes, for example, and step in and out of a two-room house made of two-way mirrors. My 2-year-old and I also couldn’t resist walking through a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture that she dubbed “big red person.” (The piece is actually called Ozymandius, and a sign provides the Percy Bysshe Shelly poem of the same name for those curious about its story.)

Along a path that winds behind the museum building, visitors have created whimsical cairns, to which we added a few stones and a pine cone. Anyone interested in a longer, wooded hike can access a 3.5-mile loop around nearby Sandy Pond from the parking lot. (It’s described in AMC’s Best Day Hikes near Boston.)

Admission to the sculpture park is free Monday through Friday and half price on the weekends until January 21, because the museum building is closed while a new exhibit is being installed. The store is open, though, so you can duck in to warm up and visit the bathrooms (unisex, with baby changing stations).

Punkatasset is harder to find than the sculpture park, but offers a great set of trails, including a short loop through woods and meadows and around Hutchins Pond that might take half an hour at an adult pace. We hiked it with our daughter in a backpack for part of the time and walking on her own the rest. We saw a few other people, some walking their dogs off leash. The highlight was surely the signs of recent beaver activity, including one tree that didn’t look like it would be standing much longer.

To find this gem, drive on Monument Street from the center of Concord until you are about six tenths of a mile north of the Fenn School. Park on the left side of the road and walk down what looks like a driveway to access the trails. A sign provides a map. The town also has information and a map (PDF) online.

Great Kids, Great Outdoors is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson. Heather wrote this post.

Winter Camping with Children

2012-01-10T16:00:00.000-05:00

If you’ve packed up your tent until next spring, you might want to reconsider. Winter offers families another season — and another world — to explore through camping. Children may enjoy the wonderfully paradoxical nature of winter camping even more than most adults. It’s cold, but you are warm. There’s the immensity of the world outside the tent and coziness of the world inside it. Even winter’s basic elements, snow and ice, are paradoxes: delicate enough to melt in your hand, strong enough to bear the weight of a tent, frozen substances that insulate you on the most frigid nights. These wonderful and strange properties may be why children need little encouragement to play in the snow.

The challenge for parents is to make sure winter camping is comfortable. However, if you follow a few simple rules for safety and start slowly, you won’t find it hard to create warm family memories out of cold winter nights.

What follows are tips and suggestions for family camping in winter and maybe some encouragement for getting your tent out of storage.

Start close to home. In fact, Yemaya Maurer and Lucas St. Clair, authors of the AMC Guide to Winter Hiking and Camping, recommend starting at home. If you introduced your children to summer camping by setting up a tent in the yard, you’re already familiar with the benefits of the backyard approach. Trying clothing, sleeping bags, and gear within view of home gives you an easy escape if a child gets cold, wet, or scared — not to mention a nearby bathroom. Don’t forget to build snowmen and snow forts, too: Playing in a familiar way in the snow, Maurer and St. Clair remind us, gives children a basic level of comfort about being outdoors in the winter.

Choose close-in favorites. For first winter camping outings with children, Maurer and St. Clair recommend returning to familiar places, preferably those within a mile of a road. Children will be fascinated by the changed feel of a trail they know in other seasons, while you’ll have the extra comfort of knowing where you are. Expect to travel much more slowly on snow than on a dry trail, and remember that daylight starts later and ends earlier in winter than in summer. Check on seasonal road closures and trailhead parking before heading out.

Practice layering. Keeping warm and dry is the key to successful winter camping trips, and the key to staying warm and dry is layering. Children need to be taught to wear several layers of clothing that retains heat but not moisture— no cotton — and then need to practice adding layers before they’re cold and taking layers off before they sweat.

Try on all clothes at home before packing them on an overnight trip. You want to know ahead of time that last year’s long underwear no longer fits, or that the zipper on that jacket doesn’t work.

Once on the trail, stop regularly to monitor young children’s feet and hands for cold (inspect for blisters while you’re at it) and check that inner layers aren’t wet. Pack extras, and make sure children change out of soggy clothes when you reach camp.

Enlist children in setting up camp. One of the secrets of winter camping is how much like child’s play it is. Children can help shovel out snow benches and tables, stomp out tent sites, and fill containers with snow to melt into water. Arrive in camp early in the day so kids aren’t too tired, hungry, or cold to join in.

Have fun keeping warm. Eat high-calorie snacks and meals, says AMC Adventure Programs Manager Sara DeLucia. Kids are likely to enjoy being required to bring candy bars to bed with them in case they wake up cold, or getting to drink such winter-camping standards as hot liquid Jell-O and hot chocolate. DeLucia also recommends warming up sleeping bags with hot-water bottles and bringing along packets of hand and toe warmers.

Keep it safe, and keep it fun. The standard advice about outdoor activities with children is never more true than for winter activities. If you help children stay warm and dry throughout a winter camping trip, they’re likely to enjoy themselves. And if they’ve had fun in the snow, fun in the tent, and fun coming back out, they’ll probably want to go winter camping again — with you.

Learn more
Purchase the AMC Guide to Winter Hiking and Camping by Yemaya Maurer and Lucas St. Clair.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog written by Kristen Laine.

Introducing a New Voice for Great Kids, Great Outdoors

2012-01-07T11:00:00.003-05:00

Kristen Laine has been writing this blog since May 2009, and I’ve been happily editing it. Behind the scenes, we have enjoyed long conversations about raising kids, but readers have heard only her voice. This year, Kristen and I have decided to share the blog, alternating posts from our somewhat different perspectives—Kristen living in a house in the country and raising older kids, me in a city apartment with a toddler.

You’ll still hear a great deal about Kristen and her family, and the pleasures and challenges of their rural life in New Hampshire, but you’ll also hear from me about getting outside as a family around greater Boston. Given my role as publisher at the Appalachian Mountain Club, I’ll also be posting information about what’s going on at AMC, from special opportunities for families to program news.

Of course, as soon as I agreed to share the blog with Kristen, I wondered what I was thinking. As a mother who works full-time, I sometimes feel challenged to get outside with my family at all, let alone write about the experience. But I’m hoping that adding my voice to this forum will help inspire others and give me fresh ideas. So please, let me—and Kristen—know your questions and suggestions as we try this new experiment in 2012.

And if you’re curious about the photos of me, both the one at the top of this post and the one with my bio on the blog were taken at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., earlier this week by my friend Lynda Banzi Sponholtz, an AMC member. That was before the weather turned cold again!

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine and Heather Stephenson.

Resolutions for Outdoor Families

2011-12-29T20:00:00.000-05:00

Before I was married, I liked being out in the mountains on New Year’s Eve, dug into the snow up high, stepping out of the tent and looking at the stars in the winter sky, musing on the year just past, thinking about the year to come. I made lists in my mind of things I resolved to do, wrote them down when I was back at home, and referred to them throughout the months that followed.

Jim’s favorite New Year’s Eve tradition, before we married, was more festive. It involved a gathering at a friend’s camp on a small pond. There would be music and a fire and skating. At midnight, they’d take down from its perch on a wall an unwieldy, 10-foot-long Swiss alpenhorn, throw open the door, and take turns trying to send a recognizable rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” out into the night air. One year, he remembers, coyotes in the surrounding hills answered back.

As a couple with young children, ringing in the New Year has been a more domestic affair. This year, we’ll have just returned from a visit to family, so our celebration will be simple, and at home. Ursula and Virgil will no doubt insist on a game of Risk (a Christmas gift), which means that one of them may start 2012 as emperor of the world. Jim and I have been talking about spending part of the evening coming up with family resolutions: things we want to do individually and together, promises we want to make, and goals we’d like to reach.

We’ve noticed that many of our ideas have to do with the outdoors. We’ve noticed, also, that the ideas fall into a few categories, and that thinking of the categories inspires us to come up with more ideas, whether they become resolutions or not. I thought I’d share the categories, and some of our ideas, here.

Places we’d like to go. We keep a family list of places we’d like to travel to, or return to, tacked to the kitchen bulletin board. Some of these places are not in our current budget — I’m thinking of the moon, on Virgil’s list — but many are parks or natural areas. We’ll ask Ursula and Virgil each to pick one of these for family trips we’ll make in 2012. Will we visit Gettysburg? Yosemite? Acadia?

Goals to motivate us. A neighbor tries to climb nearby Mount Cardigan at least 100 times each year. What if we climbed it 25 times as a family? Picked some number of 4,000 footers to climb in 2012? Made a family commitment to hike a certain number of miles on the Appalachian Trail? Even asking Ursula and Virgil about their outdoor goals should make for an interesting conversation.

Changing daily behaviors. In the “if everyone lights just one little candle” vein, we want to consider the small things that add up, like leaving the car behind and walking to do our errands, buying fewer things, and turning off lights when we leave the room. If we lived closer to town, we’d add ‘walking or biking to school’ to that list. Putting these, and other small changes, on our list of resolutions will help us create new habits.

Joining with others to help the environment. Ursula and Virgil are old enough to join a local group that maintains trails on Mount Cardigan several times a year. Other groups organize cleanups of nearby rivers and parks. Ursula may want to expand a school project, growing endangered lady slippers, or Virgil could translate his love of animals into helping protect wildlife habitat.

Keeping promises. One of Jim’s regrets for the year that’s ending is that he didn’t follow through on a promise he made to Virgil to spend a night together outdoors. We took several backpacking trips as a family, but Virgil didn’t get that night in a tent with only his dad. Jim is determined not to let such an omission happen next year. He’s also promised to take Ursula fishing on the Rapid River. I’ve promised to take Ursula and a friend to Rumney Rocks. We’ll put these on the table and ask the kids what outdoor promises they’d like from us, then ask the same of each other. (I think I see fly-fishing in my future…)

May your New Year bring new outdoor adventures and new commitments to protecting our natural places and this beautiful big blue planet.

Learn how to make a "Resolution magnet" on Kaboose.com.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

A Children’s Crusade on Climate Change

2011-12-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

“I am 16 years old and live in Harrisburg, Virginia,” the legal document starts. Grant Serrels, the young Virginian, goes on to describe what it’s like to be a 21st-century kid growing up on the Shenandoah River:

When we moved to Timberville, Virginia almost six years ago, our family lived in a house located on the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. My excitement of being able to play, fish, and swim in the river was quickly thwarted. As a new resident, my family and I soon learned the river had become polluted as a result of lax standards of factory discharge into the river. The river water had also increased in water temperature due to climate change and the bottom of the river was covered in algae. The Shenandoah River had become unsafe for swimming. Also, ‘fish kill’ became a common vocabulary word for the die off of trout, bass, and sunfish (sometimes in large numbers). My dad is a fisherman, and we would go fishing together a lot. We caught several fish in the Shenandoah River that had lesions. The reason for these lesions and the fish kill is related to the increased temperature of the river waters over the past decade.

Serrels is one member of an unusual group of plaintiffs suing the federal government: unusual, because they’re between the ages of 10 and 17; unusual, because they are suing to ask government agencies to more effectively and more quickly address climate change; and unusual, because their case relies on the Public Trust Doctrine, which requires the government to protect and maintain certain shared resources for the health and survival of everyone, including children and future generations — that is to say, Serrels and his fellow plaintiffs. According to Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit organization that assembled and filed the case, it is the first time that the Public Trust Doctrine has been applied to the atmosphere and on behalf of the country’s youth.

The young people’s quarrel with the government is that it’s dragging its feet on addressing climate change. Their voices combine youthful sincerity and naiveté with a scientific understanding of climate change, its troubling trajectory, and its political gridlock, which makes this adult both sad and ashamed. The shame comes when I read Madeleine MacGillivray Wallace’s plea for adults to address global warming before it reaches a scientific “tipping point.” “I’m not in a position to take action of the scale needed to fight climate change,” the 15-year-old New York City native writes. “I have to instead depend on my government to live up to its responsibility of protecting the public commons and making sure I, my generation, and future generations have a livable planet.”

Serrels ends his declaration with a similar combination of concern and determination: “I felt very depressed but at the same time motivated to do something about protecting the earth before it’s made uninhabitable for my and future generations.”

These young people are far more politically engaged than the average teenager (or the average adult), but their anxiety about the future is shared by many of the nation’s youth. In a 2011 survey of teen attitudes about nature by The Nature Conservancy, nearly three-quarters of the respondents agreed with the statement, “Previous generations have damaged our environment and left it to our generation to fix it.” Less than one-third thought the government was doing a good job of addressing such major problems.

The young people involved in the climate-change lawsuit have already won a first victory. A hearing was originally scheduled earlier this month in San Francisco, but when the case began to receive national publicity, the hearing was moved to Washington, D.C., at a date yet to be determined. Several of the plaintiffs hand-delivered letters to members of Congress before the holiday break urging them to take action.

Learn more
- Read a letter by Alec Loorz, 16, founder of youth movement iMatter and one of the climate-change plaintiffs.
- Watch videos made by the young plaintiffs in the lawsuit brought by Our Children’s Trust.
- Get updates on the climate-change lawsuit.
- Learn about The Nature Conservancy survey.

Photo of climate-change youth plaintiff Alex Loorz.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Family ski memories, vintage ski photos

2011-12-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

Wooden skis, leather lace-up boots, cable bindings. Space-age skis, plastic boots, step-in bindings. Stretch ski pants and anoraks. Jean overalls and down jackets. These are details that bring back a flood of memories from a childhood spent on skis — details shown to great effect in a “Vintage Skiing” photo archive on Boston.com.

If you grew up skiing in the White Mountains, Massachusetts, or Vermont, you’re likely to find photos in this archive that bring on the same rush of memories. Photos stretching back as far as the 1930s offer an interesting pictorial record of skiing in New England. There are the ski trains, with ski-carrying passengers disembarking for the walk up the ski hill; single-chair ski lifts; lessons showing techniques long consigned to history; children crying, children smiling. Many of the pictures, not surprisingly, were taken on sunny days, appropriately for sunny memories of skiing. And who doesn’t give a rouse for 70-year-old Win Smythe, shown chatting with 17-year-old Harry Muzzy after the older man had finished skiing the challenging Thunderbolt Trail in Adams, Mass.?

The Boston.com ski scrapbook was prompted by a similar visit to the photo archives by The New York Times.

Click through the 31 photos on Boston.com or 20 photos on The New York Times website this holiday season with someone who taught you to ski. It’ll be a schuss down memory lane…

Learn more
- View "Vintage Skiing" on Boston.com.
- View “Vintage Skiing” on The New York Times website. Some of these photos also depict skiing in the Northeast.

Photo of old ski passes from "Mod Remod"; ski school from the Boston.com archive; "Ski" photo from a short history of skiing in New England by Laurie J. Puliafico.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

"North" and other picture books for a snowy day

2011-12-22T20:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times Book Review last Sunday contained a small feature, “Bookshelf: Snow,” a round-up of picture books about life in the cold. If you want to bring the pleasures of winter to a young child on your holiday gift list, take a look at the 5 recently published books in that article. Or consider one of the children’s winter classics below.

Some of the books on the “Bookshelf” list will feel familiar to any child who builds snowmen or spends time exploring snowy woods. Making a Friend shows a red-capped boy making a snowman, but the book — and the friendship — doesn’t end when the snow melts. Soft watercolors show the snowman in rain and in fog, and then back with the boy the next winter. In Over and Under the Snow, a girl goes cross-country skiing with her father and follows clues to the “secret kingdom” of wild animals in the winter months.

Two of the new books travel to cold places that most of us will never see. Little Dog Lost tells the true story of a dog who drifted out to the Baltic Sea on an ice floe. The story gives author and illustrator Monica Carnesi the chance to describe, and show, the immensity of the Arctic landscape — with a happy ending. The subtitle of North explains what the book is about — “the amazing story of Arctic migration” — but the large paintings of migrating polar bears, gray whales, snow geese, and caribou, among others, convey the poetry and majesty of migration.

That list prompted me to scan our bookshelves for our favorite picture books about winter. Here are a few:
- The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. We have the board book version of this Caldecott-winning classic from 1962, now dog-eared from many readings. A small boy explores the snow outside his apartment building.
- The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs. The kids’ British grandfather gave them the wordless “comic-strip” story of a boy who makes a snowman and embarks on a magical adventure. We then discovered that the story had been set to music and animated. Both the book and the short movie are perennial favorites around our house.
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, a Robert Frost poem illustrated by Susan Jeffers. Caldecott Honor–artist Jeffers adds touches of red to an otherwise pale color palette to help answer the question of why Frost’s traveler has stopped in December’s snowy woods. When Ursula and Virgil were very young, they loved to follow those color clues and help solve the mystery of the poem.
- The Mitten, by Jan Brett. Brett understands that children love to linger over picture books; her distinctive illustrations pack additional story lines around the edges of each page. The Mitten retells a Ukrainian folktale in which many animals, from a mouse to a bear, climb into a little boy’s lost mitten.
- Trouble with Trolls, also by Jan Brett. Brett combines trolls, every child’s desire for a dog (“want dog!”), a resourceful heroine, and possibly the best ski descent in children’s literature.

Learn more
- Read "Bookshelf: Snow" from the December 18, 2011 New York Times Book Review.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

“Whose Woods These Are…”: 16 Family Snowshoes

2011-12-17T10:42:00.003-05:00

“Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To see his woods fill up with snow.”

These lines from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and other poems by Robert Frost decorate an unusual literary trail. During the years the great American poet lived in Vermont, he walked through woods not far from the college town of Middlebury. Many years later, snippets from some of his most famous poems mark the paths of his home woods — perhaps in the very places that inspired them.

We'll be visiting this part of Vermont later this winter, and now that we know about the trail, we hope we’ll be able to snowshoe it with Ursula and Virgil, both of whom have grown up hearing Frost’s poems. I bet they’ll enjoy the way that the trail fits some of the poems. At a “Y” in the trail, for example, two lines from “The Road Not Taken — “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled / And that has made all the difference” — are etched into a wooden marker.

Snowshoeing can be “the road less traveled” for families during the winter months. Getting outside as a family with young children during the winter takes a fair amount of effort. Some of the activities most strongly associated with the season — skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, ice skating — require specialized equipment, rentals, lessons, and tickets, all of which can be expensive. Dealing with the logistics alone can feel like enough exercise for a day.

Snowshoeing offers a simple alternative. Snowshoes developed thousands of years ago to help people walk on snow. The basic design of a snowshoe hasn’t changed much over time, and neither has the basic technique: a slight waddle. Even very young children can get the hang of it in a short time. The equipment is inexpensive to buy or rent, and there’s nothing special about the clothing you need.

I recently put together a list of 15 family-friendly snowshoe trails in the Northeast. If a visit to Middlebury isn’t on your schedule this winter, check that list for other trails where the woods are also "lovely, dark, and deep.”

Learn more
- To visit Vermont's Robert Frost Trail, look for a sign on Route 125 heading east out of Middlebury.
- Read “Snowy Walks: 15 family-friendly snowshoes hikes in the Northeast.”

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Ice-In

2011-12-13T16:00:00.002-05:00

The first really cold night of the winter is forecast for tonight, and as far as we’re concerned, it can’t get here soon enough. Over the past week, calm nights and just-below-freezing temperatures have slowly spread a skim of ice over the pond, which has gradually thickened near shore. Jim, who grew up skating on ponds just like ours, has initiated Ursula and Virgil into the pleasures of smooth ice. We’ve been monitoring the ice like cooks who can’t wait for the pot to boil — except in this case, we want the container, our pond, to freeze.

On one of those monitoring forays last weekend, Virgil ventured out onto the ice in his winter boots. Jim has taught both children to measure its thickness by getting down on their hands and knees and using hairline cracks to see how far below them the ice extends. A few feet from shore, the ice was already more than two inches thick — certainly sturdy enough to hold Virgil, who weighs only 70 pounds. He slid several feet farther before we told him that was far enough.

I understand why he wanted to keep going: The ice Virgil was standing on was hard and clear — “ black ice” so transparent that he could clearly see the rocks and weeds on the bottom beneath his feet, and so smooth it feels frictionless. It’s also a rare treat, formed in just the right combination of cold temperatures and calm, clear air: no wind to ripple the surface, no snow or rain to mix in milky bubbles. For pond-hockey players and pond skaters, black ice is a cause for celebration. But this ice wasn’t quite ready to skate on.

Virgil reluctantly slid back in to shore, and for the next 20 minutes he supplied the rest of us with shards of shelf ice, which we flung, skipping-stone or Frisbee-style, across the surface. Some of the better efforts resulted in impossibly long distances — 150, 200 feet — as if the projectiles actually picked up speed as they spun or slid along the ice. I could see Jim imagining skating along the surface, a hockey stick in his hands, a puck sliding out ahead of him…

Last night was cold again, but not cold enough to add the two or three inches that will make the ice safe for adults and big kids. (Four inches of solid lake ice is generally considered safe for walking and skating.) Tonight should be different. If we step outside, we may be treated to an otherworldly sound: the traveling whooping and booming of ice shifting and cracking as it thickens. With no snow in the forecast until later in the week, we may be lucky enough to skate on black ice at least once this year.

Learn more
- Read an ice thickness chart from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
- Learn more about ice safety.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Gift Ideas for Outdoor Families

2011-12-06T16:00:00.000-05:00

If you have children (or their parents) on your gift-giving list this holiday season, don't finish your shopping until you've read the following recommendations from AMC staff, volunteers, and family members. All the ideas listed below are backed by experience and by the belief that family time in the outdoors is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

I've added links for some specific options, but don't forget to look for local options, too.

Babies and Toddlers
- Matt Heid, AMC's Equipped columnist and blogger, has hiked thousands of wilderness miles and is the father of one young child with another on the way. For babies, he recommends fleece booties: "Great for keeping little feet warm and super easy to put on and take off," he says. (Try Patagonia fleece booties.)

- Sara DeLucia, AMC's Adventure Programs Manager, and Alex DeLucia, AMC's Leave No Trace coordinator, are the parents of Leo, age 2. "My all-time favorite gift," Sara says, was a combination stroller, jogger, and ski pulk. "We've been putting Leo in it almost since he was born, using it for walks, running, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing"—in other words, four-season recreation. She notes that families with young children sometimes feel limited in their outdoor activities. "Something like this or a backpack carrier," she says, "really increases the options." (Look at Chariot child trailers to see one option.)

- "The best gift we've given our daughter is a bright green raincoat," says Stefanie Brochu, director of AMC's Youth Opportunities Program. "We invested in a lightweight, good quality coat and it was worth the money. It cinches at the wrist (very important!) and grew with her. We bought it when she was just 18 months and it lasted until she was almost four. Then we passed it down to her younger sister. We've had some great adventures together, knowing that she is just as comfortable in rainy and windy weather as my husband and I are. When other families stay inside on a rainy day we're out hiking, stomping through giant puddles, or exploring a coastline. Our daughter now loves being outside in all types of weather and I think that the little green raincoat has been a big part of that.

Older Children
- Sara DeLucia recommends sleds as great gifts for kids in snow country. AMC member Owen Borek, age 12, who hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail in 2010 with his mother, Cheryl Borek, seconds that idea, but with a slight difference: He's hoping for a toboggan this year.

- Headlamps, Cheryl Borek says, "open up all kinds of possibilities for exploring outside at night." For extra fun, Matt Heid suggests LEGO-person flashlights and headlamps.

- AMC Senior Interpretive Naturalist Nancy Ritger and Shannon LeRoy, office and programs manager for AMC's Maine Woods Initiative, offer ideas to encourage children's interest in nature: binoculars and a bird book; a butterfly coloring book and a net; a bug cage and activity guide; a guide to the seashore like AMC's Seashells in My Pocket packaged with a hand lens or activities book; a guide to the stars plus hot chocolate and a promise to go outside and stargaze.

- One of the best gifts AMC guidebook authors and photographers Jerry and Marcy Monkman ever got for their children were child-sized snowshoes, bought when Quinn and Acadia were preschoolers. Snowshoes "let us explore the outdoors as a family at the drop of a hat," Jerry says. The family also paddles together. Before Jerry and Marcy invested in kayaks for their children, they signed them up for a week of kayaking camp. "The kids loved it," Jerry says. "By the end of the week they could handle a kayak as well as we can."

- "I'd love to be able to give my 9-year-old son an experiential gift instead of a tangible gift," says Eric Stones, a trip leader for AMC's Connecticut Chapter. His son Roderick, he says with fatherly humor, "unfortunately prefers to open presents." For gifts a child can unwrap, Stones recommends hydration systems ("It gets them carrying their own water and makes it fun to hydrate on the trail") and ski gear packages. These packages, which are available for cross-country and downhill ski gear, start with one purchase and then offer low-cost upgrades: "Our local downhill ski store does a free trade up for children's equipment (for children up to 110 lbs.) if you buy a ski package from them," Stone says. "It seemed expensive when the little guy was 4 years old, but he's traded up 4 times now for free and he's still only 60 pounds."

The Whole Family
- Heid calls the REI Base Camp 6 the best family camping tent: “Huge, straightforward to set up, and bomber weather-proof.” h

- Nathan Schumacher leads trips for AMC's Youth Opportunities Program. He suggests sparking outdoor adventures with homemade gift coupons. Create coupon books that can be redeemed for particular hikes—sections of a long trail, perhaps, or to the summits of 3,000- or 4,000-footers, or for 10 state parks or conservation areas. Or add coupons to other gifts—coupons for trips to letterbox locations, for example, that accompany a stamp-making kit and a compass.

- Spending time outside with children is a year-round gift, as Kim Foley MacKinnon learned while researching AMC's new guidebook, Outdoors with Kids Boston, due out in spring 2012. "As I wrote my book," she says, "I was acutely aware of how little in our day-to-day lives my family (and our friends) spend just 'being' together with no agenda (and not much of it outside). During my research, I spent hours with my 12-year-old daughter and many of her friends, and it was freeing just to wander around together." MacKinnon thinks it was easier to be outside when she was growing up. "It is rare for my daughter and her friends to have that much time now," she says. "As counterintuitive as it sounds, I think we have to plan those kinds of days now." MacKinnon hopes other parents will give their children this gift by scheduling hikes, or clearing the family's calendar and taking off for an afternoon of exploring. Being outside together as a family, she says, is "invigorating and renewing and ultimately very rewarding."

Present enough.

Image from Ollie's Ski Trip, by Elsa Beskov.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Cut your own tree for $5 in three Eastern national forests

2011-12-03T12:10:00.004-05:00

This year, as it has every holiday season since 1970, the U.S. Forest Service hand-selected a tall, straight, and full tree to grace the nation’s capital. This year’s tree, a 65-foot white fir, was cut from the Stanislaus National Forest in California and was delivered to the West Lawn of the Capitol last weekend.

The Forest Service has another holiday tradition, as well. A number of national forests have offered $5 tree-cutting permits in November and December for several decades, but interest in the special program has increased dramatically in recent years. In the Eastern region, the permits are available for the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, and the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.

You can buy tree-cutting permits through Thursday, December 22, at White Mountain National Forest offices in Gorham, Conway, Campton, and Lincoln, in New Hampshire; and at Green Mountain National Forest offices in Rutland, Middlebury, Manchester Center, and Rochester, Vermont.

If you’re interested in cutting your own Christmas tree in one of these national forests, be sure the nearest office will be open. The Androscoggin Ranger Station in Gorham, N.H., is offering limited services in December, but will be open the first three weekends in December to accommodate Christmas tree permit sales. The Conway office is closed on weekends.

Not surprisingly, the nation’s capital is home to several Christmas tree traditions. The National Christmas Tree, a live Colorado blue spruce, was originally transplanted to the White House lawn from York, Pennsylvania, in 1978. The President and First Lady begin the Washington, D.C., holiday season by lighting that tree. That ceremony occurred this year on Thursday, December 1. The Capitol Christmas Tree lighting ceremony will be held at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, December 6.

For your own holiday tradition, you can bundle up your family, grab a hand saw, plunk down five dollars for a permit, cut your own tree, and celebrate your own season of light.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Winter Planning for Next Year’s Family Hikes

2011-11-29T16:00:00.002-05:00

Hiking is a three-season activity for our family. We burst onto the trails in the spring, when they’re still a mix of mud and snow, eagerly seeking every sign of new growth, grateful for the lack of bugs. Summer means overnight backpacking trips and choosing hikes for their cooling water breaks, whether river rambles or the shock of an icy dip in a glacial tarn. My favorite hiking season is the one just ending. Fall’s cooler, drier weather energizes us. We try new trails and return to family favorites, stringing together as many hikes as we can before winter settles in. By November, each time we step on a trail, I think, This could be the last hike of the year.

I know that some people hike around the calendar, prompted by inner urgings or a temperate climate. Here at the edges of the North Country, though, winter becomes hiking’s off-season. Lately I’ve come upon several ideas on how to use the off-season, all of them quite workable with children or with the entire family.
- Think like a gardener. In cold-weather places, gardeners put their gardens to bed for the winter, then turn to many months of productive dreaming over catalogues and books or simply in the quiet company of a fireplace. Hikers can do the same: Pull out guidebooks and maps; explore trails on paper and in your imaginations. Use catalogues to draw up gear lists — and wish lists.
- Create photo albums. Share photos, and memories, from previous hiking trips. Ask your children to tell you their version of the hike and you’re likely to learn more about them, and about the hike. If you return to certain hikes every year, consider taking annual photos at the same location. Children love to see the changes in themselves over time, and in a beloved environment, too.
- Map it. For big hiking projects, think about setting aside some wall space or a table for the project. Maps, for instance, can show your progress on multi-year goals on the Appalachian Trail and other long trails. When the 7-year-old son of friends decided he wanted to hike every one of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks, the family kept track of his summits in a logbook and also on a big wall map. Before he was done, the map bristled with multi-colored pins. A map can show you where you’ve been, and also — like planning to add sweet corn or pumpkins to your garden — give you new ground to cover.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Geology Guide to Mt. Cardigan

2011-11-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

If you’ve ever hiked up Mount Cardigan, stayed at AMC’s Cardigan Lodge, or simply driven by the rounded granite summit topped by a fire tower, you may be interested in a new website that explains the geology of the peak.

Dartmouth College earth sciences professor Brian Dade teamed up with retired doctor and hiker Howie Frankel to create a guide to the geological makeup of five popular hikes in the Upper Connecticut River Valley. The online guide includes Mount Cardigan and a 2-mile section of the Appalachian Trail known locally as the Velvet Rocks Trail. Mount Cardigan is one of what Dade calls a “string of pearls” — granite-based mountains formed during an intense period of volcanic activity 500 million years ago along the coastline of what would become the Atlantic Ocean. These mountains, now many miles inland, are thought to be “ancient magma chambers from a chain of volcanic islands,” Dade says.

Glaciers planed smooth the north side of Cardigan during the Ice Age. But each time a glacier crested the peak, it plucked and pulled rocks off the southern face, creating a more broken topography. Dade says, “Carpenters, think of trying to plane across the grain” at the end of a two by four: “All you get is cracks, chips, and splinters.” It’s an image I’ll keep in mind the next time we picnic in the lee of a big boulder.

Geologists learn to take the long view of history. In an overview of the area’s geology, Dade and Frankel describe a history of upheaval and change. The region’s abundance of slate, granite, marble, and gneiss — all metamorphic rocks that have been altered by heat, pressure, and folding — have been used as building materials around the world, and have created many a fine stone wall at home. The Appalachians were once like the Himalayas, the authors remind us, and the Himalayas will someday be like the Appalachians are now. Now that’s a long view.

The short guide, illustrated by gorgeous photos, is like hiking with a geologist. Take a look at it before your next hike up this popular small mountain.

Learn more
- Geology Guide to the Upper Connecticut Valley

Photo showing glacial "plucking" on the south side of Mt. Cardigan courtesy of the geology guide's authors.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Creating Outdoor Holiday Traditions

2011-11-22T16:00:00.001-05:00

It can be hard during the holidays to do something as simple, and as important, as getting outside. Body-cramping travel often eats up full days, and then there's that one day devoted to eating. Other family traditions — watching football, catching up on family news, shopping, arguing politics — can make the holidays entirely indoor events.

It can be easy, though, to create outdoor traditions. When I was young, there came a time each Thanksgiving when the cooks pushed everyone else out the door. That was the signal to start our annual touch football game. This was an earlier time, so the teams were comprised mostly of kids and fathers, with a few unattached men joining in. I can still recall the excitement of the huddle, listening to a bright-cheeked dad set out our play, the briskness of the air, and the sharp crinkle of leaves underfoot. When we were allowed back inside to wash up and change for dinner, the sun would be low in the sky and the house warm and filled with the smell of the meal we’d soon sit down to together.

Later, when I lived too far from family to travel back home for a short holiday, I celebrated Thanksgiving with friends. Our traditions included charades and a long trail run the day after the holiday. The big family gathering at my father’s in western New York now always ends with a ramble through the neighborhood. The contrast between the warmth of the hearth and the crispness of late November air invigorates us and brings us together in different ways.

Do you have a family outdoor tradition for the holiday season? If you want to start one, consider the following ideas:
- Play an outdoor game. Touch or flag football are the classics of this genre. Freeze Tag, Capture the Flag, and Red Rover work well in mixed-age groups.
- Take a hike. You don’t have to find a trail. Wander the neighborhood while the turkey is in the oven or walk off the meal in fading light. Take a walk with someone you haven’t had a chance to talk to, or take the kids out for a stroll.
- Make a game of observing. Keep young children from getting bored on a walk by challenging them with “I Spy”-style games. Ask them to come up with a plant or animal for every letter of the alphabet. Count words on road signs. Be creative!
- Have a leftovers picnic. If you’re lucky enough to have a warm or sunny day, try packing up some leftovers and go to a park or playground for a special “meal out.” Picnic tables may work best for older family members.
- Stargaze. The moon is new on Friday, November 25, so if the night of Thanksgiving is clear, you may be able to see Orion, the Pleiades, and Jupiter.
- Sign up for a Turkey Trot. Maybe it’s the alliteration that’s made these Thanksgiving-week road races so common. Some of the “fun runs” have walker categories. The Thanksgiving Day run in Buffalo, New York, calls itself the oldest continually running footrace in the country — even older than the Boston Marathon. Another claim to that category comes from the annual “pie race” held at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. Turkey head-gear optional.

Photo courtesy of the YMCA Buffalo Niagara Turkey Trot.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Winter Bicycling with Kids

2011-11-19T14:02:00.002-05:00

We put our bicycles in the barn after the early snowstorm last month and haven’t been planning to bring them out again until spring. But driving the school carpool one day last week, I heard a radio report on two cyclists from Vermont, both psychotherapists, who are encouraging people to bicycle through the winter.

The self-styled “cycle therapists,” Dave Cohen and Phil Brubaker, had some specific on-the-ground advice for winter cyclists: Put winter tires on your bicycle (who knew you could get studded snow tires for bikes?); let some of the air out of the tires for better traction; and dress for the weather, paying special attention to keeping feet warm. Cohen and Brubaker run bike workshops to encourage adults and children to spend time outside all year, even during the winter months. Speaking as a mental health professional, Brubaker told the Vermont Public Radio reporter that there’s plenty of evidence pointing to the benefits of daily aerobic exercise: “Even just 20 minutes a day is a huge boost to mental health in general,” he said, further noting that people often struggle with depression during the winter months.

The radio spot got me thinking, and looking. At my computer, I found Bike Winter, a website dedicated to winter biking whose practitioners approach the topic with good humor: “While riding in the summer seems normal,” one writes on the site, “cycling through the winter seems, to the uninitiated, as painful and ill-advised as licking a frozen pole.” The site’s page on winter biking with young children offers expert advice on navigating a bike trailer in slush and debates the relative advantages of bike trailers and bike seats for winter riders with children. It also introduced me to cargo bikes — “the SUVs of the bike world” — apparently an idea imported from the bike-friendly Dutch.

And if I’d doubted that children can continue biking through the winter, several stories on the national Safe Routes To School (SRTS) website convinced me. Safe Routes To School funds efforts by schools and communities to get more children walking and biking to school. In Anchorage, Alaska, a place that knows winter, the school district surveyed parents and discovered, not surprisingly, that they were concerned about their children’s safety during winter months, when there are often fewer hours of daylight than hours in the school day. The district partnered with the city of Anchorage and the state highway safety office to offer free reflective tape to more than 10,000 schoolchildren and then encouraged the children to come up with their own reflective designs. To celebrate the coming of spring and longer days, the district held a reflective tape fashion show. The district also partnered with a regional hospital to donate between 75,000 and 100,000 free bike helmets to students. School nurses handed out the helmets and helped fit them. The district saw increases between 30 and 70 percent in the rates of children walking or biking to school year-round.

At Bear Creek Elementary School in Boulder, Colorado, two-thirds of students lived within two miles of the school, but only one-quarter regularly walked or biked to school. The school’s SRTS program started with incentives and prizes. Students who used “active transportation” to get to school received daily recognition in class and in prominent displays and events at school. Principal Kent Cruger instituted the Cruger Cup, a year-long challenge to students to arrive every day without a car. Cruger took the challenge himself, arriving at school on bicycle, skateboard, and even a unicycle. Another teacher used the Tour de France to motivate students, forming class teams. Students kept monthly tracking sheets and won arm bands in different colors for different categories of trips, resembling the “leader jerseys” at the legendary bike race.

Students became so determined to meet these challenges that they insisted on bringing gear for an overnight school trip in bike trailers. By the end of the federally funded program, 70 percent of the school’s students had made biking or walking to school a daily habit. With such a change in the culture of the school and community, the school is finding that fewer external rewards and incentives are needed. One of the pictures accompanying the story shows smiling students walking, and biking, through snow.

I think of Phil Brubaker in Vermont. He said of his winter bike commute that it doesn’t take much time, but it makes his day.

Learn more
- Get tips from AMC on cycling through the winter, including how to prepare your bike and what clothes to wear.
- Read or listen to the “cycle therapists” on Vermont Public Radio.
- Check out the Bike Winter website. Or read this blog post from a real winter-biking kid.
- Learn about cargo cycles. Don’t miss the informative section on family cycling!
- Find success stories from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. at National Safe Routes To School.

Family biking photo courtesy of Bike Winter.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

What makes a hike a family hike?

2011-11-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

We’ve had a hard time scheduling hikes with other families this fall. Some of our friends went straight from soccer to hockey with nary a free weekend in between. Others juggle long work commutes or business travel, making weekends precious family time. We’ve had our own problems freeing up even half-days for hikes, from household chores to homework projects to house guests. Every weekend we’re confronted with yet another perfectly good set of reasons not to put on our boots and get on a trail.

I spent some time last week looking at family trips listed on the AMC website, and what I saw there makes me think we’re not alone in finding it hard to get out the door. Out of 64 activities listed for last weekend, only two — a Saturday morning hike in Fells by the Boston Chapter and a family hike to Trustom Pond offered by the Narragansett Chapter — received a Family designation. I’m sure that other of the weekend’s hikes and outings were open to families with children. Still, that’s small number of family-focused offerings.

It can’t be that hard to get kids and families — our own and others — together on trails, right? What are your solutions for overcoming the black hole of family logistics and schedules? Have you organized family hikes through your AMC Chapter, or your scout troop, or with friends? What advice can you share with the rest of us?

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (and other Thoreau books for kids)

2011-11-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

Even after last weekend’s time change, it’s still dark on school-day mornings when I wake up Ursula and Virgil. This morning as I leaned over to give Ursula a first shake, I stumbled over a pile of books next to her bed. The pile avalanched onto my bare feet and nearly toppled me. Threats were made and promises extracted, along general lines that the entire mountain of books be put back where they belonged, or they would be carted away.

Later, after the kids were gone, I returned to Ursula’s room for a better look at the pile. Teetering on the very top was my Riverside Shakespeare — no doubt the very tome my toes had met with such unexpected force — and several other copies of plays by the Bard. Ursula’s eighth-grade class has been studying Shakespeare this fall, so the books didn’t surprise me, now that I saw them in daylight.

But the broad base they were resting on did surprise me — many children’s books, most of them picture books: Greek myths, fairies, African folktales, silly stories, all mixed together. And at the bottom, all five of our “Henry” books: Henry, as in Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, civilly disobedient protester, adventurer, and naturalist.

D.B. Johnson wrote and illustrated five picture books based on events in Thoreau’s life. The first, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, was based on an event that Thoreau wrote about in Walden:

“One says to me, ‘I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars [the train] and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.’ But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first.”

Thoreau’s sly trick, in the book as in real life, was to insist that his friend earn his 90-cent fare for the 30-mile train ride while Thoreau, depicted in all the books as a black bear, covers the distance on foot. We see the passage of the day on the watch carried by Thoreau’s friend, as he fills the woodbox in Mrs. Alcott’s kitchen (10 cents), sweeps out the post office (5 cents), and other jobs to earn his way to Fitchburg. On facing pages, we see Henry: While his friend is pulling weeds, he’s picking ferns and flowers; he climbs a tree while his friend moves bookcases.

By the time Henry’s friend has earned enough money to buy his ticket, Henry is 7 miles from Fitchburg. While his friend sits on the crowded train, Henry eats his way through a blackberry patch. When Henry arrives in Fitchburg, night has fallen and his friend is waiting for him. “The train was faster,” his friend says. Henry hands his friend a pail filled with fresh berries. “I know,” he tells him. “I stopped for blackberries.”

Henry Builds a Cabin describes the cabin that Thoreau built by Walden Pond and lived in for two years. The night that Thoreau spent in jail after refusing to pay his taxes to a government that supported slavery provides the frame for Henry Climbs a Mountain. Henry Works celebrates Thoreau’s contributions as a naturalist, and Henry’s Night draws on a moonlit walk Thoreau described in Walden.

At the end of Walden, Thoreau wrote, “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.” If Ursula steps to music from Shakespeare and Thoreau, I won’t complain. She just has to make enough space on her floor for me to step inside her room without injury.

Learn more
- about Henry Hikes to Fitchburg and other books by D.B. Johnson.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Outdoor Safety: Tips for Parents

2011-11-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

"Parents are natural risk managers," says Aaron Gorban, AMC's manager for leadership training and risk management and the father of a 4-year-old daughter. That protective concern, however, shouldn't keep parents and their children away from outdoor activities. By trying to avoid risks, Gorban says, parents may actually risk something more serious, in experiences lost and connections not made. By getting children outdoors, parents can provide important opportunities to learn and grow.

Gorban's first suggestion to parents: Do whatever it takes to get comfortable enough to bring your children outside. Read books and articles, get help from people with more experience, and if necessary, sign up for a class to learn new skills.

Second, Gorban suggests assessing children's sense of risk. Some have no fear. Some live in constant fear. "Parents need to be dialed into these dynamics," he says. "At AMC, we educate our leaders about how children may behave at different ages and at different developmental stages."

It can make a lot of sense for families new to outdoor activities to join outings that are organized by groups like the Appalachian Mountain Club. In these organized outings, parents and kids, both, can learn from others who are more experienced. AMC trip leaders, for example, undergo safety training, which includes wilderness first aid, and carry first aid kits.

Once parents have a basic level of familiarity with the outdoors—and a sense of what activities are appropriate for their children—they are ready to develop safety skills for the entire family. For short outings, these skills can look a lot like simple common sense, and parents and children can learn them together. HikeSafe, a joint program of the White Mountain National Forest and New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, offers a short list of safety guidelines that parents can teach children:

Dress appropriately for the outdoors. On a hike, wear sneakers or hiking boots, not sandals. Wear bright colors that make you easy to spot. Bring a jacket and extra clothes even if it's warm at home. Temperatures in the mountains are often cooler than in cities, and mountain weather is more variable.

Carry safety essentials — food, water, warm clothing, whistle, large garbage bag or rain poncho, flashlight or headlamp — with you on the trail. Even young children can carry small packs with these basic safety items.

Stay together. Keep to the trail. Wait at trail junctions.

If you get lost, stay in one place, preferably in the open. Stay warm and dry. Blow your whistle (three short blasts) every few minutes. If you hear a noise, make a noise back: It might be someone looking for you. Don't worry about wild animals (they'll try to avoid you) or your parents being angry.

AMC's "Lost and Alone" workshops teach children how to stay with a group in the outdoors and also what to do if they become separated from the group. Parents may be surprised by the attention their children give such lessons. And, of course, the safety whistles are always a big hit: "We give them about 15 seconds to blow them as loud as they can," says Gorban. "And then we tell them, OK, now it's a tool."

Courses can also help parents reach the next level of safety skills. AMC destinations and chapters offer map and compass courses that teach basic navigation in the woods. Although many trails are well marked, it's useful, Gorban notes, to know how to orient yourself if a trail sign is missing, or if you get turned around in the fog.

For more experienced hikers looking for advanced safety skills, Gorban recommends two-day Wilderness First Aid courses. Like map and compass courses, these are taught throughout the year at AMC destinations and through AMC chapters. The course teaches participants how to manage problems that may come up during a weeklong hiking trip and builds a "dynamic list" for first aid kits, depending on a changing set of variables. AMC also holds a more extensive two-week Wilderness First Responder course.

More safety tips from Aaron Gorban:

- For younger children, keep track of how much they're eating and drinking on the trail. Take frequent breaks to create down time for snacks. Use games like scavenger hunts along the trail to get food in them. Some parents bring drinks that are otherwise forbidden, such as sports drinks, to encourage drinking, or buy kids' daypacks with built-in hydration systems.

- Use pragmatic controls to minimize risk. For example, you can minimize the risk of mosquito-borne illnesses by avoiding going out at sunset, wearing long sleeves, and using appropriate insect repellents. Similarly, dress appropriately to avoid sunburn or frostbite; learn what's appropriate to the season and outing you are planning.

- With older kids, give them enough information to make wise decisions on their own about risk and health. At the start of AMC's Teen Wilderness Adventure trips, for example, some leaders circle up the teens, have them rub their hands together, and talk about heat and friction, which can cause blisters. The instructors remind the kids that if they get a blister in the first two hours of a weeklong hike, the entire trip, for everyone, will be affected.

- Watch for slips and falls. When children get hurt in the mountains, it's often because they're running or engaging in a behavior that makes them less aware of their surroundings. Or else they're just tired. "Fatigue is a commonality" in many accidents in the backcountry, Gorban notes. "Add wet or icy or slippery conditions or other environmental hazards" and it's more likely that an injury will occur.

Gorban would like to see parents move away from being concerned about the risks of being outdoors and focus instead on teaching children to assess and manage risks. "The outdoors is a perfect learning environment," he says.

Learn more
- AMC's Tips for Getting Kids Outdoors

- HikeSafe Guidelines for Parents

- Wilderness First Aid Courses from AMC

- Map and Compass Courses from AMC

AMC Family Adventure Camp leader and hikers. Photo by Herb Swanson, courtesy of AMC.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Getting Ready for Winter

2011-11-03T20:00:00.001-04:00

Out on our pond, a pile of partially submerged branches spreads out from our local beaver lodge. The beavers are good neighbors, if a bit cheeky: They had the nerve to build their lodge right at the edge of our property, although at least it’s tucked into a marshy curve of the shoreline that’s hard to see from our house. Their log skids lead back into the swamp, not onto our land, so while they’re cutting trees that technically belong to us, at least they’re not cutting trees in our front yard.

Each year as we reach the end of foliage season, our shy neighbors become, well, as busy as beavers. Every evening, they leave home and head to work, taking nighttime shifts to chop down trees with their sharp teeth, nibble off the branches, drag them to the pond, and swim them over to the lodge. They’ll eat leaves and bark from these branches — poplar, birch, ash, beech, and willow are favorites — during the long New England winter and use the bare wood for construction come spring. If ice holds off long enough, their food cache can spread out into the pond 20 or more feet and grow 5 or more feet high.

We’ve been preparing for winter on our side of the pond, too. Our shifts run more to daytime and weekend hours, but not full ones, so by beaver standards we’re slackers. We’ve been traversing the edges of the yard and what we call “the back 40” (more like the back quarter-acre), looking for leaners — dead or dying trees that aren’t downed. If the wood is sound, we chop them down. Virgil and Ursula and I use saws and axes on the smaller trees; for bigger trees, or sometimes just for ease, Jim fires up the chainsaw. Once the trees are down, we limb them and drag them up to the house, where we chop them into firewood. (Elsewhere, I've revised the old saying that firewood warms you twice; revising again, I'd say that this wood will warm us four times over by the time it’s in the fireplace.)

After last weekend’s early snow, Ursula and I pulled the logs up from the field on a sled, creating our own smooth skid road. The four of us took turns chopping wood in the fading light. We were cleaning up when I heard the distinctive slap of a beaver’s tail. We stood quietly, listening to the sound of our neighbors’ evening commute.

Winter will come, but I hope not before we — our family and our beaver neighbors — bring in enough wood to make it through.

Learn more
- Read "Junior Naturalist: Beavers," and view a video of beavers creating a lodge.
- Read "Chop Wood, Carry Water," about teaching Ursula and Virgil to split wood.

Photo of beaver feeding in Canada's Gatineau Park courtesy of D. Gordon E. Robertson.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

First Snow

2011-10-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

The first snow of the season arrived in a flurry earlier this week, here and around northern New England. The higher peaks had already received dustings, of course, and Mount Washington is nestled once again under the first layer of what will become its heavy winter blanket of snow.

Even more modest changes in elevation make a difference when it comes to snow. Our house sits at around 1,500 feet; the kids’ school, not far from the Connecticut River, is a thousand feet lower. “We have snow on the ground at home,” I told the kids when I picked them up on Thursday afternoon in a freezing rain. My news thrilled Virgil. He bounced up and down in the back seat as we drove back home, listing everything he wanted to do in the first snow of the year: roll it into snowballs, carve it into snow sculptures, pour warm syrup over it for “sugar on snow,” build a snow fort, have a snowball fight, get out his snowboard and practice… “We may not have enough snow for all that, not this first storm,” I cautioned him. “But we’ll get to do all that, I promise, before the winter is over.”

Ursula, on the other hand, put her hands over her ears and moaned. “It can’t snow before Halloween,” she wailed. “It’s just not right!” She loves winter, and will spend hours tromping around in the snow. But the October snow offended her sense of the proper progression of the seasons. It’s also possible that an early Halloween experience — as a toddler princess who insisted on wearing pink plastic sandals in three inches of slushy snow — helped form her distaste for foliage-season snow.

When we got home, Virgil put on rain boots and pulled open the mitten and hat drawer for the first time in months and then turned around and went right back outside. A while later, he brought me a perfectly round snowball. “This is great snow!” he exclaimed. With a little maple syrup added, the snowball became a sweet treat. Ursula stuck to her principles, too, refusing to go out in the new snow before the plastic bins with our winter boots and coats were in from the barn.

I thought I could reassure her that the snow would be gone before Halloween. But Jim whispered that an even bigger storm was headed our way over the weekend. I hope monsters wear snow boots….

Photo of Mount Washington courtesy of steveswhitemountainblog.com

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Junior Naturalist: 4 cool facts about bats (and 1 scary one)

2011-10-28T09:03:00.002-04:00

It’s almost Halloween, which means that construction-paper bats and pipe-wire spiders are going up in classrooms and on windows, and soon kids in all manner of frightening costumes will be going batty. It’s a good time to look at one of the things that go bump in our night.

- Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. (“Flying” squirrels actually only glide.) Bats don’t have wings like birds. Instead, they flap the thin membranes between their spread-out digits, which act like fingers.
- There are more than 1,200 classified species of bats worldwide, nearly 20 percent of all mammal species.
- More than two-thirds of bats are insectivores — that is, they eat insects. Other bats eat fruit and a few eat fish.
- Then there are vampire bats: These natives of Central and South America feed on the blood of other mammals. They live in colonies in dark places such as caves, hunt only when it is fully dark, and use a special sense called thermoception to locate a good place to bite their victims, usually while the victim is sleeping. Vampire bats can survive only about two days without food, so bats in the colony that have fed regurgitate their meals into the mouths of bats that are hungry.

Now for the scary fact. (Yes, I know. You thought the vampire facts were scary.) Bats serve useful purposes for human beings, such as eating insects that can destroy crops and — especially here in New England — keeping down the mosquito population. But a mysterious infectious disease called white-nose syndrome has killed more than one million bats across the United States and Canada and wiped out entire colonies in many locations. Some species, such as the little brown bat and Virginia big-eared bat, are threatened with extinction.

Just this month, however, researchers proved that a fungus discovered in 2007 is responsible for the baffling disease. The fungus appears to interfere with bats’ immune systems during hibernation. Understanding how the disease is transmitted will help biologists develop remedies for infected bats and ways to protect vulnerable populations.

Happy Halloween.

Learn more
… about bats at Bats 4 Kids and Bat Conservation International.
… about the United Nations’ International Year of the Bat, which runs from September 2011 to September 2012.
… about white-nose syndrome.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

The pleasure of gear

2011-10-25T16:00:00.000-04:00

We’ve relied heavily on hand-me-down gear to outfit our children over the years. Uncle Rik and Aunt Susan from Washington State have kept the kids in fleece jackets and snowpants. Whenever we see friends Chris and Patty, they pass along cross-country ski gear that their girls have outgrown. Ursula’s downhill ski boots have another kid’s name up the side of the heel, Virgil’s pink snowshoes belonged to a friend’s daughter — and we’re grateful for all of it.

Outdoor gear is expensive. Kids sometimes grow out of footwear or clothing before they’ve used it even a full season. And if you want to ski, snowshoe, skate, paddle, hike, climb, and bike with your children using proper-fitting clothing and equipment, you’re either looking at regular outlays for new gear or looking for alternative supply chains. We’ve found them in the tradition of gear swaps, which are especially common around here for ski gear. And we’re lucky to have friends and family who pursue similar activities, and whose children are older than ours. Their gear flows down to our children, and we pass it along in turn to families with younger children. In fact, we take pride in how much we’ve been able to make the hand-me-down system work, year in and year out.

So this year, it was a big deal in our family when Ursula, at age 13, got her first new bicycle. When bike-riding season came around, it became clear that she was too big for the bike she’d been riding, and we didn’t have another hand-me-down in the pipeline. We decided to give her a new bike for her birthday. She went to a local bike store with Jim and carefully considered different types and models before settling on one. After they brought it home, she remarked on how shiny it looked compared to her old bike. “This is the bike I’ll probably take to college,” she said, and it took me and Jim a shocked moment to agree with her.

I remembered Ursula’s pleasure in her new bike when I was in an outdoor store earlier this fall. A red and black children’s backpack caught my eye, and I immediately thought, “Virgil would love that pack.” He didn’t need a new pack — he was just about ready for a hand-me-down from Ursula — and the one in the store window was not cheap. But I could imagine his pride in wearing a pack with his favorite colors; I could see him putting his sketch book in an outer mesh pocket, and zippering money or a pack of cards in a hidden compartment.

Yes, I bought it. And yes, Virgil was thrilled with it. Still, I was unprepared for one side effect of his new pack: He couldn’t wait to go hiking with it. He packed it and repacked it half a dozen times. And once we were actually on the trail, he took great pride in working the fasteners and straps, in how well it fit, and in how well everything he was carrying fit into it. I swear he stood up taller and walked faster and with more purpose, too — Virgil, the same child who normally starts asking right away if we’re there yet, the one we’ve had to bribe with M&Ms placed along the trail just to get him to walk uphill.

We aren’t going to stop accepting hand-me-downs. For one thing, we can’t afford to, not if we want to continue doing so many different activities with our kids outdoors. But I’m going to keep the lesson of the new backpack in the back of my mind. New gear, I’ve discovered, can be a powerful motivator. In some cases, despite the expense, that can be worth a lot.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Exercising Bodies as Well as Minds

2011-10-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

How much exercise do children get in school? As schools have focused on core academic subjects and on testing, have recesses and physical education classes been cut back, or cut altogether? How have tightening budgets in school districts across the country affected school-day exercise? How do the practices in my school district or in my state compare to those in other parts of the country?

These questions and more are answered in a hefty report, The Shape of the Nation, published last year by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education in partnership with the American Heart Association. I learned about the report from a New York Times article that profiled the efforts of several New York City public schools to get their students to exercise. One P.E. teacher applied for grant money to change a storage closet into an exercise room. In another school, students take quick breaks from math problems for calisthenics. The article also noted, however, that not one of 31 elementary schools audited recently by the city was meeting minimum requirements for physical education.

The good news, nationally, is that more states mandated physical education for their students in 2010 than in 2006. But only six states — among them Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont — require physical education from kindergarten through high school. (New Jersey and Rhode Island require it starting in first grade.) I learned that New Hampshire, where we live, does not mandate daily recess for elementary school students, and was grateful that the school Ursula and Virgil attend schedules twice-daily outdoor breaks anyway.

We’ve learned in recent years how much recess and physical activity matter to children. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that exercising regularly during a school week improves performance in the classroom and school attendance. In these difficult times, however, children are going to have to rely on the creativity of teachers, parents, administrators, and others. One example from the New York Times article: An elementary school teamed up with the New York Road Runners Club to create a challenge — students would earn the school a book for each mile they ran. At the end of the year, they’d earned 250 books. That’s what I call a win-win situation.

Learn more
- Follow the link in the New York Times article to the “Shape of the Nation” report.
- The New York Road Runners Club is hosting a Youth Jamboree on Sunday, October 23. The jamboree includes running, jumping, and throwing events and is open to all children in kindergarten through 8th grade and their families. No experience is necessary.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Best Fall Hikes with Kids: Mt. Cardigan

2011-10-20T20:00:00.002-04:00

We started seeing cars on both sides of the road more than a mile from the trailhead. “This doesn’t look good,” I said to Ursula. In the other car, behind us, Jim was saying to our friend Andrea, “I’ve never seen it this crowded on Cardigan.”

But then, maybe we’d never tried to hike up Mt. Cardigan’s west side on an October weekend, particularly during a fall that’s had more than its share of rainy days. It doesn’t help — that is, when you’re trying to park with a car stuffed with restless children — that Mt. Cardigan, in central New Hampshire, is a famously easy hike with a big reward.

The view from Cardigan’s 3,155-foot summit, thanks to a fire that swept over it in 1855, is far more expansive than it has a right to be. The exposed granite and scrubby alpine vegetation is more typical of the much higher alpine zone of the White Mountains. Even better, on our side of the mountain (AMC’s Cardigan Lodge is located on the opposite, eastern, side), a long access road climbs to a parking area just a mile and a half from the summit, creating a hike that’s just right for families with young kids.

Oh yes, the parking area. It was beyond full when we arrived on Saturday afternoon, but two cars pulled out moments later. As we set off up the mountain — our two kids and four of their friends, ranging in age from 7 to 13, plus three adults — we met a stream of hikers coming back down.

A couple of things stood out on the hike. For one, the wide age range and the presence of friends totally mixed up the usual sibling dynamics. All the way up, the kids moved together as a pack or split into groups, the older ones looking after the younger ones and urging them on, or “competing” in teams, the younger ones hurrying to keep up.

For another, no one hurried. We three parents knew that we had more than enough time to reach the summit and get back to the cars before nightfall. No one had homework or a sports practice to get to. We noticed that the higher we hiked, the more the kids seemed to let their imaginations run. They stopped and explored colorful leaves. They found hiding places off the trail to jump out and surprise whoever was coming up. They built dams to re-direct small rivulets — it had been raining a lot. They called one trickle the Nile and named the dirt and gravel that fanned out from it the Nile delta. They created a “no-touching-leaves-on-the-trail” game — and, on top of the wind-blown summit, yelled, “I see Greece!” “I see California!” “I see Rome!” guessing at the directions they faced on the compass as they yelled.

While we were on the summit, a brief, fast-moving rain shower left dramatic dark clouds and open sky and a startling rainbow. We didn’t notice, right away, that all of the day’s crowd had left by then. We had the place to ourselves.

Learn more
... about AMC's Cardigan Lodge. Fall and winter service runs from October 23 to December 31.
... about other great fall hikes with children.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Best Fall Hikes with Kids: Sunset Ledge on Vermont’s Long Trail

2011-10-13T20:00:00.002-04:00

An occupational hazard of writing this blog is that no matter where I go, I think about kids in the outdoors. This past weekend, for example, we attended a wedding in Waitsfield, Vermont. Before we left home, I was mostly concerned that we’d packed our wedding best and knew where we were going.

Our first morning in the Green Mountains, though, I realized that we had enough time before the ceremony for a short family hike. While other guests quizzed our innkeepers on the best places to shop or to see fall colors, I asked a father sitting with his 9-year-old son at the table next to ours — the two of them up from Philadelphia on an annual hiking trip — for recommendations.

I’d asked the right guy: Jim, the dad, had spent childhood vacations nearby, and had continued the tradition with his own family. He and his son, A.J., seemed to know every trail in the area, from woodland rambles along the Mad River outside Warren (the trail starts at the airport, where you might see gliders take off, soar, and land) to longer and steeper climbs. I didn’t think we could squeeze in a 6-mile roundtrip climb of General Stark Mountain, but I was pleased that he thought we might.

“What about a ridgeline walk?” I asked.

“Ah! Then what you want is Sunset Ledge on the Long Trail,” he replied. We were to follow the north-south highway, Vermont Route 100, to the turn-off to Warren’s village center — where, he suggested, we could stock up on food for the trail at the general store. Just past the turn-off to Warren, heading south on Route 100, he told us to look for a sign to Lincoln Gap, and to follow that road west to the top of the ridge. “Even if you miss the trail signs for the Long Trail and Sunset Ledge,” he said, “you won’t miss the cars.”

We followed his directions exactly, buying apples and drinks at the general store, then driving the steep and narrow road up through one of the famous gaps in the Green Mountains between eastern and western Vermont. Jim was right about the cars: They were pulled in every which way on both side of the road. We wiggled ours into a space, then left the road for the woods, following the Long Trail and the ridge south. The morning sun filtered through the hardwoods and still gave off enough heat to warm patches of trail shaded by hemlock and spruce.

Virgil started a new version of Trailside Olympics, counting push-ups and sit-ups, before deciding that he’d rather duel with his father using long sticks for swords. Ursula and I tried to jump from rock to rock along the trail. Another family passed us on the trail, and I heard the dad say to his daughter, “I used to play that game! We called it Hot Lava.” We hadn’t been calling it anything, but now every step became a matter of life and fiery death. After I fell into the lava, I began another life as Ursula’s rock assistant, carrying a portable landing spot in each hand.

Sunset Ledge, appropriately named, faced west into the wide Champlain Valley. The view stretched across Vermont’s vibrant orange and red foliage into New York, to the high blue peaks of the distant Adirondacks. Other families joined us on the warm rock and soaked up the view.

The hike took less than an hour in both directions. It was enough, though, to make us feel that we’d traveled far, seen amazing sights, and performed great feats. At the wedding that evening, a woman we didn’t know came up to us and said, “Hot lava! Hot lava!” She recognized us from the trail — her husband had given our game its name.

Learn more
- Learn about classic fall family hikes in the White Mountains, Berkshires, Connecticut, the Hudson Valley and Catskills, and near Boston.
- Discover great hikes for families from Yankee magazine’s 2010 “Top 25 Foliage Towns.”
- Other hikes in the Mad River Valley

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

“Take Congress Camping”: Ideas from the Outdoor Nation Youth Summit

2011-10-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, Emilie Colby attended an Outdoor Nation Youth Summit in Minneapolis. Outdoor Nation is a youth outreach effort started a year ago by the Outdoor Foundation, a nonprofit established by the Outdoor Industry Association. The 20-year-old college student had heard that the organization was looking for ideas to fund, and she had one.

It had started as a joke. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we took Congress camping?” Colby had asked other young activists who wanted to show lawmakers the importance of reconnecting America’s kids with the outdoors. “Emails can be deleted and dismissed,” she said. “With petitions you just tack your name on to a form letter.” But if you could talk to, say, Nancy Pelosi around a campfire….

That joke became the “Take Congress Camping” kit — a sealed plastic bag stuffed with postcards, crayons, and suggestions for personalizing comments to legislators — and one of 20 pilot projects given $2,500 in seed money by the Outdoor Foundation.

The pilot projects fall into three categories — mentoring, access, and engagement — outlined in the America’s Great Outdoors report published earlier this year. Several mentoring projects connect collegiate outdoor recreation programs with nearby K-12 schools. One access project works with outdoor specialty retailers to bring outdoor gear to under-served communities. Some of the engagement projects will focus on one neighborhood, while others, like Colby’s “Take Congress Camping” project, will target youth around the country.

Colby’s joke has translated into reality. This fall, she returned to New England, where she first learned to hike, ski, and paddle. She’s staying in touch with her far-flung project team as they refine their pilot season. Colby won’t be roasting marshmallows over a campfire with legislators, at least not yet, but those lawmakers will be hearing from her — and, she hopes, thousands of other young people — over the coming year.

Learn more
- “Take Congress Camping” and other Outdoor Nation grants
- America’s Great Outdoors Initiative and report

Photo: Outdoor Nation youth ambassadors at the White House Council for Environmental Equality.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

David Queeley: the not-impossible job of getting 500,000 kids into the outdoors

2011-10-06T20:00:00.002-04:00

In August 2011, David T. Queeley joined AMC as Vice President for Outdoor Engagement. In the newly created position, he will oversee AMC's current and future outdoor engagement programs, including its Youth Opportunities Program for urban and at-risk youth; its "A Mountain Classroom" school program; guided backcountry Teen Wilderness Adventures; and youth and family programming at AMC huts and lodges. He'll also spearhead new efforts to create local community partnerships and diversify youth and family participation. Currently, AMC programs reach some 40,000 young people in the Northeast. Dave will be directly responsible for leading AMC's efforts to raise that number to 500,000 over the next decade, a key component of AMC's Vision 2020 strategy.

In his own words, Dave talks about the path that has led him to his new job, and the mission that drives him.

"When I was in first grade, we moved from Dorchester to Sharon, Mass., and my life changed from an asphalt existence to a wooded, leafy, suburban one. I spent a lot of time outside. There were woods all around, a pond behind our house that we skated on in the winter, a couple of nearby camps, and a blueberry farm."

"My parents saw the value of getting outdoors. My mother was always saying to me, 'Go outside! Go outside!' One of our first family trips was to Dolly Copp campground in the White Mountains, when I was about 10 years old. My brother and I were so excited that we figured out how to put up the tent before our father did. I saw someone fly-fishing for the first time there; even though it took me years to get around to trying it, it's now one of my favorite pastimes.

"I began to think that I'd like to pursue a career in the environment if I could combine my passion for the outdoors with work. With my first serious money, right out of high school, I bought a tent, an orange A-frame Eureka, and took it on a trip to the Grand Tetons. In college, at Wesleyan, I went on my first winter camping trip, near Lake Placid. We had no real clue: I wore corduroy overalls, a flannel cotton shirt, and suede leather boots, that froze up during the night because I didn't know to keep them inside my sleeping bag."

"I look back and can see that although my early jobs appeared somewhat disconnected from one another, all gave me skills that built toward the career I now have. I was inspired by the environmental movement of the '60s and '70s, specifically by Jacques Cousteau. The first career I pursued was marine biology, but my first jobs in that field involved a lot of rote lab work. That didn't fit my romantic vision of being another Cousteau.

"I then took a job as a science teaching intern at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California, which had an outstanding environmental education program that included rock climbing and hiking. Experiential learning got many of the kids to open up in new ways—and it enhanced their classroom learning.

"From there I worked for the state of Massachusetts managing a grant program that gave money to cities to create, repair, enhance, and maintain parks and playgrounds. I gained an understanding of how state and municipal budgets work, as well as how government can improve access to green spaces for children and families, especially in urban areas. Then I worked as a planner for what became the Department of Conservation and Recreation, where I oversaw a lengthy process to develop a master plan for the Neponset River from Mattapan into Dorchester, which had been terribly neglected. We ended up converting an old railway line into a greenway and converted a landfill into a park. It's been a great success story."

"After working in government for many years, I realized that local and regional environmental groups were also becoming more interested in urban work and in reaching new constituencies. Mass Audubon was creating a new nature center right in the middle of Boston. I thought, I have to have that job. I was the first director of the Boston Nature Center. I lived on the site—72 acres, including what at one time was the largest community garden in the country. Some mornings I'd even have a wild turkey on my front porch.

"I went to New York City for a couple of years to work with the Prospect Park Alliance, then returned to Boston and ran the Trust for Public Land's Parks for People program in New England. We worked on green spaces in Providence, Stamford, and Portland, Maine, and built a playground in Dorchester. The parks, greenways, and playgrounds we created made life better in those urban communities. I realized that making a difference in people's lives had to be an essential part of my work going forward."

"I heard about the new position at AMC. I'd been an AMC member off and on for many years. I often go backcountry skiing at Cardigan. I sea kayak and hike, and of course I fly-fish. Being an AMC member has been a very positive experience for me personally. And I knew of AMC as a well-run organization. People rang me up, emailed me. 'That's you!' they said. The new position seemed like an especially good fit for my eclectic background."

"AMC's president, Andy Falender, tells me I've taken on an 'impossible' job [of getting 500,000 kids outside by 2020]. I disagree. It's true that there are many moving parts. But it's a challenge, not an impossibility, to make seemingly disparate things come together. I've done a lot of that in my life. Another thing about me: I don't give up. I'll keep going until I figure something out."

"My main focus in the new job is to follow through on the goals laid out in Vision 2020. I want to reach 200,000 kids directly over the next decade, which means getting many more families engaged with AMC and increasing the diversity of kids and families in AMC. Reaching out is critical to the future of the organization. If our message is already reaching the converted, then who else can we reach, and how do we go about doing that? We need to reach more people where they are.

"We also want to work with the chapters to help us expand our audience. We need to hear from those chapters that have created successful family programs, and learn from them. It will be important to give chapters the resources they need, whether that's training or assistance or helping them enter into creative partnerships."

"Given the current economy and our concern for the environment, the question arises: Rather than ask people to travel, how do we do more right where people are? We'll be looking for population centers where we can have a big impact. We also have to use and market our resources differently. I think Cardigan Lodge may be an underused resource, as are Noble View, Mohican Outdoor Center, and Ponkapoag Camp. These are great places to introduce kids and families to the outdoors. We're hoping to bring in more kids, programs, and families from nearby population centers, like Springfield, Holyoke, and Pittsfield for Noble View and the greater Boston area for Ponkapoag, to use these facilities."

"Louv's theory of nature-deficit disorder is true. I've seen what happens when kids don't get outside: There's a whole generation of kids joined at the hip with technology. We have something deeper, and more real, to offer the younger generation."

"Kids in urban areas without backyards need access to the outdoors. Kids need to be connected to nature. I can't tell you how many kids I've met who don't know where the water that flows out of their taps comes from, or that the food in their supermarkets comes from farms. They need to connect on that very basic level. If they don't, we are all in trouble."

"At Pinkham recently, I watched a father and son coming back from a long trip. I heard a young couple yell, 'We made it to base camp!' as they arrived in the parking lot. Another young man was just coming back from what looked like a night or two out. To a person they were all beaming and happy to be there. They exuded a sense of being home in the outdoors. If AMC can instill that sense in all the kids and families who don't have it right now, I'll be doing my job."

Learn more
- Vision 2020: A trail map for the next decade. (Don't miss the links to the AMC Commitment to Youth fact sheet at the bottom of the page.)
- Video: AMC's Youth Programs

- Tips for getting kids outdoors

Interview by Kristen Laine. Photo credit Megan Begley.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Wild Play: Parenting Adventures in the Great Outdoors

2011-09-29T19:43:00.003-04:00

If the phrase “parenting memoir” brings to mind tiger mothers and hipster fathers or over-the-top over-sharing on bringing up baby, then you might be misled by a new title in that genre. Luckily, the subtitle of Wild Play, “Parenting Adventures in the Great Outdoors,” helps put both “Wild” and “Play” in context.

The parent behind Wild Play is David Sobel, a faculty member at Antioch University New England who has done pioneering work in environmental education. Richard Louv drew on Sobel’s ideas about place-based education in Last Child in the Woods, Louv's best-selling indictment of “nature-deficit disorder.” In articles and essays in Orion, Sierra, and other magazines, Sobel has often drawn on his own experiences as a parent, raising a daughter and son in the Monadnock region of southwestern New Hampshire. Wild Play is Sobel’s earnest attempt to consider ideas he’s spent his career working on — principles of children’s development in connection with nature, and strategies for developing those connections — in the light of his own experiences as a father.

Sobel comes across as a loving and devoted father, and as someone who has thought deeply about the value of spending time outdoors throughout one’s life. Within the framework of his own family story, Sobel offers useful ideas for parents who want to create similarly strong attachments in their children.

His description of childhood development in relation to natural metaphors is worth the price of the book. He uses the image of the meadow for the first of three stages in a child’s connection to nature — close to home, safe, small explorations with family nearby. For middle childhood, the metaphor is the forest beyond the meadow. Parents and children may explore the forest together, but children may also, as Sobel writes, “follow secret paths to hidden forts, with their friends or on their own.” For adolescence into young adulthood, the developmental focus shifts to what Sobel calls “the rocky ridge,” a place that includes “boulder caves for secret ceremonies,” steep slopes for risky adventures, and pathways to “the wilderness beyond the ridge” — the adult lives they’ll eventually navigate on their own.

Wild Play gave me specific ideas, too: the value of story-telling in building a lifelong connection between children and the natural world; using treasure and scavenger hunts to develop an awareness of the natural world, not only in early childhood but into adolescence; the notion of islands as “intimate geographies” in which children and families can create full worlds.

I especially took to heart Sobel’s thoughts on a transition that girls often make at the end of middle childhood. He notes that the years leading up to adolescence, roughly ages 10 to 13, can be a time of deep connection with the natural world; in adolescence, girls tend to focus more on new webs of social connections. Sobel thinks that some of the clarity and confidence of late middle childhood can be brought into adolescence by making sure that teenage girls continue to have time alone in nature, separate from the social world of peers.

Sobel makes a disarming admission early on: “I had conscious aims in parenting that dovetailed with my work,” he writes — then adds, “There’s nothing like actual parenting to make theories look foolish.” One of the real-life situations he deals with in the memoir is the break-up of his marriage when his daughter and son are 14 and 12. As someone who writes about my own family’s experiences in the outdoors, I’m sympathetic to Sobel’s desire to keep out of the darker glades of his family’s story or off its steeper, scarier slopes.

At times, though, I wanted him to reflect on what he or his family might have traded off or set aside in pursuing his particular vision of a nature-centered and place-centered childhood. Letting us travel some of his family’s rough spots — rebellions, failures, what a connection to nature couldn’t fix — would have harnessed some of the wild energy that makes memoirs so compelling.

But this is a small quibble about a thoughtful exploration of nature and family, deeply rooted in its northern New England landscape.

Learn more
- Wild Play: Parenting Adventures in the Great Outdoors (Sierra Club Books)

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

FoodCorps on the ground

2011-09-27T16:00:00.000-04:00

Three members of the first class of 50 in the FoodCorps national service program were assigned to work in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Erin Taylor had studied environmental issues and public health at Tufts and helped found Boston Truck Farm, a mobile community farm and education project. Sarah Rubin became interested in issues of food access while studying religion at Oberlin College. After spending a gap year at “Maggie’s Farm,” a farm school in Massachusetts, Grace Cherubino studied human ecology at the College of the Atlantic. FoodCorps members receive a $15,000 living allowance, health insurance, and a $5,500 education award. Perhaps more important, they get the opportunity to learn from people who have been helping create the school-garden movement.

Francey Slater is one of those people. At 30, she’s not even a decade older than Taylor and Rubin, the two FoodCorps members she is supervising in Gloucester. (Cherubino is assigned to the Food Project.) In college, Slater spent a semester in Italy, and fell in love with the food culture there. Back home, Slater became drawn to the question of how food is produced in this country. She worked on an urban farm in Philadelphia with the Urban Nutrition Institute, a joint project of public school and the University of Pennsylvania, and became involved in its education programs. That led to graduate school in education and a short teaching career. Then she found out about CitySprouts. It’s a “marriage of both the worlds I’m interested in, education and growing food,” says Slater.

For the past four years, Slater has worked with CitySprouts in the Cambridge public schools, planting school gardens and developing a garden curriculum alongside classroom teachers. For example, in the spring, fourth-grade math students start weekly measurements of pea plants in the gardens. “They keep track of their measurements, graph them, make predictions about them, develop hypotheses,” says Slater. “A lot goes on, from the simple mechanics of operating a ruler to cognitive processes, taking information and making inferences about what will happen in the future.” But this, says Slater, is where the program gets “a little sly.” While they’re doing math, Slater says, the students are also interacting with the plants, watching them grow, flower, develop pea pods.... and eventually eating the peas. Imagine: A math problem you can snack on when you’re done!

Slater started Rubin and Taylor as garden coordinators in two Gloucester elementary schools, Veterans Memorial and Beeman Memorial. Each young woman spends 4 days a week at her school tending a raised-bed garden and making herself available to teachers and students. They also assist Grace Cherubino, who is helping the Food Project develop after-school programs in the gardens. Slater: “You can’t walk into a school and ask teachers to take on more work. Teachers are really busy and under a huge amount of performance pressure. Their entire day — entire week — is often spoken for several times over.” So Slater was delighted to see how interested the Gloucester teachers were in the new gardens. “We built the gardens one week, and by the next, classes were coming out asking questions, getting tours.”

Slater thinks it’s made a difference that Rubin and Taylor are on the job 30 hours a week. CitySprouts could afford only 10 hours a week for garden coordinators. Being on site 4 full days a week has allowed teachers to connect with the FoodCorps workers and trust that they can rely on them.

There’s another component, as well. Drawing on the experience of the Boston Public Schools’ 3-year Farm to School pilot program, Gloucester is incorporating the garden programs in another classroom — the cafeteria. The schools’ food services department is on board to promote new menu items created from produce grown in the school gardens. Kids who might refuse to eat barley in soup or salad might have a different response, Slater thinks, if they’re able to say, “Oh yeah, we grow that in our garden.”

The school year has just begun, and the three FoodCorps members are on the job until next August. Slater imagines a harvest celebration at the schools — letting kids press apple cider and dishes cooked with vegetables grown in the gardens — before the winter comes. She already knows that next spring will be full of activity: planting new fruit, herb, and flower gardens; building new beds and sheds; more classroom visits and more ways to include the gardens in lesson plans. One thing is clear: Much will be learned.

Learn more
- Read "FoodCorps: Beginning the Food Revolution?" and "The Massachusetts FoodCorps Initiative."

Photo by Erin Taylor.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

The Massachusetts FoodCorps Initiative

2011-09-24T10:26:00.006-04:00

You could say that FoodCorps grew from its grassroots. The seeds of the national service program were sown through many initiatives that have been trying to reframe the relationships that children, families, schools, and communities have with food. Some of those initiatives are already national in scope, such as the National Farm to School Network, which includes the Boston Public Schools. Others work on the state level, while many more focus on specific communities.

The new national service program decided to partner with existing nonprofits in order to leverage their experience. FoodCorps selected partners in 10 states for its inaugural year. In Massachusetts, they chose three organizations — Boston Public Schools, Food Project, and City Sprouts — collaborating as the Massachusetts FoodCorps Initiative.

Each of the three partners brings important experience to the kids-and-food table. Through its Farm to School Initiative, which began in 2008, the Food and Nutrition Services of the Boston Public Schools have incorporated local produce into school lunches. The Food Project engages teens and volunteers in planting and tending gardens around the greater Boston area. In 2010, its twentieth year, the Food Project grew more than a quarter-million pounds of food on more than 40 acres, selling some through community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares and donating thousands of pounds to local shelters. City Sprouts has worked in the Cambridge schools for 10 years to integrate school gardens into the elementary and middle school curriculum.

Six FoodCorps service members were assigned to the Massachusetts initiative: three to the Food Project, two to City Sprouts, and one to the Boston Public Schools. The hope among the partners was that the FoodCorps collaboration would allow each organization to expand its existing work, and also to move onto new ground. If they could bring all their work together — the experience of the Food Project in building and tending community gardens, the experience of City Sprouts in creating school gardens and garden-based lesson plans, and the experience of BPS in bringing fresh and local food to schoolchildren — maybe the changes they’ve sought will happen faster.

“I’d love to look down the road in 3 to 5 years,” says Jay Harrison of the Food Project, “and see kids having healthy snacks and nutritious lunches using food they’ve grown themselves. I’d like to see science, literature, history, math being taught using school gardens; to see kids, their parents, their teachers, and others in their community working together in gardens right where they live.”

This is the second in a series on the FoodCorps national service program in Massachusetts. Next: FoodCorps on the ground in Gloucester.

Learn more
- Read "Food Corps: Beginning the Food Revolution?"
- Learn about the Food Project, City Sprouts, and the Boston Public Schools' Farm-to-School Initiative.

Photo courtesy Massachusetts Food Project.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

FoodCorps: Beginning the Food Revolution?

2011-09-22T20:00:00.002-04:00

Late last month, as the school year was beginning in Massachusetts, 6 young adults prepared for new jobs in Lynn, Gloucester, and Boston. They attended a training and orientation session. Nothing special there, right? However, their employer and the work they were preparing to do are unusual, indeed. They might, in fact, be a way to solve many of the difficult issues surrounding food and childhood.

We know these problems, and know that they’re knotted tightly together: Childhood obesity has more than tripled in 30 years. Many low-income communities are “food deserts,” where healthy food is difficult to find and expensive to buy. Those communities often also lack green spaces where children can safely play and exercise. According to a recent article in TIME magazine, the cost of weight-related health problems is expected to reach $344 billion by 2018.

Enter FoodCorps, a new national service program under the umbrella of AmeriCorps, which provides about a third of its funding. FoodCorps received more than 1,200 applications for its first 50 service positions — making it harder to get into than Harvard, note the program’s organizers.

FoodCorps co-founder Cicely Upton has been working to bring healthier food options to children since college. Directing youth programs at Slow Food USA, she heard from teachers, food professionals, and parents that healthy-food organizers needed to professionalize their work. “We needed to be able to pay people to give it viability,” she told me recently. Recruiting volunteers on college campuses, she kept hearing from students that they were eager to work in this new field, but could find no entry-level jobs. FoodCorps solves both issues simultaneously.

The mission of FoodCorps is as idealistic as you’d expect from a program modeled on the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps — nothing less than to transform the relationship of the nation’s children to food. “We envision a nation of well-nourished children,” says the FoodCorps mission statement — “children who know what healthy food is, how it grows and where it comes from, and who have access to it every day. These children, having grown up in a healthy food environment, will learn better, live longer, and liberate their generation from diet-related disease.”

Six ground troops in the battle for that “healthy food environment” were deployed in Massachusetts this month. They’re working in classrooms, in school gardens, and with community members. In my next post, I’ll describe the organizations that have laid the groundwork for FoodCorps in Massachusetts.

Learn more
... about FoodCorps
... Read about FoodCorps in a New York Times column and in a TIME magazine article.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Sir, the AT cat

2011-09-20T15:48:00.005-04:00

How do you hike the Appalachian Trail with a cat? That question has come up recently following a post about “trail angels” who took in AT thru-hikers during Tropical Storm Irene.

When Irene first started battering central New England, “trail angel” Greg Cook took in a pair of thru-hikers. They stayed with him for five days, until the White Mountain National Forest re-opened. One of the thru-hikers was a 4-month-old cat. Like most thru-hikers, he was known by his trail name, “Sir.” And like many thru-hikers, he traveled especially light — in his case by snuggling into an indentation on top of the backpack carried by his human companion, 23-year-old “Magic Mix.”

During their stay with him and in communication since they’ve returned to the trail, Greg Cook learned some of Magic Mix and Sir’s story. Magic Mix decided to hike the Appalachian Trail after serving five years in the Marines. He started in Georgia alone, but before long yearned for companionship on the trail. At an early trail town, he got online and onto Craiglist, where he found a silky black kitten he promptly named Sir. Magic Mix stayed in town an extra day to get Sir checked out by a veterinarian.

At not even a month old, Sir was young to leave his mother. Maybe this made the kitten cling more tightly to Magic Mix, or maybe being together nearly every minute of every day did it, but by the time the feline and the human reached New Hampshire, they’d developed an unusually strong bond. Sir spent most of his time sitting on his backpack cushion; when he wanted to get down, he nudged Magic Mix with his nose or a paw. They carried some dry food for Sir, but mostly he caught his own — mice and beetles at campsites. The first afternoon they stayed with Cook, Magic Mix went into town without Sir and left his pack on Cook’s back porch; the cat waited patiently in his usual spot for his companion’s return.

“I don’t even like cats,” Cook confesses. “But I fell in love with this cat. I hated to see them leave.”

Cook recently heard from Magic Mix’s mother. The young man and the cat were in Gorham, N.H., hoping to catch a ride to Mount Katahdin, the trail’s end, in Maine. From there, they’d flip-flop, hike back south along the trail, taking advantage of a few extra weeks’ good weather, and complete the trail in New Hampshire. There was every chance, though, that they’d run out of hiking season altogether and be forced to finish the trail another year.

It was a change from Magic Mix’s earlier single-minded focus on completing the AT in a single season. “At the beginning of the trip I’d hike in extreme heat and rain,” he wrote his mother in an email. But now that he had Sir, he didn’t want to subject the cat to such weather. He’d also needed to leave the trail for vet visits and to get the cat neutered. The weather, “which refuses to give us more than three decent hiking days in a row,” had also added to the “forced zero” mileage days.

“Still,” he wrote his mother, “I would rather come home without finishing the AT and have Sir than have never gotten him and completed the trail.”

Learn more
- Read "Trail Angels shelter AT thru-hikers during Irene".

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Quests and Geocaches

2011-09-13T16:00:00.000-04:00

Letterboxing, questing, and geocaching are different takes on a similar theme: treasure hunting in the outdoors. Each form combines the art of navigation with puzzle solving, in which participants follow clues to reach a special spot—and, often, a special reward. The navigation can rely on simple, handwritten notes or clever riddles, or on the standard orienteering tools of map and compass, or on expensive high-tech GPS systems. The thrill of discovery is the same.

Letterboxing, the earliest of the forms, began in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Hidden letterboxes usually contain a notebook and a rubber stamp. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox's stamp in their personal notebook or on a postcard, and leave proof of their success with their personal stamp on the letterbox's logbook.

The first public questing program in this country got off the ground in the mid-1990s in the Upper Connecticut River Valley around Hanover, N.H. "Valley Quest" took the letterbox idea and combined it with clues related to local geography, history, and community lore. "It was like peak-bagging for kids," says Delia Clark, one of the organizers and a member of AMC's board of directors. "They'd say, 'I want to get 20 different ones!' Without being aware of it, they were learning at the same time."

The idea has caught on. Today, you can find more than 200 quests across just New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Many of them are educational, tied to Colonial or Civil War history, for instance, with clues scattered throughout cemeteries and villages.

Clark offers these tips to families interested in questing:

1. Have children choose individualized rubber stamps before they start their quest.
2. Engage them in the stories behind quests and caches.
3. Ask questions: If you could make a quest, what would you do?
4. Create your own. Back yard or neighborhood quests can be fun and also less intimidating for very young questers.

"Geocaching" takes the treasure hunting into the twenty-first century by using Global Positioning System, or GPS, devices to search for "caches," durable and waterproof canisters of varying sizes that often contain small trinkets as rewards for finding the cache.

This year, John Lennon, naturalist at AMC's Cardigan Lodge, used geocaching to solve a problem. Two nearby trails were not well used, even though Lennon and other naturalists had created self-guided nature walks along them. He wondered if placing geocaches on those trails would create more interest in them.

Lennon, a professor at Plymouth State University, had created geocaches for his students before by hiding containers (often metal canisters) behind boulders, in the middle of swamps, or in the crooks of trees at specific GPS coordinates. The students then used GPS devices, maps, and compasses to locate the hidden containers. "The skills required mean that geocaching is considered an activity for experienced hikers," Lennon says. "I wanted to see if I could make geocaches for children five years old and younger."

He hid five large wide-mouthed jugs "in plain sight" along the two little-used trails. Each jug contained three sets of nature questions, from easy to hard. An easy question from a jug next to a bog bridge: "What are you standing on that protects the environment? The first word rhymes with 'log' and the second word rhymes with 'fridge.'" Other questions covered map knowledge—"What town in England is at 0 degrees longitude?"—and local wildlife—"Why is summer moose scat different than winter moose scat?"

Lennon has discovered that he can use the "cool new technology" of GPS to draw children and families onto the nature trails. He shows them how to read the devices and starts the search for the geocaches by following the GPS. As they search for the jugs, he demonstrates the limits of the devices and why it's still important to know how to use a map and compass. "GPS devices have only about 30-foot accuracy," he tells his searchers, "so when we get within a hundred feet or so, start using your eyes to look for the cache, or you might walk right by it."

"If I'm really lucky," Lennon says, "my battery runs out while we're searching." Then he can pull out a map of the trail and a compass and use them as back-ups. "You can instantly get your bearing," he says. "And their batteries never wear down."

Lennon also explains to his young geocachers that GPS devices rely on information from other sources. While they may work really well on roads and in towns, the information may not be accurate on a trail or in the woods, away from roads. "That's why you always need to add your own intelligence" to any device, he tells them.

The nature trails at Cardigan Lodge have been much busier this year. Lennon likes to think that some young hikers have a better sense of how to find their way in the woods, as well.

Learn more
- Family and educational quests are available around the AMC region, from Maryland to Maine.
- Find geocache sites around the AMC region or search an international directory of sites.
- Read "Geocaching in Urban Parks" by Alex Schwab (AMC Outdoors, August 2011).
- AMC's Cardigan Lodge and Highland Center offer geocaching as a family activity.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

School Lunches 101

2011-09-08T16:00:00.001-04:00

New pants the next size up, with knees as yet unscraped or torn: Check. New shirts without food stains or pen marks: Check. New pencils, binders, and protractors: Check. New lunch boxes: Nope.

This year, not only did we not buy new lunch boxes for the kids, we didn’t buy any new containers to go in them. Ursula and Virgil will be carrying their lunches to school in the same bags they used last year, and we’ll pack their food in containers that worked for us last year, as well.

If a recent New York Times article is any indication, we are apparently part of a larger eco-trend. That article, “The Plastic Sandwich Bag Flunks,” focused on a trend toward waste-free packaging: out with the Ziplocs and paper bags, in with reusable sandwich and lunch bags.

Two years ago, we started looking at how we packed the kids’ lunches as much as what we put into them. One of our goals was to reduce packaging waste. That meant looking for containers we could use and reuse …. many times over. In that first effort, I bought the following:
- SnackTaxis, reusable snack bags sewn by a cottage company in western Massachusetts and decorated with pandas, beavers, and turtles
- a lunch bag made out of recycled juice boxes by a women’s collective in the Philippines
- stainless steel containers and bottles

When the SnackTaxi bags arrived, the tag contained information that disturbed us all: Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used and discarded worldwide — more than 1 million a minute; more than 100,000 animals in the oceans die after eating discarded plastic bags. We scaled way back on our use of plastic bags of all types and washed and reused those we already had in the house. Our local grocery store also started accepting plastic bags for recycling — all small steps toward decreasing those huge and horrifying numbers.

There was another reason we wanted to change how we packaged our lunches, though —one even more important to us than reducing waste — and that was reducing our overall exposure to potentially toxic plastics: BPA, phthalates, PBDEs, and other endocrine disruptors. I was surprised to see no mention of this issue in the New York Times article, especially as new scientific studies suggest that a much wider range of plastics are endocrine-disruptors than was understood even a few years ago.

Last year, we went to even simpler packaging. While we liked the idea of the SnackTaxi bags, we had trouble keeping them odor-free. Following a tip from a “Great Kids, Great Outdoors” reader, we tried wrapping some food in a cloth napkin and discovered that it worked just fine. For food with more moisture content, we relied on stainless steel “Bento box” containers. We added the following to our collection:
- Pyrex glass bowls in several sizes. The glass is heavy-duty; the lids are plastic, but BPA-free.
- Wide-mouth thermoses for hot soups and leftovers.
- Zippered neoprene bags in bright colors and wild prints to hold everything.
- A thick canvas lunch bag with “L U N C H” in stenciled type across the front that nicely mimics the paper bag of the classic “brown bag” lunch. This became Virgil’s go-to lunch bag. He liked the jokey obviousness of it, and we loved how easy it was to clean.

We know that the kids’ lunches aren’t going to be completely plastic-free, or waste-free. But in the process of trying to give Ursula and Virgil truly healthy lunches, we’ve educated ourselves, too.

Learn more
- about reducing exposure to plastics from the nonprofit organization Healthy Child, Healthy World

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

“Trail Angels” shelter AT thru-hikers during Irene

2011-09-01T16:00:00.001-04:00

We were at the edge of Tropical Storm Irene’s serious flooding last weekend here in west-central New Hampshire. As I write this, water is receding from the streets of the closest town center, though we’ve been told to expect several more days without power at home. Luckily, Howe Library in Hanover, 20 miles away, makes a fine home-office-away-from-home, complete with lights, running water, and Internet access.

I’m not alone in appreciating “The Howe’s” resources (locals invariably add “the” to the library’s name). Late last week, as it became clear that Irene was bringing serious weather our way, even as it was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, the good folks at the Howe worried about one unusual community that the library serves: Appalachian Trail thru-hikers.

The Appalachian Trail runs through Hanover, and I mean right down Main Street, where the lampposts are painted with the AT’s distinctive white trail blazes. It’s common to see backpackers picking up packages from the post office or enjoying a “town day” off the trail.

The town has tried hard in recent years to welcome hikers. Some businesses offer discounts, extra servings, and freebies to thru-hikers. Nowhere is the welcome mat out more prominently, however, than at the library. The library entrance contains a guest book, maps, and a complete guide to the town’s services; inside, below a 15-foot long map of the Appalachian Trail, a bank of computers gives hikers free access to email and the Internet. By season’s end, the map is covered with postcards, pictures, and thank you notes from hikers. Earlier this year, Hanover was named New Hampshire’s first “Appalachian Trail Community.” The celebration was held at the library.

So it made sense, as Irene swept toward New England, that Howe Library became a source of information and a refuge for hikers hoping to get in out of the storm. Librarians posted a notice that local families were opening their homes to stranded hikers and that others were welcome to stay in the town’s community center over the weekend.

The local “trail angel” network kicked in. Greg Cook in Wilder, Vermont, has hiked all 48 4,000-foot peaks in New Hampshire. He keeps track of another, quite possibly more impressive, set of numbers, too — the number of AT hikers he takes in each year. On Friday, as forecasters showed the storm tracking inland over New England, Greg opened his home to Magic Mix (thru-hikers adopt trail names), who was hiking the trail with Sir, his cat. The next day, he took in Frosty and Amber, high school sweethearts from Bangor, Maine, bringing his “trail angel” number to 56. Greg also opens his kitchen to thru-hikers. As the storm moved up from New York, Amber and Frosty prepared pot roast and an enormous salad, Magic Mix made a platter of sausage sandwiches, and Sir made quick work of a can of Fancy Feast.

On Monday, young children, teenagers, retirees, and folks like me looking for a place to plug in and work mingled as usual with thru-hikers. One young woman stood at the row of computers, her pack at her feet. On a bench outside the library, several hikers soaked up the warm sun, their packs beside them. “We were lucky to be here” during the storm, one said. They’d stayed at the community center over the weekend and were awaiting information on conditions farther north along the trail. That came late in the day, with a bulletin saying that the White Mountain National Forest would be closed indefinitely while damage to roads and trails was being assessed.

I stayed in the library that evening until it closed. Another thru-hiker, a compact man with a neat gray beard, walked out the door with me. He told me that the Town of Hanover had extended its offer to house AT hikers through the rest of the week, and that the number of hikers staying there had grown to more than 40. “This is as kind a town as any I’ve been in,” he said. Then he picked up his pack, slung it over his back in one practiced motion, and headed for the shelter.

Learn more
— … about the status of roads and trails in the White Mountain National Forest
— … about the Appalachian Trail around Hanover
— … about flood damage and recovery efforts in Vermont.

Photos courtesy Greg Cook.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Junior Naturalist: Apples

2011-08-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

A is for apple. Considering how easy the apple is — to pick and to eat — it makes sense that so many kids start the alphabet with it. Around the AMC region, apple-growers are readying for this year’s harvest. Local apples are already showing up in grocery stores in the north country.

The apple tree, a member of the rose family, apparently originated thousands of years ago in mountains between modern-day China and Kazakhstan, where it likely became the first tree cultivated by early farmers. (The capital of Kazakhstan comes from the Kazakh word for “apple.”) Alexander the Great is credited with sending dwarf apple trees back to Greece from this region.

Apples arrived in England around the time of the Norman Conquest. Early American colonists brought apple root stock with them when they traveled to the New World. An apple orchard established near Boston in 1625 is said to be the first in North America. Because apples keep well in a cool place, “winter apples” were an important food for early settlers.

Other apple facts:
- Apple trees belong to the rose family. Other deciduous fruit-bearing trees in the rose family are pears, apricots, plums, cherries, and peaches.
- Apple trees are “self-incompatible” — each tree must be cross-pollinated with another in order to develop fruit.
- The crabapple, the only apple tree native to North America, is an important cross-pollinator for trees that will produce table apples.
- More than 2500 apple varieties are grown in United States, out of 7500 varieties worldwide.
- Apples ripen from the outside branches in toward the trunk. A ripe apple can be many colors — green, yellow, and pink, as well as red. A ripe apple should be firm to the touch, and its flesh should be crisp when you bite into it.
- “Johnny Appleseed” — John Chapman — was an actual person, raised on a small farm in Massachusetts. Beginning at age 18, early in the nineteenth century, he traveled to the American frontier, creating apple nurseries and encouraging healthy, simple living. He entered into American folklore partly because of his kind and generous treatment of all living things.

One way to enjoy apple season is to pick your own at a local orchard. Many offer hay rides, apple bobbing, and other family fun. You can find apple-picking options on this online list — alphabetical, of course.

Learn more
… about Johnny Appleseed in the PBS series based on Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Deathslog 2011: 4 boys, their dads, and one awesome(ly long) day in the White Mountains

2011-08-25T11:49:00.007-04:00

The T-shirts were hard to miss. AMC regional director Ruth “Sam” Jamke was volunteering at Madison Spring Hut last weekend when she noticed a man wearing a T-shirt with a map of the Presidential Range on the back. The map was marked by a long, winding route along the range. She saw that a boy was with the man, and that he was wearing the same kind of T-shirt. The command “Hike Fast” ran above the map, “Forget the bears … the hike will probably kill you” below it. Jamke was especially intrigued by words around a smaller image of a hiker on the shirt front: “Deathslog 2011. No crying.”

Then she realized that there were eight of them — four dads, four sons, eight T-shirts — and, judging both from the T-shirt maps and the group’s triumphant expressions, one very long hike.

Scott Switzer, an AMC member since college, was the mastermind behind “Deathslog 2011.” Last year, when Switzer’s oldest son, Liam, was seven years old, they planned a night at Greenleaf Hut with another father and seven-year-old, Derek and Jett Rosner. The first morning of that hike, the hikers woke to a downpour. Switzer thought, “That’s it. We’re done.” But the boys responded to the rain by saying, “Guess we’re wearing our raincoats.” The day cleared, and fathers and sons made such good time that they ate lunch on the summit of Lafayette and were back to the hut by noon. “The kids ate it up,” says Switzer.

Over the winter, Switzer planned another hike, this time in the Presidential Range, extending invitations to other fathers and sons where they lived in West Hartford, Connecticut. A core group of four fathers and four sons emerged. But when Switzer went to make hut reservations in April, he discovered that there was no combination of summer weekends that would allow the group to hike their planned route from Lakes of the Clouds to Madison. There was, however, some room at Mizpah Hut.

Switzer did some quick math: The new route would require them to cover 12 miles on Saturday alone. He remembered how bored Liam and Jett had gotten hanging out at Greenleaf Hut the previous summer and how they’d hiked back to the top of Lafayette that afternoon and down again, just for something to do. He factored in that the boys would be one year older in 2011. Then he made the reservations.

“I knew it would be a slog,” he says. None of the other father-son pairs — Derek and Jett Rosner, Ken and Cole Berko, Doug and Jack Lubin — backed out. No doubt it helped that the four boys knew each other through competing in mini-triathlons. Still, Switzer and the other fathers understood that the hike — not yet called the Deathslog — would require careful preparation. They told the boys, “You’ve gotta be tough. You’re going to wear a pack, you’re going to be hiking uphill. I have to know you can do this, and do it in a reasonable time.”

They organized several spring hikes, including a 12-miler along the Metacomet Trail in Connecticut. To make the hike more challenging, they ran the flat sections, covering the distance in 4½ hours. Switzer held planning sessions and a pre-hike barbeque. On his own, he logged onto the White Mountain Guide Online and fiddled around with a map of their route. When the right weekend in August came around, he stuffed an extra sack into the bottom of his pack.

The T-shirts came out of the pack at breakfast on Saturday morning. By 8 a.m., the group had left Mizpah behind. For the next 12 miles, they’d follow the spine of the Presidential Range over at least a half-dozen summits, including Mount Washington. It quickly became obvious that even their training didn’t quite prepare them for the rocky and uneven terrain. “I’ve planned a lot of trips,” Switzer says, “and walked a lot of ridgelines. But this was unlike any ridgeline I’d ever been on.”

The group stayed close together over the first summits, Pierce, Eisenhower, and Monroe, under clear skies. The weather continued to hold, but as the father-son pairs tackled the massive flanks of Mount Washington, they began to spread out. The “no crying” rule began to be honored more in the breach.

Scott and Liam Switzer climbed Clay after Mount Washington, then imposing Jefferson. Liam had been hiking all day with a cast on his right, dominant arm, the result of a fall from monkey bars. “He had to learn to lean with his left arm,” Switzer says. Scrambling up the rocky ridgeline, sometimes the eight-year-old would bang his cast against a rock: “That hurt.”

Eventually only Mount Adams stood between the Switzers and Madison Spring Hut. Up ahead, the Rosners took the route over the summit. Scott Switzer looked at his son and made a different call. “I didn’t care about that pile of rocks that was 400 feet higher than where we were,” Switzer remembers. “I just thought, ‘My son will lose his mind if we try that.’”

The final mile and a half traversing Adams to the hut was hard enough. Liam was ready to quit, mad at his dad and hurting. Switzer shared some “raw knowledge” with his son: “You can sit down right here,” he told Liam, “but your body’s got to take you to that hut.”

Ken and Cole Berko welcomed the Switzers to Madison. The first arrivers had worked with the hut croo to save dinner for the rest of the Deathsloggers. Once Liam had collected “about four loaves of fresh bread, an entire pot of lentil soup,” turkey and all the fixings, plus a foot massage, his mood improved. And when the boys saw their beds in Madison’s loft bunkroom, Switzer says, “all was forgotten.” The next morning, all four were ready to hike up Mount Madison and down to Pinkham — and even said they wanted to do the Deathslog again.

Switzer, however, is promising no slog next year. “I’m thinking of taking four days, maybe even a week, to go from Zealand to Greenleaf,” he says. “This year, we had to keep moving. I’d like to make more time for lingering.”

I wonder what the T-shirt will say for that one.

Learn more
- … about the Metacomet Trail
- … about AMC’s White Mountain huts and lodges
- … about the White Mountain Guide Online.

Photos, top to bottom: Ken Berko, modeling the "Deathslog T-shirt. Setting out from Pierce. Deathsloggers on Eisenhower: (back row, L to R) Doug Lubin, Derek Rosner, Scott Switzer, Ken Berko; (front row, L to R) Jack Lubin, Cole Berko, Jett Rosner, Liam Switzer. Liam Switzer and Cole Berko on Jefferson. Courtesy Sam Jamke and Scott Switzer.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Swinger of Birches

2011-08-23T16:00:00.001-04:00

“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” The last line in Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches,” came to me yesterday as I watched Ursula climb the trees down by the pond — two trees, actually, side by side at the water’s edge and not more than two feet apart at the base. They’re maple, not birch, I believe, but young and supple like birch, with upward-pointing branches spaced just far enough apart for a growing girl to climb.

Ursula has pulled herself into their lower branches for several years now. But yesterday while I watched from the house, she ascended well above her usual perch, threading back and forth between the two trunks. I’d look out and see her walking up the right tree almost in a layback, a climber’s move. A while later, I noticed her stretched to her full length in the left tree, reaching up for another branch. All afternoon, she climbed up and down and between those two trees. At one point, I saw her striding across the field between the pond and the house with slings and a pulley in one hand. Soon she had them arranged in the trees, as well.

Ursula and I are spending the last week of true summer here at the pond while Jim and Virgil are away. (Any child will tell you that in spite of what the calendar says, summer ends when school starts.) I’d asked her yesterday morning if she wanted to invite a friend over for the day or even overnight. “I don’t know, maybe, I can’t decide,” she’d cried. And then I saw her in the trees.

Eventually she climbed so high that my mother’s heart rose, too, and constricted. She reached the smallest branches, close enough to the tips of the trees that they were no longer obscured by the fullness further down, and thin enough to make good switches. The trunks tapered to similar slenderness and seemed to sway downward under Ursula’s weight, slight as she is. I watched her for a long while, needing to be sure she was safe. And then I simply watched for the pleasure of watching her bend those trees, and bend herself to them.

When she finally came in, it was nearly dinner time. The light slanted onto the pond through Ursula’s trees, silvering the undersides of their leaves as they lifted in the breeze. She, too, was radiant.

In “Birches,” the poet comes upon birch trees that have been bent to the ground by ice. He imagines instead that a boy has bent them —

As he went out and in to fetch the cows —
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Such a boy, or girl, would learn “all there was to learn about not launching out too soon” about climbing carefully, “with the same pains you use to fill a cup up to the brim, and even above the brim.” The poet lets the imagined boy follow his desire, flinging himself outward on one of those slender saplings, “feet first, with a swish, kicking his way down through the air to the ground.”

I know without asking that Ursula understands exactly what Robert Frost meant when he said he’d like to

climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.

She knows, too, that on some days at the end of summer, one can do no better than be a swinger of birches.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Our Teen Adventure: Picking up

2011-08-20T11:00:00.001-04:00

“You’ll probably want to drive with your windows down,” one of the instructors called after us with a laugh. We’d just picked up Ursula at the conclusion of her Teen Wilderness Adventure and had turned to walk back to our car. Our friends Chris and Patty were with us; their daughters Sarah and Rita had also joined the week-plus backpacking and rock-climbing adventure in the White Mountains.

It was true: The girls gave off a robust fragrance. But what the instructors might not have realized is that being the parents of teenagers can require a sleuth’s skills, and that even the smell of sweat and wet socks can provide clues.

When Jim and I had first arrived at our pick-up spot behind the Pinkham Notch Visitor Center, Rita and Sarah had come over right away to give us big hugs. But Ursula had stayed where she was, shaking her head and rolling her eyes at us, to make sure we got the message. “Don’t take it personally,” Patty said to me. “Rita wouldn’t hug me, either.”

The trip instructors had asked the eight teenagers on the trip to help clean and put away the group gear. As those chores wound down, our three girls joined a boy who had unfolded a map of the Presidential Range on a picnic table and was trying to ink in their hiking route. We parents sidled in closer, detectives working the shadows. Ursula excitedly pointed out a cut-off they’d taken near Mount Adams. Rita confirmed a side trip to Madison Hut for water. And thus we learned that the group had stood on the summits of at least four of the White Mountain’s tallest peaks, had hiked over the summit of Mt. Washington in the clouds, that early in the week they’d retreated below treeline when a storm rolled through, and that they’d also climbed four (or was it six?) pitches of technical rock to the top of Whitehorse Ledge.

Who knows how long it might have been before one of them admitted to a parent that she’d enjoyed her trip? It was obvious, though, listening to them, that they’d had fun, that they’d worked well together, and were proud of what they’d accomplished. They seemed to wear their ripe aroma like a badge of honor.

Truth is, none of us minded the smell. Chris and Patty had powered up and down Boott Spur that morning, and Jim and I were coming off an ambitious two-night loop through the Pemi. The girls were out ahead of us, striding toward the parking lot and already conferring about ice cream and lemonade. Patty called back to the instructors, “That’s OK — we all need the windows down.”

Learn more
- Read “Our Teen Adventure: Packing to go.”
- Read “AMC’s Teen Wilderness Adventures: A Parents’ Primer.”

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Jumping equals fun

2011-08-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

Virgil has made a leap this summer — literally, and, for me, somewhat frighteningly. Just shy of his ninth birthday, he has improved enough as a swimmer that we’ve allowed him to jump by himself into deep water. It’s a moment that comes sooner or later to every parent when, despite your fears and concerns, you let your child get in over his head.

It happened this past weekend, on one day, and at two great swimming holes. On Saturday, after Jim and Virgil dropped off Ursula for her week of hiking and climbing, they headed over to Evans Notch and the deep green water of Emerald Pool. Virgil immediately asked if he could jump off the high ledge. Jim said no, that first he needed to try the lower bench on the opposite side of the pool. Virgil crossed and jumped in from there, to Jim treading water below just in case the ice-cold water or the surprise of the impact made Virgil lose his confidence or his equilibrium. He lost neither, and insisted on the high ledge. Jim let him jump from there, too — again, while he waited below in the pool, just in case. After that, the two of them jumped in together, then Virgil alone, as Jim stood watching from the shore. That was the moment, Jim said.

My chance to experience Virgil’s leap came later that afternoon when we met at another of our favorite watery places, Sculptured Rocks in Groton, N.H. I hadn’t seen Virgil’s success at Emerald Pool, so I insisted that Jim wait in the water while Virgil took the 15-foot plunge. Virgil popped back up like a cork. After seeing his ease, and his delight in what he’d done, I plunged down after him. Finally he jumped out from the ledge while both of us watched from the rocks. He’s still not as strong a swimmer as he’ll need to be, but he’s made a rite of passage.

At both swimming holes, Jim and I saw swimmers approach the lips of the high ledges and back away, or close their eyes and collect themselves for long minutes before daring to take the plunge. We asked Virgil later if he was nervous jumping from so high above the water. “No,” he said. “Jumping equals fun. Hesitation equals not jumping. Therefore hesitation equals not fun.”

That joyful lack of fear is a wonderful part of Virgil’s personality, but it’s also made us want to be extra careful with him around water. He has made a leap this summer. When he adds a coefficient of safety to his formula for fun, we’ll know he’s truly ready to jump on his own.

Learn more
- Read "Summer Tips: Water Safety" in Great Kids, Great Outdoors.
- Read "Swimming Holes: Emerald Pool" in Great Kids, Great Outdoors.
- Learn about Sculptured Rocks Geologic Site State Park

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Free Fridays and Other Summer Deals for Families

2011-08-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

Summer is winding down, but there’s still time to explore free activities in cities around the AMC region, whether they’re near where you live, coincide with places your family is traveling, or give you an idea for one last trip before school starts again.

Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, the Highland Street Foundation has collaborated with cultural organizations around the state to offer nine “Free Fun Fridays” during the summer. Three such Fridays are left. On August 12, free events are being held in Boston’s Arnold Arboretum, Stoneham’s Stone Zoo, and the JFK Library and Museum. That evening, all 14,000 lawn tickets to an evening performance at Tanglewood in Lenox are free, thanks to the foundation.

The final two weekends in August showcase events from Worcester to Watertown and Stockbridge to Springfield. On Friday, August 19, the foundation has arranged for free ferry travel to the two most popular Boston Harbor Islands, Georges Island and Spectacle Island. Tickets are distributed on a first-come first-served basis at Long Wharf-North, near the Aquarium subway station, beginning at 6:30 am. Check the website for specifics on this and other Free Fun Friday events.

New York City. The Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden are free to the public every Wednesday. The Botanical Garden is also free on Saturday mornings, from 10 a.m. to noon. On the third Friday of each month, from 6 pm to 8:45 pm, the South Street Seaport Museum offers free admission, which includes the chance to board the historic schooner Pioneer. Or take the free Staten Island Ferry for a maritime tour of the city. Several New York City parks and museums are always free: the National Museum of the American Indian; Federal Hall, called the “birthplace of American government,”; Castle Clinton National Monument, with its head-on view of Ellis Island and park ranger talks; Jones Beach State Park, with 7 miles of sandy beaches for swimming and wading; and there’s always Central Park.

Philadelphia. The Philly Fun Guide lists events in the Philadelphia area, many of which are family-friendly and free. Take a guided nature hike at Briar Bush Nature Center or visit a traveling Civil War Road Show and History Fair from August 12-14.

Baltimore. Walk or bike on the 15-mile Gwynns Falls Trail. The trail follows a green space and park system originally planned in 1904 by the Olmsted Brothers, successors to the nation’s first landscape architect firm started by their father, Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted. Take a self-guided tour of Baltimore’s many public monuments, which depict such people as Frederick Douglass, Babe Ruth, and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as sea urchins, boy scouts, and “the spirit of music.” Or take a free harbor taxi, the Harbor Connector. Start at the Frederick Douglass – Isaac Myers Maritime Museum in Fell’s Point (admission fees) and travel to the Tide Point Pier.

Washington, D.C. Many residents and tourists know about the extensive free museums and other national attractions in Washington, D.C. Two free activities that feature the outdoors: walk or bike the C & O Canal Towpath, which follows along the shore of the Potomac from Georgetown to Cumberland, M.D.; browse the farmers’ market in Dupont Circle on Sundays from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Do you have a favorite free summer activity to share? Add it here!

Photo: Georges Island in Boston Harbor.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Training Natural Leaders

2011-08-09T16:00:00.000-04:00

How do you help create the next generation of environmental stewards? It's a question that Judy Silverberg and others have been trying to answer for several years—a question made both more difficult and more urgent by the knowledge that today's youth increasingly lack a strong connection to the outdoors.

In 2006, Silverberg, head of wildlife education at New Hampshire Fish and Game, read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. Convinced by Louv's argument that the nation's children suffered from "nature-deficit disorder," the environmental educator helped found the NH Children in Nature Coalition, which became a part of Louv's national Children and Nature Network. The next year, members of the NH Children in Nature Coalition, including Silverberg, met with Louv to brainstorm how to develop emerging "natural leaders" in the state—teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 who would help other youth connect with the natural world. In their conversations, the group realized that 12 of the 14 people on the board had attended conservation camp as teenagers—an experience that had been instrumental in guiding them toward environmental careers.

It's no surprise, then, that the first New Hampshire Natural Leaders program, in 2009, started off with an intensive summer camp. The Natural Leaders program has changed in other ways since that beginning, but the camp experience remains key. For the 2011 program, nine teenagers from around the state converged on Barry Conservation Camp in Berlin in late June for a week of outdoor activities, leadership development, and hands-on exploration of career opportunities in the outdoors.

The weeklong camp included hiking into the Presidential Range and spending the night at AMC's Lakes of the Clouds Hut. It was the first time that 14-year-old Elena Mednick, from Nelson, and 15-year-old Travis Akerstrom, from Canterbury, had traveled to the White Mountains. The weather didn't cooperate for a planned summit of Mount Washington, but the group did reach the top of Mount Monroe—Akerstrom's first 4,000-footer. Even before the week ended, the teen was making plans to return to the Presidentials for another attempt on Mount Washington.

This year's camp was strongly focused on introducing the young "natural leaders" to career options in the outdoors. The group toured a fish hatchery and participated in an "electro-fishing" exercise with a Fish and Game biologist one day, and learned how to identify trees and determine timber yields from a forester the next day. (Several state agencies, including NH Fish and Game, NH Department of Environmental Services, and UNH Cooperative Extension, joined the Appalachian Mountain Club and other organizations to provide program instruction and support.) Akerstrom, who wants to become a wildlife biologist or conservation officer, especially appreciated the sneak preview of a potential career. "At my school, they don't teach you that much about the outdoors," he said. During the camp he also learned about wildlife ("I had no idea there were so many small animals in the woods!") and the effects of climate change on New Hampshire's forests. "Did you know that a plasma TV uses almost as much electricity plugged in as it does turned on?" Akerstrom asked, following the camp. "I'm definitely telling my friends about that."

Three years in, Silverberg and the other program leaders are still trying to determine the best way to develop the next generation of "natural leaders." The program wants to reach motivated teenagers, inspire and teach them, and give them the tools to go back into their communities and make a difference. Those running the program have discovered that many of the students who are interested in participating are already heavily involved in their communities and schools—and don't have the time to commit to developing year-long service projects, an initial requirement of the Natural Leaders program. Also, many otherwise interested families weren't able to afford an initial $1,500 price tag. This year's formula attempted to address both of these issues.

The current program, at a cost of $575, takes advantage of an affiliation with New Hampshire 4-H Clubs (Camp Barry is a 4-H facility). The scope of the program has similarly scaled back: The teens are given the option to participate in pre-selected service projects in the school year following the camp. The first project, a coastal clean-up day, will be held in September.

At the end of this year's camp, Mednick considered what she'd learned and what she hopes to accomplish as a New Hampshire Natural Leader. "I want to try to get outside more," she said. "I know I want to help other people learn more about the environment and global warming," she added, "but I don’t know exactly how to do that. It seems kind of hard."

Learn more
One of the initiatives of the Children and Nature Network is to build a national Natural Leaders Network. The network has organized an annual Natural Leaders Day and created a toolkit to help young people around the country create the next generation of "natural leaders."

Photo: 2009 Natural Leaders explore a seacoast tide pool. Courtesy NH Fish & Game.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Our Teen Adventure: Packing to go

2011-08-06T11:00:00.000-04:00

Ursula’s new backpack leans against her bed, its top opened wide. All its 6.5 liters of volume are empty at the moment — the long underwear, socks, hiking boots, rain gear, and mess kit that will fill it still scattered about her bedroom. I’ve promised Ursula that I’ll finish packing today while she’s 20 miles away, preparing for a circus show tonight. Early tomorrow morning, we’ll deliver her to her first Teen Wilderness Adventure.

It’s already been an adventure just getting Ursula ready to go, which is to say that we’ve already been surprised and challenged. Back in January, I had no hesitation about signing her up for the AMC course, 9 days of rock-climbing and backpacking in the White Mountains. She’s always enjoyed our family backpacking trips, and she’s loved learning to climb. We’d just spent a ski weekend with family friends, who were signing up their two daughters for the same adventure. I told her about the course almost in passing, the rightness of it was so obvious to me.

Ursula has turned 13 since I filled out that registration. Over these past months, she’s asked for more responsibility in managing her schoolwork, her activities, and her schedule, and handled it very well. Over that same period of time, she’s complained that I signed her up for the teen adventure without consulting her. She’s hated that I’d treated her like a child.

There are moments in every parent-child relationship that mark a change in its ground rules. This course has been one such marker of change between me and Ursula. Once she made her frustration clear, I apologized and gave her the option of not doing the course. She chose to stay on, but I understand (having been a teenager myself) why she’s had a hard time getting excited about it. I also suspect (having been there before, too) that she may be feeling some anxiety about whether she’ll fit in. That’s a common concern among first-time campers, at AMC as at traditional sleep-away camps, and one that Ursula’s instructors will undoubtedly work to dispel.

I’m holding out hope that she’ll have a great time, for herself. And that the next time she goes on a backpacking trip, she’ll do her own packing.

Learn more
- Read “AMC’s Teen Wilderness Adventures: A Parents’ Primer”

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Teaching kids how to pack

2011-07-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

A young woman stood before a group of children outside a community center in South Royalton, Vermont, and asked them, “Do you like my pack?” It was an extraordinary pack, stuffed to the brim and beyond. A teddy bear peeked out from under the top flap between a fluffy pillow and a yoga mat. A light saber and a big hand mirror stuck out of the pack’s outside pockets.

“Am I ready to go hiking?” she asked the children gathered around her under the shade of several trees. The tall young woman, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, was a summer intern with the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. Together with the nonprofit One Planet, the Trails Alliance was teaching the children what to bring — and not bring — on a hiking trip, including what to wear. Kelen, the intern, wore a flouncy yellow skirt, clutched a straw purse in one hand, and had wrapped a pink feather boa around her neck.

Chances are, none of the children had ever seen a hiker quite like Kelen. Some of the children were just out of kindergarten. Others would soon be starting middle school. But all of them knew when someone needed their help. “No!” they shouted.

At that, Kelen invited each child, one at a time, to come up to the front of the room and get her properly outfitted for hiking. In quick succession, they divested her of the feather boa, the purse, and the yellow skirt, revealing hiking shorts beneath.

Next, they moved on to her giant backpack, choosing which items would go into a smaller daypack. Out went the teddy bear, the yoga mat, and a crazy cornucopia of other items. If something didn’t go in the smaller pack, the child got to hold it on his or her lap. “Why can’t I bring my mirror?” Kelen asked when a small girl shyly pulled it from the side pocket. “How can I fix my makeup without a mirror?” “You don’t need makeup on the trail!” children shouted happily back at her.

The light saber prompted a careful discussion. Several boys made an impassioned pitch for keeping it — it’s light, it’s fun, you could play games with it on the trail — but eventually it, too, was cradled on a child’s lap.

After a time, a small portion of the things Kelen had carried up to the front of the room were neatly packed into the daypack: food and water bottles, raincoat and extra clothes, map and compass, whistle, headlamp. And the children left knowing more about what to bring with them on a hike. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, though, if they found themselves thinking about feather boas and light sabers…

Learn more
- Read “Essential 3-season hiking gear for Northeastern hikes” and “Ten Essentials for a Safe and Pleasant Hike” from AMC Outdoors.

Photo credit: John Taylor, UVTA.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Brown-bag opportunities for young environmentalists

2011-07-26T16:00:00.000-04:00

Wednesday lunches have been particularly filling for young Boston-area environmentalists this summer. For six weeks in a row, starting in mid-June and ending tomorrow, the Environmental League of Massachusetts (ELM) has hosted the Young Environmentalists Program (YEP), a series of brown-bag lunch talks for interns and junior staff to learn from people in the field about environmental policy, advocacy, and the role of government and media in environmental issues.

AMC Conservation communications intern Amanda-Joy Febles and AMC Facilities intern Anne Kirk were among about 20 regular participants in the weekly seminars. “Food bribes us to go,” Febles laughed. She also enjoyed the community feeling that developed among the diverse group over the summer: “You have your woodsy guys with beards, college students, folks getting master’s degrees — even three high school students! There were people right from Boston and from all over the country.”

Febles learned how the series began from Eugenia Gibbons, the staff member at ELM who organized this summer’s series. In 2008, a summer intern told Gibbons that she’d especially appreciated the chance to meet and listen to working experts during her internship. She suggested that the nonprofit craft try to reach more young people with those talks — and the Young Environmentalist Program was born. The first lunch series launched the summer of 2009. Febles felt a certain amount of empowerment, knowing that the program, meant to educate young environmentalists, began from a suggestion by a young environmentalist: “The idea was sparked by someone just like me.” She noted that the series was aimed at an age group that was likely to get involved in environmental issues. It’s happening at a time, she said, when “our passions are just getting ignited.”

The intimate, seminar-style gatherings have encouraged more personal conversations. In a recent talk about Harvard’s sustainability program, Heather Henriksen, Director of Harvard’s Office for Sustainability, explained the path she took to a career in environmental issues — fundraising at Stanford Law School, nine years in marketing at Time-Warner, a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School. Anne Kirk found an interesting generational difference between current leaders like Henriksen, who didn’t start out focusing on the environment, and her own generation, which she sees as being strongly focused on environmental issues.

Kirk, who is studying transportation and planning at Bucknell, looked forward to the series’ final talk — “Walkability,” by Joseph Cutrufo, program coordinator for Walk Boston — on July 27. Kirk had been inspired by Henriksen’s descriptions of how Harvard students became involved in “greening” Harvard’s campus. “As a student, I kept thinking of all I’d like to do back at school,” she said. “It motivated me for when I go back: ‘You need to plant organic grass in the Quad!’” The talk on walkability will no doubt seed more ideas.

For Febles, the lunches have been a great addition to her internship at AMC — and not just because of the food and the company. The conversations have allowed her to see her work for AMC in a fuller context, the speakers have given her role models and a sense of what it takes to make a difference, and the community has given her an instant network of young people who might together make a difference of their own.

Learn more
- The Environmental League of Massachusetts and its Young Environmentalists Program
- Harvard’s Office for Sustainability
- Walk Boston
- AMC Internships

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Visiting the new Madison Spring Hut

2011-07-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

Ursula and Jim took advantage of a run of splendid summer weather earlier this week to hike up to Madison Spring Hut. We’ve been tracking renovations to the nation’s oldest mountain hut since work started last fall. Jim had some work to do up that way, and Ursula needed to break in new hiking boots before her Teen Wilderness Adventures course starts next month.

Ursula wasn’t sure she wanted to give up one of the first unscheduled days she’s had this summer vacation. Circus camp had followed theater camp, which had started immediately after school ended. But the chance to spend uninterrupted time with Jim and the promise to dally in mountain streams on the way back down made the difference, and she was up and ready to go before first light.

By late morning, they were hiking in from the north, off Highway 2. Ursula started out in comfortable school shoes, her new boots tucked in her pack. Numerous trails head up the northern slopes of the Presidential Range. Ursula helped Jim follow the signs for Valley Way, the easiest and most direct trail to the hut, and the most sheltered approach in poor weather. None of that was anywhere in sight, although less than a week earlier, severe thunderstorms had pounded the White Mountains. What was in view much of the way up were other hikers headed for the hut, many of whom were also eager to see its new look.

Four miles and 3,500 feet in elevation gain later, they stood before the hut. The first hut below Mt. Madison, built in 1888, was a modest stone affair that slept 12 hikers. The “new” hut uses part of a larger 1929 footprint and some of its stone walls, but opens up into an entirely new dining room and refashioned sleeping spaces. Inside the new dining room, big windows below a soaring cathedral ceiling looked north and west.

Jim and Ursula ate a late lunch in front of those views and then headed back down the mountain, Ursula now in the new boots. Jim had no trouble keeping to his promise, pulling out his fly rod at each deep hole in Snyder Creek. (A fisherman to the core, he won’t let me divulge any details in print.) Ursula waded in, hiking shorts and all, and left the trail for short sections and followed the stream instead. The last mile or so, she didn’t even bother to put her boots, or her socks, back on.

Two tired and very happy hikers pulled into the driveway later that night. The next day, Ursula slept past noon. Summer’s good…

Learn more
- Read about the Madison Spring Hut renovation and re-opening.
- View a time-lapse video of Madison Hut history and its recent renovation.
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“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Kids and the outdoors at Tanglewood

2011-07-21T20:00:00.000-04:00

When most people think of Tanglewood, the Berkshire summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, they probably think — as I did before I saw it myself — of classical music inside grand performance halls and elegant concert-goers strolling through formal, manicured grounds. “Kids and the outdoors” never crossed my mind.

And so I got more than one unexpected treat when Jim surprised me with an anniversary trip to Tanglewood to picnic on the lawn and see the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Seiji Ozawa Hall.

We arrived as the afternoon light was fading across the hills, showed our tickets at the gate, and carried our picnic basket up a gently sloping hill on Tanglewood’s 120-acre grounds. People were already scattered about the expansive lawn on picnic blankets and around folding tables. We walked to a broad west-facing overlook. The Berkshires spread out around us, bathed in pink and soft orange; behind the setting sun, we could pick out the Taconic range, which marked the near border with New York. Jim set out a checkered blanket and pulled out our picnic dinner.

That’s when I noticed the children. I heard their laughter before I saw six or so kids zig-zagging across an open section of lawn in full-out pursuit of fireflies. I could tell that some were probably quite young, maybe three or four years old. Others had the stretched-out, lean look of teenagers or children on the cusp of adolescence. Their delight carried over on the summer breeze, its own joyous music.

As day turned to dusk, another group of children left a big family group near us and ran over to a grove of trees at the top of the slope. Within moments, they’d climbed into the crooks of trees and onto limbs and were calling to each other from their various perches.

Still others somersaulted and tumbled down an open slope by the performance hall. The more I looked about me, even in the fading light, the more children I saw playing on that broad, inviting lawn. In all, before we were called to take our seats inside, Jim and I counted more than 30 children in the kind of free-form outdoor play that we adults sometimes bemoan as lost to the ages.

I’ve since discovered that Tanglewood makes it easy to bring children to many of its outdoor concerts. The Boston Symphony Orchestra offers free lawn tickets to most shows for children and young people up to and including age 17. Parents or legal guardians can claim up to four free children’s tickets per concert at the box office on the day of the concert. (For the Popular Artist concerts, free tickets are available only for children under the age of two.) At noon on Sundays before afternoon concerts and during the open rehearsals on Saturday morning, Tanglewood also offers supervised musical and crafts activities for children and accompanying adults, also free.

The night that Jim and I were there, many in the audience remained outside, viewing the performance through the hall’s open west end from the sloping lawn. I guess that the children who’d been outside earlier either continued playing quietly during the performance or joined their parents in watching. Perhaps to ensure an attentive audience, Tanglewood doesn’t allow children age 5 and under inside the hall during performances.

This summer marks 75 years since the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first concert in the Berkshires. Jim and I now think of a Tanglewood concert as a great addition to a family weekend in the Berkshires. We’re looking ahead to August 2, to “Tanglewood on Parade” and its fireworks finale, plus a guest astronomer for star-gazing for adults and children and exhibits on the science of music, the sounds of the Sun, and Galileo and his telescope. There’s also the Family Concert on Saturday, August 20, with its $10 tickets for adults and many child-friendly activities.

And all that perfect expanse of grass, inviting us to come out and play.

Learn more
- Tanglewood for Kids
- Look through AMC’s Best Day Hikes in the Berkshires or read these “Great Kids, Great Outdoors” posts for child-friendly hikes near Tanglewood (hikes in Stockbridge and Williamstown).

Photo credit: Steve Rosenthal, Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Blueberry Memories

2011-07-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

Early July — traditionally the Fourth of July — is when wild blueberries come into season around here, replacing wild strawberries like blue follows red in red, white, and blue. Some years we’re able to eat them together with cream and get the full patriotic effect. Blueberries have seemed to arrive late this year, though, either because of the cold, wet spring or because we’ve been too busy to notice them.

Last weekend, Ursula caught a glimpse of something blue in the meadow next to the pond. A moment later, she came running up to the house with ripe wild berries cupped in her palm. That’s all it took to pull out our homemade berry buckets (plastic yogurt containers strung with twine, to allow two-handed picking) and spread out to pick the season’s first blueberries.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading essays by poet Thom Rock that are all about blueberries – how they color our memories of summer, how they connect generations, what they mean to us. He describes picking blueberries alongside his mother as a little boy, the plinking sound of berries hitting the bottom of the pail, the tart sweetness of wild berries — and how, many years after her death, that sound and that taste bring back such intense memories that his mother seems to sit alongside him in the blueberry meadow once again.

My own blueberry memories are of my Finnish grandmother, who stirred fat berries into her pancake batter and baked them into pies, serving up love in berries instead of words. And of my own mother reading me Blueberries for Sal, Robert McCloskey’s tale of two mothers and two young ones, all eating berries on the same hillside one summer’s day. It’s his words I use, even now, for the sound of berries hitting a pail: kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk.

Ursula and Virgil have grown up hearing McCloskey’s story. Rock’s essays taught me a new blueberry story. Certain American Indian traditions say that the Great Spirit sent his people the gift of wild blueberries to feed them when they were starving. “Upon careful inspection of these heavenly gifts,” Rock writes, “a single star could be seen stamped upon each little berry, and from that day on the people called them ‘starberries.’” I’d never really thought about that five-pointed star — all that remains of the flower that begins each berry — but I’ll add the story of its origins to those I tell Ursula and Virgil.

In just a few days, we’ve eaten blueberries plain and with cream and on cereal and ice cream. They’ll soon be in on the south peak of Mt. Cardigan, on the high bushes around our pond, where we can pick them from a canoe, and carpeting our upper meadow.

I agree with Rock: The celestial berries are indeed “a little bit of heaven beneath our feet.”

Learn more
- Read "Strawberry Moon, Moon Magic" in Great Kids, Great Outdoors.
- Learn more about Blueberries for Sal
- Tips on making your own berry-picking pail and picking blueberries

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Fun after dark: 10 activities that even small children will love

2011-07-14T20:00:00.004-04:00

Early childhood is the classic time for being afraid of the dark — and for an interesting reason. Children learn to use their imaginations starting around age two. For several years, their ability to imagine all sorts of things outpaces their ability to distinguish between the real world and the world of make-believe. It’s no wonder that fear so often colors young imaginings at night, which, as Shakespeare said, “cloaks and changes the day.”

Yet that very difference between the known of daylight and night’s unknown opens up a world of new experiences for young children — a world of nighttime sounds and spectacles, of nature perceived differently. Summer is a perfect season for acquainting children with the night and letting their imaginations run wild without straying into darkness.

The following activities allow young children to discover the magic of summer evenings — without being scared of what they find there.

1. Catch fireflies. Watch one light up the space between cupped hands or poke holes in the lid of a glass jar and collect more. Release them in an hour.
2. Listen for owls. It’s been said that while the day has eyes, the night has ears. You’re most likely to hear barred owls — who who, who cooks for you, who cooks for you all? — and barn owls, whose hoot follows a descending scale, in the hour either side of nightfall.
3. Watch a meteor shower. The first two weeks of August bring the year’s best “shooting stars,” the Perseids. Wake up a child between midnight and dawn for the best viewing this year. While you’re waiting for the streak of a meteor across the sky, point out the Big Dipper and Little Dipper.
4. Play flashlight tag. “It” gets the flashlight and counts down from 10 (or, for younger children, calls out the names of everyone playing) while other players scatter. Anyone the flashlight beam lands on is caught.
5. Watch the moon come up. Look through binoculars for “the man in the moon.” Near a lake, river or the ocean, look for the moon’s light trail across the water.
6. Get wet. Zip up life jackets and step into water for a nighttime float. (Parents must accompany children for safety.) Run through sprinklers for a cooling nighttime soak.
7. Build a campfire. Roast marshmallows, tell stories, sing songs. A charcoal grill works equally well as a nighttime hearth.
8. Light up the night. No need to relegate sparklers and glow-sticks to the Fourth of July!
9. Take in an outdoor event at night. Many communities hold evening band concerts, baseball games, and other child-friendly events in lovely green spaces during the summer months. To extend the pleasure, bring a picnic dinner or add a short walk to and from the event.
10. Sleep in a tent. Spending a night in a tent is a big step for young children. Share the night with your child for lasting memories — but be prepared to go inside if your child has had enough excitement for one night.

Children are often afraid of the dark in part because it’s an unknown. Nighttime play can light those dark corners and spark the imagination, all at the same time.

Learn more
— This post was inspired by a request from The Mother Company. Read that article, co-authored with Jennifer Ward, “Facing Fear with Summer Fun After Dark!”

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

The Nature Principle

2011-07-12T16:00:00.001-04:00

Driving back after dropping off Ursula and Virgil at circus camp this morning, I heard Richard Louv on New Hampshire public radio. Louv wrote the international bestseller Last Child in the Woods and gave us the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe an epidemic of disconnection between children and nature.

Louv was on the radio to talk about his newest book, The Nature Principle. The book extends his discussion of nature-deficit disorder to adults — but, as described by Louv on the radio, it adopts a more hopeful tone than his previous book. Louv believes that the twenty-first century will bring a resurgence of human connection to nature.

This optimism surprised me, and surprised Louv’s interviewer, too. By way of explanation, he quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (I’ll have to paraphrase here), who said that people cannot change unless they can see a brighter future. Louv said we need to think about what the future should look like: Do we want a dystopian, “Blade Runner”-type future, he asked, or do we want something else? He encouraged listeners to imagine what a nature-focused future would look like, for families and communities, for cities and nations.

Louv started describing the work being done in some cities to make nature more readily available to more people. He made a case for “button” parks, small green spaces people can “sew into” the urban landscape themselves. My mind, though, lingered on his earlier question. It felt like a challenge. What would I see in a world with better connections between humans and nature?

I’ve written here about my pleasure in living in the midst of wilder nature than existed in this small town when Jim’s mother was growing up down the street, and my gratitude that Ursula and Virgil have developed strong connections to the natural world. In my even better, nature-centric future, we would drive much less than we do now — not just our family in our rural community, but families across the country. We’d have shorter commutes so parents could get home to their children earlier each day. We’d incorporate nature into every school day and across school curriculums. Our roads would be safer, so more children could walk or ride bikes to school. Our governments would regulate chemicals and pollutants to protect us and the environment.

Louv and King were right: I felt more hopeful, even energized, after imagining that better future. What would you put in your better, nature-connected future?

Learn more
- …about The Nature Principle by Richard Louv
- … about Louv’s NHPR interview

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Seashells in Their Pockets: Exploring the seashore with children

2011-07-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

Growing up along the Maine coast, Judith Hansen came to love the smell of salt in the air, the sound of waves against a rocky shore, and the ways of shorebirds and other coastline animals. Even before her son Justin could walk, she introduced him to the same pleasures. "I kept looking for a guidebook that was sturdy enough to take to the beach," she says—and one that followed environmentally sound principles. When she couldn't find any she liked, she decided to write her own guide, and asked her cousin, illustrator Donna Sabaka, to create drawings for it.

The child for whom Judith Hansen wrote that guidebook is now a grown man. AMC first published Seashells in My Pocket in 1988, when Justin was 6. The current third edition describes more than 200 plants, shells, and animals that can be found along the Atlantic coast between Florida and Maine. The final pages still contain a Sea-Searchers Award for children who identify every creature and plant in the book

Close to home, Hansen also observed successful grassroots efforts to conserve an estuary—a place where a river meets the ocean—in Wells, Maine. The wetlands and salt marshes eventually became the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. Hansen added more information to the new edition about protecting the plants and animals of these critical coastline environments.

Adults at the beach, Hansen says, "have a tendency to look out over the water or down at the sand." Going to the beach with children often means exploring smaller places. "It's also fun to sit down and find out how many things you can find in one square foot." Bring magnifying glasses, spoons, and containers along with the beach towels, sunscreen, and water.

Hansen encourages adults to explore the treasures of the sea through a child's eyes:

Tide pools and other small ecosystems. "Tide pools are teeming with life," Hansen says, from water animals so small they can't be seen without a magnifying glass to starfish and sea urchins. "I can easily spend more than an hour exploring a tide pool."

Snail trails. Snails are famous for being slow, but they're quick to pull inside their shells if they sense danger. If you hum while holding a snail in your hand, the "good vibrations" can sometimes entice the snail to peek out from its shell.

Stay-at-homes and headstanders. "Every person has a story," Hansen says, "and every living thing does, too." She especially likes to tell children the stories of easily missed animals like limpets and barnacles. Limpets, which have shells that form a cone-shaped "hat," hardly ever move once they attach to a rock. And a barnacle spends its entire adult life standing on its head.

Over the years, Hansen has also developed several easy guidelines for protecting the seashore's treasures:

Leave animals where they live. Hansen is heartened that in the quarter century since she started working on her guidebook, seashore visitors have become much more careful about not collecting living things. Hansen goes further and explains the importance of leaving animals where you find them. "Some animals live at the low tide line," she says, "others at the high tide line. The difference between the two may be only 4 or 5 feet, but it can be the difference between life and death for these creatures."

Observe more than you collect. Hansen understands the pleasure of stuffing small pockets with half-shells—it's what gave her book its name. She's learned, though, that even young children can understand the importance of leaving the treasures of the sea for others to enjoy.

Create seashore art. Use shells, seaweed, driftwood, and more to decorate sand castles (and let the tide redistribute the wealth). Take pictures of sand castles or of collected seaside treasures. At the end of a weekend, or a summer, put the snapshots in a scrapbook.

Bring home the trash. Any time Hansen goes to the seashore, she takes along an extra plastic bag to pick up trash left behind by careless visitors or carried in by the tide.

Photo credit: Marcy and Jerry Monkman

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Great Park Pursuits

2011-06-30T20:00:00.000-04:00

In 2006, shortly after the publication of Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, Connecticut governor M. Jodi Rell launched a statewide “No Child Left Inside” initiative to reconnect children and families to the natural world. A key part of the initiative was an eight-week contest for families called “The Great Park Pursuit” that took place in the state’s parks and forests.

Since then, a half dozen other states, including several in New England, have developed similar programs. Those state park systems are gearing up now for the 2011 “Great Park Pursuit” season. The basic notion behind the first program has remained — to introduce children and families to the great outdoors. This year, however, Connecticut has stopped running its program as a contest; other states offer a range of family-friendly activities.

Follow the links below for more information about Great Park Pursuits and other similar programs around the region.

Connecticut
• The state launched a year-round Great Park Pursuit Outdoor Recreation Challenge earlier this year. There’s no formal registration process, but letterboxes, secret codes, and passbooks encourage children and their families to explore Connecticut’s state parks.
• The next event is a Family Boating Day on July 9 at Mansfield Hollow State Park.

Maine
Maine has two programs. The Maine State Parks Passport program is open to anyone who visits Maine state parks. The Take It Outside! program is limited to state residents.
• The Maine State Parks Passport program runs from Memorial Day through September. Free passport books are available at any state park or historic site.
• Through Take It Outside! in 2011, Maine families who have never been camping have the chance to spend a weekend at one of 11 participating Maine State Parks. Families receive a two-night reservation at their chosen state park and are lent a complete set of camping equipment for the weekend. The program, which is offered to Maine residents only, starts July 15 and continues through the first weekend in August.
• Take It Outside! programs are also held throughout the summer at various locations around Maine.

Massachusetts
Massachusetts began a Great Park Pursuit program in 2007. The program has grown over the years. In 2011 it includes a team contest and events at parks around the state.
• The 2011 Massachusetts Great Park Pursuit kicks off on Friday, July 1, and concludes with a “grand finale” on September 10. The Massachusetts Great Park Pursuit is a team activity; the minimum team size is one adult 18 years or older and one child under 18. Teams collect special stickers for their game cards.
• Teams are challenged to visit different Great Park Pursuit programs and to design their own activities. Programs include hiking, fishing, history, coastal walks, night-sky programs, and more.
Two examples:
• Fishing clinics at Walden Pond. July 2, 9, and 23. 7:00 am – 9:30 am. Walden Pond staff provide instruction and fishing gear for visitors ages 7 and up. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged: Each Saturday morning event is limited to 12 youths. All children must be accompanied by an adult. http://www.mass.gov/dcr/events.htm
• Thoreau on Greylock family hike. July 16. Mt. Greylock State Park. Hike along the historic route of American naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau to the summit of Mount Greylock, accompanied by local writer and scholar Lauren Stevens. 5.5 miles one way or 11 miles round-trip.

New Hampshire
Registration for the New Hampshire Great Park Pursuit has already closed and the summer-long competition has begun. However, anyone can take part in some of the other activities, including self-guided NH Biodiversity Quests.
• Here’s a challenge for Franconia Notch State Park: Locate dead and downed wood (rotting logs, downed branches), a dead standing snag, a forest seep, and a yellow birch “barber chair.”

Rhode Island
Registration for the Rhode Island Great Outdoors Pursuit is still open, even though the program has already begun. It includes both guided and self-guided events and offers a list of places to explore in Rhode Island communities.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Unplugged Summers

2011-06-28T16:00:00.000-04:00

A friend planned a girls-only vacation with her pre-teen daughter. She booked them a night at a historic Cape Cod inn, rented bicycles, and made a reservation for two at a restaurant she thought her daughter would enjoy. It had been a busy school year, and she liked the idea of walking along the beach together and talking. “Preventive medicine for the teenage years,” she said.

But when the weekend came, my friend found herself contending with unwanted digital guests. On the drive to the Cape, her daughter listened to music on her iPod. When they arrived at the inn, she slumped in a chair, texting friends, with barely a look at their surroundings. At dinner, my friend noticed the telltale signs of under-table texting and blew up. Her daughter’s response surprised her: She reminded her mother that they hadn’t left for biking until my friend had replied to email, that she’d talked on her phone on the drive down. And that her smart phone sat on the table, inches from her elbow.

As we say in our family, Busted!

Summer is a good time to reduce the hold our digital distractions have on us, individually and as families. There’s no better time to replace some portion of our screen time with “green time” spent outside. Consider this summer grab-bag of ideas for making that switch and add your own:

- Use summer’s change of pace. It can be easier to change our routines or try new ones on vacation. This summer, try taking family vacations from technology. The break can last as a long as a walk in the park or extend to a full day, a weekend, or more. On summer drives, play car games or (gasp!) all listen to the same music or audio book instead of retreating to separate digital worlds. Leave digital devices behind on your next trip to the pool or your next family hike.
- Put yourself on a technology diet. Do you check your smart phone during family meals, during conversations with your children, or on vacation? Do you spend significant non-work time on the computer or in front of a screen? You may be giving your children the message that they are less important to you than whatever is on the screen. Try setting aside particular times of the day, or of a vacation, to spend time with your children without any digital distractions.
- Send the children to a technology-free camp. Or the entire family. Many summer camps insist that campers surrender their electronic devices while they’re at camp. “Without the persistent interruption of text messages, Facebook updates, and even the quainter notion of a phone call, campers become more grounded and invested in their surroundings, relationships, and activities,” says Laura Gillespie of The Aloha Foundation. AMC’s family camps encourage guests to keep cell phone and other technology use to a minimum.
- Turn off the power. If you don’t use electricity, it’s hard to keep the technology habit going, even with batteries. Susan Maushart put her three children through a “blackout bootcamp” — several weeks without electricity, in which light came from candles and food was stored in a cooler of ice — and then instituted a six-month digital media ban. (And then wrote a book about the experience, The Winter of Our Disconnect.) Without electronic stimulation, Maushart’s children oriented themselves differently in what they called “RL,” or the Real World, spending more time with friends, playing music, reading, and “blossoming,” in Maushart’s words.

Backpacking trips offer similar opportunities for slowed-down time and deeper connections — and candlelight. Experience suggests that it’s easier not to pack electronic devices in the first place than to place limits on their use once they’re in the tent or on the trail with you. That is, until the batteries run out. Then they’re simply dead weight.

My friend and her daughter are planning another trip later this summer. They’ve agreed to turn off their phones while they’re driving, to check email and Facebook only once a day, and to leave their digital distractions behind at least one day.

Summer is short enough here in New England that it's a shame to spend too much of it in the virtual world.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

A little night magic: stars and planets

2011-06-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

Before the school year ended, Virgil’s third-grade class visited the Montshire Museum in Norwich, Vermont. For their final science unit of the year, they were studying astronomy, and their teacher had some surprises for them. I went along as a chaperone.

We started our visit inside an inflatable planetarium called Star Lab, crawling into the room-sized bubble through a short tunnel and sitting in a large circle along its thin walls. Inside, once our eyes adjusted to the dark, Montshire educator Mike Fenzel turned on the night sky.

Obviously, he didn’t turn on the real night sky, but the scaled-down moon, stars, and planets looked real enough, and with Fenzel at the controls they followed their actual paths across the smaller sky. The class marveled at his “30-second night,” in which the deepening of twilight, the moon rising in the east and setting in the west, and the coming dawn all passed by in less than a minute. But the kids erupted with glee when Fenzel ran time in our small universe backward, making the moon travel from west to east.

Our journey through the night sky the second time around went by more slowly and touched on kid-friendly highlights. “I always start with the Big Dipper,” Fenzel told me later. “We live in an area where we can see the Big Dipper every night of the year for the entire night,” as long as it isn’t too cloudy. Right now the Big Dipper — also known by its Latin name, Ursa Major, or the Great Bear — starts high in the sky and slowly swings down toward the horizon by daybreak.

Fenzel explained that, in spite of what we might expect, the hottest stars may actually appear blue in the night sky. Slightly cooler stars will show up as yellow or white. The coolest stars come in the hottest colors, red and orange.

After an hour, our night in the Star Lab was over, and the class emerged into the bright light of day. Our next astronomical stop was the museum’s Planet Walk, which fits our solar system into a 3-mile hike. We started at a big orange sphere three feet in diameter — the sun. The real sun was high overhead, throwing off the first heat of the season. A path led toward scale models of the 9 planets in our solar system.

We reached the first planet, Mercury, in less than 30 strides. It actually lies 58 million kilometers from the sun. The scale model of Mercury was about the size of a ball bearing — tiny compared to the big orange sphere we’d just left. Thirty more steps brought us to Venus, the brightest object in our sky except for the sun and the moon, and about the size of a pea in this parallel universe, not much larger than Mercury. By the time we reached Mars, we hadn’t walked a tenth of a mile, not even the full length of the museum parking lot.

In their astronomy unit, the third graders had learned that the word “planet” comes from a Greek word for “wanderer.” To find the rest of the planets, we would need to wander ourselves, along a trail that climbed out of the Connecticut River Valley.

The description on the Mars model explained that to reach the fifth planet, Jupiter, we would need to walk three times as far as we’d already come. Jupiter is the biggest planet, more than two times bigger than all the other planets combined; here, it was the size of a basketball. Fenzel had told us that as the summer progresses, we’ll be able to see Jupiter in the constellation Aries.

From Jupiter to Saturn, we walked the same distance we’d covered to reach Jupiter, a little more than a third of a mile on our forest trail, where squirrels and chipmunks chattered back at the kids from safe perches on tree limbs and logs. Actual distance: about 700 million kilometers.

After Saturn, the trail skirted a big meadow where the grasses already reached shoulder-level on most of the kids. We’d walked a little more than a mile when we reached Neptune, the eighth planet, perched on an outcrop. In the distance to the north, we could easily make out the spires of Dartmouth College, rising on the opposite side of the river. In another half-mile or so, we’d reach Pluto, long considered the smallest planet but now demoted to dwarf status, 6 billion kilometers from the sun.

The real sun was beating down on us and a bus was waiting to take the kids back to school. So we turned around and traveled back through the parallel universe, our perspectives realigned, with a deeper sense of the night sky and the scale of our solar system.

Learn more
- .. about the Planet Walk at the Montshire Museum.
- ... about the solar system from National Geographic.

Illustration from Greenwings

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Advice for Adventurous Fathers

2011-06-18T11:06:00.004-04:00

Outside magazine is not normally a place I turn to for parenting advice. So I was intrigued when a link to a Father’s Day-themed series in the magazine came across my desktop. Some of Outside's macho attitude came across with it: The text to the link asked, “Are You Raising a Wimp?” and offered “Essential Advice for Adventurous Fathers.”

Here’s how the article started: “They say that becoming a dad means your days of big trips and serious adventure are over. They are so wrong. Starting this Father’s Day, be your hard-charging self again. It’s what your kids need most.”

It then cited a statistic from a recent study by the nonprofit Outdoor Foundation, which the Outside editors phrased this way: “75 percent of kids aged 6 to 12 who participate in adventure sports are simply copying their parents.” Their concluding advice — “[Y]our first act as an awesome outside dad is to walk out the front door.”

I understand the outdoor adventurer’s desire to keep getting out — into the mountains, onto the trail, on the river, on the rock. And being a mother or father needn’t prevent us from going off on serious adventures. But being “an awesome outside dad” takes much more than heading for the hills without the kids.

Other statistics collected by the Outdoor Foundation but not included in Outside's article make it clear, in fact, that if fathers want their children to become “hard-charging adventurers” in their own right, then Dad needs to walk out the door with kids in hand — even if that means scaling back his own adventures for a time. It makes sense that young children are heavily influenced by their parents’ choices. If you’re 6 years old, or 12, you’re most likely to go hiking or participate in other outdoor activities if your parents take you. The second most common reason children in the study gave for not spending time outside, after “not interested”: “My parents don’t take me.”

This statistic is especially important because the study also noted a precipitous decline in outdoor activity in this age group over a shockingly short period of time. In 2006, 78% of children ages 6 to 12 reported participating in outdoor activities; in 2009, the year of the study, only 62% of young children reported participation.

Another part of the magazine’s Father’s Day package sends this message exactly. The editors asked some of their best-known writers, Ian Frazier and Mark Singer among them, to contribute essays on fathers. I recommend ignoring the introductory article and accompanying gear guide (unless you’re just dying to buy an igloo-building kit) and instead reading their thoughtful meditations on fathers and the outdoors.

Advice for adventuring fathers from Outside magazine writers:
- More patience, less danger. Steve Rinella, host of the Travel Channel series “The Wild Within,” remembered a father who threw him off a dock to force him to swim and who barred his sons from coming inside on bitter winter days. Rinella writes, “He didn’t want to raise a thin-skinned softy who couldn’t handle hardship.” But now that Rinella is a father himself, he is looking “to create a future that we can remember with fondness.”
- Focus on what you can share. Ian Frazier did not share his father’s mechanical aptitude: “He told me I didn’t have the brains God gave a screwdriver,” Frazier writes ruefully. But they did share a love of rambling, whether on foot or behind the wheel of a car. So the two hiked mountains and drove across the country — and the tinkering gene skipped a generation to Frazier’s son.
- Teach them to be safe and let them make mistakes. “Never take your skis off,” Marc Peruzzi’s father told his 7-year-old son, who quickly discovered the limits of such advice. Peruzzi arms his children with perhaps more useful safety information, then lets them roam.
- Less is more. “If I could have one do-over,” Mark Singer ruminates about being a father to four sons, “it would be to have spent less time telling them what I’d done in my life, what arcane knowledge I’d accumulated. If only I had just listened and absorbed what the world looked like through their unadulterated, as it were, eyes.”

Being an adventuring, role-modeling father is hard work, harder in some ways than the adventures themselves. But it’s hard work during a relatively short window of time. The Outdoor Foundation study shows that by age 13, kids are making choices increasingly influenced by their peers. So, Dads, walk out the door — and take your kids with you when you go.

Happy Father’s Day.

Learn more
- Tough Love: Outside writers on fathers

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Summer tips: heat and humidity

2011-06-14T16:00:00.001-04:00

Last week’s steamy weather reminded me of a hiking trip our family took last summer. Shortly after noon on a blisteringly hot, windless, and humid July day, we pulled into a trailhead parking lot for an overnight hut hike we’d planned for months. We started sweating as soon as we stepped out of the car, and Virgil started complaining almost as quickly. He complained about the heat, sweat in his eyes, and how uncomfortable his small, very light pack felt against his back.

I was eager to get to the hut and didn’t want to deal with a whining child. It took more energy than I had, in the heat and humidity, to jolly Virgil along. I wanted to ignore him, and if I couldn’t ignore him, I wanted to yell at him. We kept him going for a while, but he seemed to deflate with each step, until he was hardly moving. We took a break. I noticed his bright red face. He shrugged off his pack and out of his shirt and lay down on a rock, listless. It wasn’t until I saw the raised red bumps on his neck and under his arms, though, that I got it: He was truly suffering in the heat.

Those red bumps were a heat rash. Virgil’s red face, and the fact that he wasn’t sweating, meant that his body was struggling to cool itself down. If we’d taken his temperature, it might have seemed that he had a slight fever. And if we hadn’t stopped right there, he might have developed heat stroke.

Heat stroke occurs when a person doesn’t sweat enough to lower his or her body temperature. It’s the most severe heat-related ailment and a life-threatening emergency. A child’s body heats up 3 to 5 times faster than an adult’s, making children more vulnerable to heat stroke than adults. A child, as we were seeing with Virgil, can become dangerously overheated in only a few short minutes.

Virgil needed to drink to replenish his body’s ability to sweat. Out came our water bottles. Even before he’d had his fill of water, we soaked his shirt and put it back on him to cool his skin and soothe the itchy rash. We started up again, but at a much slower pace, resting often and drinking even more often. Virgil’s energy eventually returned, he stopped whining, and we made it to the hut in good shape.

A child with heat stroke may have any of the following symptoms:
- temperature of 103 degrees F or higher, not accompanied by sweating
- hot, red, dry skin
- rapid pulse
- restlessness, confusion, or dizziness
- headache
- vomiting
- rapid, shallow breathing
- lethargy

To prevent heat stroke and its milder form, heat exhaustion:
- Let children slowly acclimate to hot temperatures over several days or even weeks
- Make sure children drink plenty of fluids before, during, and after physical exercise, Drinks with caffeine, carbonation, or a lot of sugar are much less effective than water at replenishing the body’s fluids and should be avoided. Many sports drinks fall into this category. Dehydration contributes to heat stroke.
- Avoid sunburn, which interferes with a body’s ability to cool itself and causes a loss of body fluids
- Give children frequent breaks to cool down
- Dress them in lightweight and loose-fitting clothing
- Schedule activity for cooler times of day
- Bring children into the shade or into an air-conditioned space
- Give children cool baths

Heat stroke requires immediate medical treatment. If a child develops heat stroke, you need to bring his or her internal temperature down as quickly as possible.
- Call 911.
- Undress the child and if possible move him or her into a cool room.
- Sponge the child’s body with a washcloth and fan the damp skin.
- Apply ice packs to the groin and armpits.
- Give the child cool fluids only if he or she is alert and able to drink.
- Don’t attempt to treat the high temperature with a fever-reducer such as Tylenol.
- Never leave a child in a parked car. Heat stroke can occur within minutes in a car; the temperature inside a car can quickly climb 10 to 20 degrees higher than the temperature outside.

It may be hard to believe that it’s going to be hot again. But before long, we’ll have those hot, steamy days of high summer. I’m actually looking forward to them.

Learn more
- Information on heat stroke from the Centers for Disease Control
- Heat-related illnesses and children

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Fledging in the graduation season

2011-06-09T20:00:00.001-04:00

I looked it up in the dictionary: Fledging means taking care of a young bird until its feathers and wing muscles are sufficiently developed for flight. Add an “l” and you get the name for a young bird whose wing feathers have recently come in. Fledglings often remain under the care of their parents, though, even after they’ve learned to fly.

I’ve been thinking about both words lately, in their several forms — verb, noun, and adjective — and in uses both scientific and metaphoric. It is, after all, the fledging season, when young of the year (and not only those that grow feathers) take first steps.

Sometimes there’s not much warning. The baby robins we’ve observed over the past couple of weeks from our kitchen window opened their eyes late last week. On Saturday morning, they were busy pulling out fluffy white tufts with their small yellow beaks — fledging feathers, no longer necessary now that their flight feathers were coming in — and jostling for position in a nest that suddenly seemed much too small for the four of them. One bold one even stepped out of the nest and onto the slippery slope of the upright toboggan that’s been their nest platform. It tottered there for a few seconds and then scurried back into the nest.

The next morning, standing at the sink, I automatically glanced over at the nest. Empty. Later, we walked around the back yard, looking for clues. Ursula found a snake skin on top of the rock wall and remembered coming upon a large snake sunning itself and watching it slither back down between the boulders. Snakes eat birds’ eggs and young birds; so do squirrels, blue jays, and crows. A stray cat might have clawed its way up the toboggan, though that seemed less likely. More likely was that the 2-week-old birds were ready to leave the nest, and did.

Assuming the young birds made it safely from nest to ground, they’ll spend several more weeks learning the ways of the robin world from their parents. The adults will teach them how to feed themselves, where to perch safely during the day and at night, and what dangers to avoid.

I discovered the empty nest the day after our nephew graduated from high school. He graduated on one day; the next morning, he caught the first flight to the west coast. By now he’s registered for college classes and flown on to Alaska, also alone, to begin a summer job at a cannery. The suddenness of his departure, even though planned, caught his parents by surprise. In the nest one day, gone the next.

Taking wing, metaphorically speaking, isn’t always so abrupt, and even our nephew’s leave-taking is the end result of many years of nurturing and preparation. And he won't fly away forever: He'll be back at the end of the summer and over vacations for several years more. But his mother told me, “Once they leave for college, they don’t really live with you anymore. They’re just visiting.”

Fledging: letting go.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.