As I sit down to write at 10pm, curled up in a corner of the couch at our Airbnb in Golden, BC, the sky is still quite light. I am looking at a few rocky peaks and the still-blue sky beyond them, dotted with pink-bottomed clouds. We’re an hour ahead of our usual time zone at the moment, so after a bath and many snuggles and giggles, I finally got Ava down to bed just before 10. Something about vacation and the fact that the sky is still awake made this very late bedtime feel totally appropriate, and the fact that I hiked my ass off today and had tons of time with friends in nature made me a much happier mom than I often am during the toddler bedtime routine.
This is my and Jamie’s second time visiting Golden together, our first time being in late February of 2020, right before the whole world shut down. Jamie’s good friends moved out here after university and have built a beautiful life in this gorgeous setting and small town community, and staying with them and their daughters that week made a big impression on both of us. Should we move back to Canada and live in Golden and have kids who grow up playing in the snow? That thought crossed my mind on more than one occasion during our last visit.
This visit was built around Jamie and Andrew and another good friend doing a guy’s backpacking trip for a few days, and Ava and I tagging along to hang with Linley and the girls while the guys have their mountain time. So when Linley asked last night if I wanted to join her and another friend for an ‘adult hike’ today and leave the dads and kids for the day, I was all for it.
Linley, Kate and I gathered around the kitchen table at 9am this morning to eat freshly baked currant scones and talk about our plan for the day. We’d originally planned to hike to the lower lookout on Mount Hunter, but decided we were entitled to an entire day to ourselves and to go for the upper lookout instead. Both of the other women seemed confident about this 11.7km hike, essentially straight up and then straight back down the mountain, and I was excited and a little nervous for the challenge.
Despite only having spent a few days ever with Linley, and having just met Kate last night, we immediately fell into an easy dynamic familiar to me from other adventure days with friends. The planning and sharing of snacks and water bottles, the trip to the grocery store for sandwiches and candy (and chips for the ride home), the discussion of temperature and what we were all wearing.
We decided on shorts and high socks to avoid scratching up our lower legs and to keep the mosquitos at bay, and Linley pulled out her collection of ski socks for us to choose from. Once the water bottles were filled and we were properly attired, we grabbed some ski poles to help with the descent and piled into their big truck for the 20 minute drive to the trailhead.
What should we listen to on the way there? Taylor Swift? Obviously.
Despite the natural bug spray and our high socks, we got eaten alive by mosquitos during the first few hours of the hike. We walked at a good pace, stopping for snacks and water breaks and to peel off layers as needed, chatting all the while. Any time the trees thinned out and the trail moved closer to the ridge, the views of the valley below and mountains beyond took my breath away. I swear there is something healing in just witnessing that much wild, that much green.
After four hours or so, when we were all very ready for a break, we finally reached the top. The view was insane, an almost 360 degree view of the Kicking Horse River and valley, surrounded on all sides by the Rocky Mountains and the Purcell Mountains. At first we couldn’t sit down, we just kept walking around taking it in from as many different spots as possible.
We finally sat down to eat, cutting our massive sandwich in half with a piece of sharp rock, peeling off our shoes and socks, and joking about whether there might be any OnlyFans customers out there willing to pay for some pictures of our dirty, sock-lined feet being mobbed by sweat flies. We were pretty sure it’s a thing.
Once we’d eaten and rested, Kate pulled out her little portable tripod and we set up to take a bunch of photos of ourselves on the summit. We posed with our ski poles, our ridiculous socks, and even each did a couple of ‘jump shots’, the kind of thing I would generally roll my eyes at other people doing, but that actually make for incredible photos. The whole girl photoshoot on top of a mountain situation was fun and silly and the kind of thing I haven’t done probably since I was literally in my 20s.
I am a 41 year-old woman who is deep in toddler-mom life, and jumping around with friends and doing Charlie’s Angels poses on top of a mountain made me feel like a girl again, in the best way. As Kate pointed out on our way back down, life is pretty heavy a lot of the time, so it’s really good to just have fun.
We made quick work of the descent, very grateful for our poles, and piled back in the truck to crush a bag of Miss Vickie’s Spicy Dill Pickle chips while listening to Metric on our drive back into Golden. The girls dropped me off at our little Airbnb, and after having a sweet reunion with Ava, showering, and picking up some beer from the local brewery, Jamie, Ava and I headed over the Linley and Andrew’s place for a barbecue.
One of the most nostalgic parts of my childhood is memories of long summer nights spent running wild in our backyard, so watching Ava roaming around the yard, filling a wagon with wild berries, trying to befriend the cat, swinging on the zip line and just generally being in awe of and wanting to mimic everything the big girls were doing was unbearably sweet. As much as I love our city life and especially our new home, running barefoot onto a deck and down the steps into the grass on a warm summer night feels like such a core part of my childhood that I am simply not sharing with my own daughter in our daily life.
Her childhood memories will be filled with the epic parks and beaches of San Francisco and all sorts of other wonders I never experienced, but there is a special type of pleasure as a parent in watching your child delight in the very same things that once gave you such happiness, and I really savoured that feeling tonight.
Also full circle was watching as our friends’ daughters, dressed up in various dresses and dance costumes, put on a dance / acrobatic performance with the incredible rope swing in their backyard.
As I chased Ava around the yard, trying to keep her from getting hit by one of the swinging girls, or trying unsuccessfully to have her sit on the deck with me and the rest of the adults to watch the performance, I felt a similar aching nostalgia for the performances my sister and I used to put on with our cousins anytime we stayed at their house. We would set up a curtain out of blankets to mark the stage in the living room, and call all of the adults into the room to watch us swan about in old figure skating costumes and display whatever moves we’d pulled together for the “show”.
As I watched the girls tonight, I couldn’t help remembering myself in an oversized sparkly purple skating skirt, proud as can be as I waved my arms around and paraded across the couch for my parents and aunts and uncles to see.
There is something so innocent, so universal, in the desire to perform, to be witnessed, that seems like such a crucial part of childhood. Ava was starry-eyed the entire time, doing summersaults on the grass and awaiting applause, clapping wildly and saying “You did such good swings” to the girls, or doing her own swings across the lower zip line and saying “I’m a performance girl”.
I felt filled up to the brim by the whole day, and could see that she did too. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Fabulous - on all possible fronts!