Tag Archives: campfire with kids

Let’s meet in a spruce grove at 10,300 feet

The sun had long ago oozed into Silver Mountain by the time the assembled parents got our eight collective children zipped into sleeping bags. Drowsy siblings, who just an hour ago, were bickering over camp chair real estate, nestled close together, exhaling marshmallows into each others‘ hair.

One by one, the adults returned to the campfire, perhaps skipping just a bit at the clandestine pleasure of uninterrupted conversation with people who have full command of the English language. It wasn’t entirely unlike the elk mamas Dan and I have spied frolicking in a high mountain meadow while their wobbly-legged newborns were stashed under mountain shrubs.

Despite the high level communications required to get four families to a spruce grove at 10,300 feet, or coordinating meals for sixteen people via 160-character text messages, or simply the 2-day project of gathering and stuffing gear into our Subaru, it was totally, entirely worth it.

Bomber tarp set up by bomber husband, accommodating 4 families and 2 thunderstorms.

Adult needs were heartily provided for as coolers spilled with local beer, marinating elk, farmers market corn and other culinary delights. However, the only child-accouterments carted along were the same played out pair of buckets and shovels we always bring camping. In the woods, the kids are responsible for their own entertainment. This is not something we have to tell them; soon as they spill from car seats, the sticks and rocks leap into their hands as if magnetized.

What a lovely treat to sip coffee at a morning campfire while eight children rambled around wet wildflower meadows, picking orange sneezeweed blossoms for their moth named Cinderella. The nuclear family structure got pleasantly dismantled as parents casually rotated through positions of responsibility, cooking, cleaning and minding children. And even the minding of children takes on a relaxed, more auditory flavor in the woods, as in “I can still hear them, everything must be fine.”

Orange sneezeweed showing off on a south-facing slope

The kids did beautifully, they really did. They picked wild strawberries and discovered ancient dinosaur jaw bones and gave every single fruiting mushroom the exotic label: poisonous. There were hardly any scuffles, perhaps because sharing, the prickly goblin of the home scene, is easy when there are plenty of rocks and sticks and moths to go around.

And sometimes it seems like we need a life coach, cheerleader and super nanny just to pack up the family and head to the mountains for a night, and I don’t get much more sleep than when I was seventeen and slurping down crappy coffee in a Denny’s booth at 3 am. But ambling down the forest service road—pre-coffee—to see the morning mist draped across the mountains as magically as if exhaled by a dragon, was like falling in love with life itself.

Driving out, watching the mountains come in and out of focus as we rolled down the forest service roads, I felt like something internal–small and unnamable–had shifted from our time in the woods. And that will always be enough.









Here’s Rosie helping Collin chop some wild mountain parsley:

See how Rosie's steadying Collin's wrists as he cuts?




electrified pumpkin?

There was a family bow-shoot, because, obviously.


And this:

can you see the rainbow?








Here’s Dan pounding yucca leaves into ropy fibers:


And Col’s pictograph, using, er, primitive sharpies:






Camping, family style


Rose sucking nectar from a red columbine flower









The posse enjoying some wild trout


**announcement for locals:

