Hiking with a 1-Month Old: Possible, Apparently

By Jenny Shank, 7-17-06

	Caption: Outfitted for hiking.

There's nothing like 100-degree weather to motivate you to head for the hills, even if you have a new baby and you've not yet tested your wilderness parenting skills. On Saturday as our house grew unbearably hot, my husband and I quickly made a plan to escape town and head for the Indian Peaks Wilderness, about an hour's drive away from Boulder. We weren't sure how cooperative the baby would be, but we thought if we could at least leave the house for the hottest part of the afternoon and walk a few paces with her in the woods, we'd feel like we'd accomplished something. To our surprise, the baby comported herself admirably and we were able to complete an easy, almost five-mile round trip from the trailhead to Lake Isabelle.

A Hiking Must: The Swedish Device
Our baby likes to be held close and in motion constantly--bounced, walked, jiggled, rocked. I suspect it's because I kept jogging until I was eight months pregnant. So hiking is the perfect activity for her, provided we use a piece of equipment that makes it possible to carry her for hours on end. We used the Baby Björn Active Carrier, or as I like to call it, the Swedish Device, because that sounds more exciting. While strapped to my husband, the baby napped contentedly in it for almost the entire four-hour duration of the hike.

Evading Mosquitoes and Sun
Every time we've been to the Indian Peaks Wilderness before, mosquitoes have attacked us. We didn't want the same fate to befall our baby, so we decided to dress her in long-sleeved pajamas with feet. We worried about putting the harsh chemicals of bug spray on her skin, so before we put the pajamas on, we sprayed them with repellant. We also brought an enormous hat, one that should fit her in a couple of years, sprayed that and rested it on top of her head. My husband wore a wide-brimmed hat that cast a decent shadow and mostly kept her out of the sun, but what we really need him to wear for total sun protection would be an oversized novelty sombrero.

Nursing in the Woods: Not as Freaky as Anticipated
The kid was going to need to eat a few times along our hike, and I knew what that meant: Me, topless, in the woods. After a month of spending eight hours a day topless around our house, however, my resistance to this idea was considerably diminished. Although the initial fear of breastfeeding in public kept me from leaving the house for weeks, desperation has helped me develop various techniques and cloaking devices to prevent passersby from throwing Mardi Gras beads at me whenever I feed the baby. The route we took had a lot of hiker traffic, but once we reached Lake Isabelle, we found a secluded rock on which I could feed her. She was a little stunned by the altitude, I think, so didn't eat as much as usual, but we accomplished a feeding while my husband tried to swat mosquitoes away.

Racking up Plenty of Firsts
While she napped, we carried our baby over her first patch of snow, passed by her first mountain blooms (Columbines and Indian Paintbrush), and generally introduced her to peaks, lakes, and streams. Every night we have to put her to bed to the soothing strains of a white noise machine--her preferred sound is the "waterfall" setting. But this weekend she heard many of the actual noises that she listens to nightly: birdsong, a rushing waterfall, and wind through the trees. This made me think that people who lived in Colorado long ago must have had very contented babies--strapped close to their parents in a papoose, lulled by the motion of walking and the sounds of nature all around them. I am reasonably certain that our baby either was stupefied by the altitude or that she enjoyed the experience--she didn't cry at all until we were almost home. Then she screamed like a maniac, calmed when I fed her, and remained calm and content the rest of the evening and night. So she's a Colorado girl after all.
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