Hiking to the Carpathians with children
This report is about the tour: Laugavegur Trek
Video about hike to Hoverla May 27-29, 2018.
This hike was special for me because I went on it with my children. This is both additional responsibility and additional weight in the backpack. Therefore, this time another instructor led the group, and was the last one - he walked in the back, chatted with the children and took pictures of flowers. By that time, I had not been to the Carpathians for quite some time and had slightly forgotten about some of the features of local tourism. The fact is that when we spent the night on the Sheshul traverse, our “classmates” had their backpack stolen from their tent. In the end, everything worked out well - the backpack was found, nothing valuable was missing, but as they say, a residue remained.
There were other difficulties. It turned out that my 7-year-old daughter copes with the climbs quite easily (we climbed Petros at a completely adult pace), but on the descents not everything is so smooth. As a result, we descended from both Petros and Goverla constantly holding hands, very slowly and rather tensely.
It wasn’t easy for me either, at least because of the heavy weight of the backpack. I carried all the equipment (sleeping bags, rugs, tent) and most of the food for three people, and therefore, even taking into account maximum lightening and optimization, the backpack turned out to be too heavy.
Nevertheless, the trip was a success. It was very nice to look at the Carpathians with a fresh look, it was informative to spend time with children in a relatively extreme environment, it was useful to take a sober look at your strengths and the difficulty of hiking in the Carpathians.
Now I (as a tour sales consultant) am even more careful about answering questions like “At what age can you take children hiking in the Carpathians?” In short, my answer today boils down to approximately the following: the ideal ratio is two adults to 1 child; children over 10 years old can easily walk at the pace of an adult group, but for the rest, much depends on individual characteristics; parents must be ready to completely unload the child and even pick him up.
Kirill Yasko April 1, 2020