Tag: backpacking

What we pack in our kids hiking packs

What we put in our kids hiking pack from hydration and snacks to gear.

Dehydrating homemade backpacking meals

We’ve used pre-made dehydrated meals for years for the convenience, but always felt they were not exactly what we wanted. Meals either weren’t something our kids liked, had a funny aftertaste, had more sodium than we wanted, or didn’t have a plant-based option. Plus we didn’t love all of the excessive, bulky packaging that they come in. We recently decided to start making our own meals using a food dehydrator and the meals have been SO DELICIOUS! Why did we wait so long?!

Tips to help your child sleep when camping

The most challenging part of camping with kids is getting them to sleep well. We’ve tried a variety of tactics to help ours fall and stay alseep. These are our top tips.

what to wear hiking and backpacking

Wearing comfortable, breathable, and durable clothing hiking and backpacking is critical for remaining comfortable throughout your adventure. We organized the clothing, shoes, and hats we wear by each person.

Tent camping with kids

We’ve camped everywhere from the beach and the desert, to the mountains and everything in-between with our kids. Sleeping in a tent with little ones was a big departure from our former days as backpackers sans kiddos. Now with kids, we’ve tried lots of different options and we are sharing our experience, good and bad. There’s so many different factors that go into camping in a tent with kids such as professional organization guidelines, family preferences, child needs, and style of camping to name a few. For this reason, what we are sharing in this blog is not recommendations for what you should do, but rather a description of what WE do. And what we do continues to evolve as our children grow and new equipment is developed in the ever expanding realm of outdoor gear.

Summer hiking Tips

autiful flowers, refreshing lakes, and long days are what dreams are made of. But summer hiking can be a nightmare filled with sunburns, over heating, and bugs without the proper preparation. After years of hiking we learned that certain pieces of gear and a few tips make all the difference to squeeze the most out of those long summer days on the trail.

camping gear list

We are self-proclaimed gear junkies. We love having the right “stuff” to make any adventure a little easier or more fun. Across countless camping outings we have discovered that quality gear is important in order to make the camping experience a blast.

Our favorite packs to carry kids on the trail

Finding a comfortable way to carry your baby or toddler on hikes can be overwhelming. There are so many options, and the needs and size of little ones are always changing and growing. Our collection of packs and carriers came to be after combing through blogs, watching video reviews, testing, and even stopping random parents on the trail. We’ve got you covered from the first few days and weeks of infancy all the way up to toddler carriers. While no carrier is perfect, we found each of these options was a nice solution to meet our needs as an active family hiking everything from local parks to overnight adventures in the Sierras.

9 Tips For Backpacking With a Baby

One of the biggest challenges we faced when we talked about of having children was a loss of our freedom to backpack. So many people with children told us that we would have to wait years before we could get back out on the trail. If you find yourself in similar shoes, let us tell you that IT’S NOT TRUE! We’ve done it and our family of three has lived to tell about it…and had fun doing it!

Emergency Preparedness Gear That You Can Actually Use

Being ready for an emergency is important, and preparing an emergency kit before disaster strikes is a critical piece of the puzzle. We built our kit a few years ago, and go through it each spring to see what needs to be replaced. In the past we always purchased separate gear for our kit with no intention of ever using these items outside of an emergency. While this plan seems prudent initially, it leads to a lot of waste down the road when items expire or stop working after years of sitting in the kit. Good news! Thanks to advances in technology and gear, preparing an emergency kit that is actually useful on a daily basis is possible. The items we’ve picked are versatile enough that you can use them for camping and outdoor adventures, and still have them ready in case the unthinkable happens. We selected items that also tap into renewable sources of energy, so you always have power and supplies when you need them. Plus, this type of gear is earth-friendly, and less expensive in the long run.