Hiking With Kids and the Power of Gummy Worms

How a 'hike from hell' inspired Lynda Pianosi to write a guidebook all about hiking with children

Young Cailynn and Annalise on a hike to Black Rock Mountain.

We adore hiking. We were just two-months-old on our first hiking trip (to Heart Creek) and growing up in Calgary, our family of six made frequent trips to the nearby mountains. Hiking was a formative experience for us both, and continues to be an activity we enjoy immensely.

With hiking season around the corner, we’re kicking things off with a question we’ve been asked a lot from readers: How on earth do I hike with my children?! Given that neither of us yet have children, we turned to Lynda Pianosi, the author of Take a Hike with Your Children™.

When Pianosi’s book was first published in 2012, it was a first-of-its kind guidebook for family hikes and walks in the Canadian Rockies. It includes a difficulty rating from a child’s perspective. Pianosi has been hiking in the Rockies since 1999, when she moved to Alberta from Ontario with her husband. When her two sons were born, 19 months apart, it was important to the family to get out and be active together. 

Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Pianosi was prompted to write Take a Hike with Your Children™ after hiking Larch Valley with her husband, five-month-old and two-year-old. “It was the hike from hell,” she says, recounting a diaper blowout, a toddler who couldn’t make up his mind between being in a backpack, wanting to walk, and being bounced, and passersby offering to help carry the kids.

Pianosi had heard the hike was an easy hike, but learned firsthand those hikers didn’t have young kids. In those days, there wasn’t social media (or Substack newsletters) to turn to for advice or crowdsourced recommendations. “If you heard from somebody that it was a good hike, you better ask four other people just to get an average of what people thought,” she says. 

The success of Pianosi’s guidebook for families led her to become a professional interpretive hiking guide, and this summer she’ll start offering a series of learn to hike programs (watch her website for details.) She’s also working on more books, intended for both families and people new to hiking.

We spoke to Pianosi about her new books, the highs and lows of hiking with kids and her top trail recommendations. Read on for some tips from a very experienced hiker; Pianosi has hiked every 10 kilometre (and under) trail in Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, Yoho and Waterton Lakes National Parks! This interview has been edited for length and clarity.     

What should families new to hiking know about this activity, and where to even begin? 

I think the best advice is just to become educated. Question your source of information. Be very careful with crowdsourced online reports, because everybody has a different opinion on what a hike should be like. It can be a good starting point, but you need to become familiar with the parks websites themselves. Don’t rely solely on social media.

If you’re going to Banff National Park, look at their website, what their trail ratings are, what they’ve written up about the trail. Download one of their PDF maps. Same for Kananaskis; go to the Alberta Parks website. Read about planning and preparing for a hike. Get to know where you're going. I think people are shocked that literally you just drive up the road in Kananaskis, go through Whiteman’s Gap up to Goat Creek, and all of a sudden you have no cell service. 

Do your research, plan and prepare before you go. Pack the 10 essentials. Have a Plan B. Expect the unexpected and be prepared for it. Pack a basic first-aid kit. Let somebody know where you're going, and when you're going to be back. And anytime you have an opportunity to take a bear awareness program, take that. 

What makes hiking a great family activity?

When my kids were younger, it was just about having family time. Even at the time, there were some grumblings, but what was always great is that they would talk about what they saw on the trail. Maybe not that night, but maybe later on down the road, later in the week. If they were talking to one of their friends, I could overhear them saying ‘Yeah, and then we went to this really great lake and we played in the water forever.’ Just those experiences and being outdoors was just the best thing about the family hiking.

Now the two of them, they're both driving, they're taking their own friends to these places that I took them to when they were younger. So it has kind of come full circle, which is really, really neat.

Do you have any favourite family hikes?

I always remind people, what I might like, you may not like. For me, I like to figure out a bit more about the history of the area. So somewhere like Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park, it’s wonderful, because you can learn so much about glaciology. I would recommend going with a guide or the Parks Canada guided tours.

I also love Yoho National Park, and many hikes in there, like Takakkaw Falls, Laughing Falls, and even Yoho Lake, for families and kids that have some more hiking experience. If I were to make it a simple answer, it’s anything with a lake. I'm a water person. So anything that ends in a lake, where the kids can throw some stones into the water and just relax and get rejuvenated before you head back down the trail. 

Any tips to share with other parents when it comes to family hiking?

When the kids were younger, we would head off to Superstore and they could go down the bulk bin aisle, and they were allowed to pick from certain bins. Gummy worms on the trail were the best. It worked out really, really well.

For every parent starting off, drop your expectations. Just live in the moment. Don't say I wish my kids were older, I wish we could be going farther, I can't wait till they can hike on their own. If you’ve got a baby, they're not complaining about a hike. When they're toddlers, you're going at a toddler pace, which is great too. 

One thing that I would say to families right now, that I probably wouldn't have said even five years ago, is ask, why are you going? I know for me, I'm going out there because I want to interact with nature. I want to reconnect. I find nature very calming and soothing. Are you going to grab a social media shot, or are you going to reconnect to nature and reconnect as a family? What's your motive for getting out there? I think the whole social media, and Instagram in particular, is a double-edged sword. People see these locations, they want to go, but they're not always prepared, they haven't planned well for it. I’m all about giving families the skills and knowledge they need for a safe and enjoyable day on the trail.

Can you tell us about your new guidebooks? 

By the end of this summer, I will have five new books. They’re going to be primarily e-books to start off with. I will have one that covers Yoho, one for Kootenay, Jasper, Banff and Waterton. All the trails will be in there. But there's one whole section that will be the same in each book, and it's called Know Before You Go and Hiking 101. The books are going to be family focused and new hiker focused, both people that have never ever gone and people who want to get back into it and maybe aren’t familiar anymore with where to go.  

Head to Lynda Pianosi’s website, Three Mountain Family Hikes, for more on her books, future learn to hike programs, and a blog detailing hikes and easy walks as well as information to plan and prepare for getting outside. 

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Please note, we’ll be taking a two-week spring break from writing Go Outside and will be back in your inboxes on April 13. Until then, check out our past issues and enjoy your time outside!

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