We're trying an interesting experiment in a few weeks. A local friend of mine has been talking to me for years about hiking Isle Royale, the national park out in the middle of Lake Superior. It's a small park, but it also has the lowest visitation of any standard, regular National Park, in part because reaching it requires a costly (and time-consuming in the latter case) trip by seaplane or ferry to reach. On top of that, it's kinda in the middle of nowhere (although that's not necessarily unique for national parks) and it lacks the scenic drama of many other parks in the mountains or the deserts. (Admittedly, that's partly my own bias there.) Anyway, we agreed we were going to hike this this summer, and the time is fast approaching; it'll be at the end of the month.
He has a very outdoorsy family, and his youngest son is almost 18, so most of his family will be with him; his wife, three of his four sons, and his daughter and son-in-law. In all, they're a seven person party, which changes the regulations for group camping for them somewhat. I'm going too, and I had planned on bringing my own two younger boys (my older son and daughter in law are too busy to break away, sadly) but curiously, he somehow convinced my wife to come along!
I'm very surprised by this personally—she had told me for years that she loves hiking and being outdoors, as long as she can sleep in a bed at night, take a shower, and eat at a restaurant or otherwise some "real food" at least. So I wasn't assuming she would go, and I wasn't going to ask her. Maybe it's the family ties (we discovered that this friend of mine and my wife are fourth cousins, actually.) Or maybe it's just the fact that he asked her and I wasn't going to—or maybe it's the fact that he asked her and not me, and she wasn't quite as comfortable saying no to him. And it certainly helps that his wife will be there. Most likely it was a combination of all kinds of factors that just tipped her over the edge.
Now, honestly—I don't think that she's likely to get into backpacking in a big way, and I'm not even convinced that she's going to enjoy this (although I'm doing my best to help her do so) but I'm very curious about the results nonetheless. I have taken one of my sons backpacking before, and I've got another one who wants to go with me but it hasn't worked out yet, but normally I do my hiking and backpacking alone—and honestly, I kind of like it that way. The solitude is part of what's appealing about the hobby to me. Not that I don't like my family, of course, but I see my family every day and backpacking is kind of "my" thing, not "our" thing, if that makes any sense.
So, this trip will be an experiment in a number of ways, both for me and for my wife, and for all of us.
1) Will I actually like hiking with this big crowd? When I was a teenager, of course, my backpacking trips were with our youth group and our leaders, because I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to do them on my own. But in the years since, I've gotten accustomed to doing things my own way and enjoying the solitude. Technically, we're a group of four and the other family is their own separate group of seven, but of course, in reality, we all know each other, we have the same itinerary and we mostly plan on walking together, we may well feel like a traveling circus compared to what I'm used to.
2) Are the boys going to enjoy this? My older of the two that's coming is the one who's been with me. He thought it was kinda boring to be out alone just the two of us, but he's done other trips with larger groups of friends and family and really enjoyed them. I don't know that he loves hiking for its own sake, but he enjoys it well enough when he has people with him that he enjoys being with. The younger of the two hasn't ever really done anything exactly like it, but he's active and healthy, he's always liked camping and rafting and other outdoorsy things that he's done in the past, so there's no reason to suspect that he won't like backpacking too. But again, for him, the people that he's doing it with may be more important than what he's actually doing. Luckily, he's less likely to be bored just hanging around with the family than the older one is.
3) My wife?! Is she going to enjoy this at all? Even if she does, what will she be interested in doing in the future? I'd actually really like to plan some hiking trips from a hotel base-camp with her, and I've noodled around some ideas. Maybe this trip will make those more likely to happen sooner rather than later. Maybe I'm wrong and she'll actually think that the whole thing is really cool. But I doubt it. I mean, I've been married to her for twenty-five years for crying out loud.
I don't think this means I will be ushering in an era of backpacking with large groups of family and friends, but I think that we'll enjoy doing it this time, at least. And I've got my eyes on maybe some fun trips to take with my wife and my youngest son in the next couple of years when it's just the two of us available to go.
