“With black bears, you make lots of noise. With brown bears, you play dead,” my daughters told me as we drove away from the campground’s check-in booth.
The ranger had warned us that bears had been active in the campground throughout the week. Make a lot of noise, the children said. How do they know these things? Maybe it comes from being a native Coloradan, something that sings in their blood, something I can never be, though I’ve lived here more than a dozen years. When I read the information signs, they were absolutely right. Make noise, clap your hands, yell. I’m glad the Rockies are black bear country, because relying on playing dead seems less than ideal.
When I was little, we went to Vermont annually to stretch our legs and fill our souls, a get away from suburban Boston. I have memory vignettes from those trips. A specific apple tree, laden with fruit, at the bottom of a hill. The wood beams of a cabin. Those memories are sweet because they’re a little faded around the edges, full of vintage appeal. It’s a reminder that when our family packs up for a weekend of mountain camping, when we escape suburban Denver for the idyllic appeal of the mountains, it matters.
More and more, I’m faced with reminders that my children are growing up and that the decisions we make now are teaching them lessons and priorities in ways that feel alarmingly real sometimes. (And even more alarming, it is real. Life has no dress rehearsal). While children are sponges for knowledge from the moment they’re born, there’s something about the age where suddenly your child, still very much a child, true, but older every day, has learned facts that you didn’t teach them. Even if it’s just from 8:35 to 3:30 weekdays, you begin to realize that they’re on their own out there in the world, and they’re doing just fine. Suddenly, they know what to do if they see a black bear, and you realize that you have to defer to their greater knowledge. The day rapidly approaches where, just as your restaurant dinner is served, your child announces they have to use the bathroom. You sigh a little, look fondly at your just delivered, currently hot dinner, fold your napkin and begin to scoot out of the booth when that child says, “I know where it is, Mom.” Not Mama, not Mommy. But, “I know where it is, Mom.”
Part of camping in the mountains is hiking in the mountains. Visually, you can’t go wrong any direction you turn and what’s better when you’re camping than coming back ravenous to a campfire dinner of THE BEST FOOD YOU’VE EVER EATEN. While our family rambles around Denver and calls it hiking, we planned a fairly ambitious hike for the mountains. An alpine lake was 2.8 miles away from the trailhead, which also made it 2.8 miles back. We were prepared to take all day if we needed it; the goal was the hike, not a timed event.
Going to Rocky Mountain National Park is about escaping into the wilderness. It’s about seeing deer and elk and dozens of chipmunks in their home, while you are just a visitor. It’s about wildflowers and giant boulders as old as the mountains in the middle of your path. Potentially, it’s about bears, though we didn’t see one. Rocky Mountain National Park is the quintessential model of the park system. It’s stepping into an Ansel Adams photograph, in color. A photograph that 3.8 million people visit a year. Wilderness it may still be, when the people go home at night, but it’s not exactly a lonely planet sojourn. As we hiked, we passed people, and people passed us. Groups of high school students, other young families, couples who had been hiking for fifty years more than we had. There were some amazing moments, when we saw clearly the complex artistry of spiderwebs, marveled at sun blanched, uprooted tree roots taller than a child, and jumped from rock to rock downstream of a thundering waterfall. And there were some lackluster moments. Tired legs and aching feet, how-much-farthers and flaring tempers. We made it to the lake, though, and for an hour and a half, all the aches were forgotten, splashing in the cold ice-melt waters, warming back up on the sun-soaked rocks. On the way back down, still energized from the lake, we passed another family with children still hiking up and the parents said, “Look at these children, hiking without complaining!” We all smiled knowingly at each other, members of the same club. Parents of children who were toddling just yesterday, and hiking today. 
What will become my children’s wild Vermont apple tree? The nostalgic trigger for a childhood we’re currently defining? I wish I could know, to be able to stop in that rose-colored moment and indulge in it, delighted in the foreknowledge of their wistful reminiscence. I wish I could know what will shape them the most, what will define their memories. As parents, the not knowing keeps us up at night, hoping we’re getting it right, but also means we also get to live childhood again, with the knowledge of how fleeting it really is.