Black Canyon was beautiful and the kids hiked close to 9 miles the day we spent exploring it. We were staying near the north side which is far less crowded and in my limited experience my favorite side. There is an option to hike into the canyon but the trail is super steep and with little guys I didn’t feel like it was worth the risk, that and from reports there is poison ivy all along the river at the bottom and I have a severe reaction to poison ivy and did not want to ruin the rest of our trip covered in that and I figured there would be no way we could avoid it despite our best efforts. So we chose to stay top side and do the Green Mountain Hike. The first part was relatively flat and took us to the canyon edge. Caedmon found part of a prickly pear cactus that he was very excited about until he put it down and his fingers were covered in small little needles. They came out easily enough but again made me thankful we weren’t hiking among poison ivy. The outlooks along the edge were breathtaking. After the edge hiking we started to climb and climbed quite a bit up to the top of green mountain. The views from the top to look out over the canyon and surrounding area were just amazing. On the way down we started a game of telephone where the person in the back would whisper something to the person hiking in front of them and they’d run and catch up with the person in front of them and pass the message on, then we did it in reverse as well. It was great fun and a good idea for hiking in the future to keep the kids motivated. There was a little melt down with the two littles as they both fought to be in the front and both dissolved into tears on the side of the trail. So at that point we set up a “switch positions every 2 minutes” which at least helped dry up the tears a bit and also let me know that everyone was in need of a lunch break soon. Lunch seemed to revive everyone’s energy and attitudes and we finished out the hike. It was really warm, but we expected that for July and we were glad to refill all our water bottles at the rangers station. We then decided to drive to the south rim which while the canyon is only a few thousand feet across the drive to the other side is about 90 minutes. It was a good chance for everyone to cool down and rest and Clint read everyone a book as we went. We ended up on some back country roads and saw someone down in a ditch so we pulled over to help, turns out they were hunting for wild asparagus and not in need of our assistance. The south rim had a ton of people so we did a couple of the lookouts and did a little 1-2 mile hike that took us just below the rim a little and away from all the people. The kids did great and were amazing hikers. According to my GPS we hiked over 2500 feet of elevation gain. Needless to say everyone slept really well that night.
Hiking Mommy 