Sunburned Smiles
If you know my littlest sister, you know she loves dinosaurs, when we found out that there are fossilized dinosaur prints in San Angelo state park just a few hours away, we have wanted to go.
Well since the co-op semester has wrapped up, and Fridays were free again we decided it was finally cool enough to go, and while it has cooled off 80 degrees is still warm. LOL.
So we loaded up, drove to San Angelo, and met my oldest sister and her 4 kids, (my nieces and nephew) and hit the trail.
While it was a bit chaotic, it was also so much fun. My mom use to take us hiking fairly often when we were little kids, we hiked state parks, national forests, and our deer lease. We hiked the deer lease a lot. Now they weren’t long hikes, we probably never when more than a few miles, but they were always so much fun. We looked for fossils, and different types of rocks. (My mom is a geologist) mine and one of my sisters favorite thing to search for were bones, and we found quiet a few. As we got older we started nature journals and took a lot of pictures of plants, insects and a few deer to track, identify and write a few facts about. I still remember this picture of a spider on its web that we took. But we had a lot of fun. What was cool about this hike in San Angelo was getting to see my little sister and nieces and nephew enjoy hiking and creating memories that I know they’ll remember and laugh because I still think about our hikes and laugh.
To keep 5 kids under 12 engaged, while we hiked to the fossilized dinosaur tracks, we printed out 100 things to look for on your hike list, and handed each kid one. My little sister also needed to photograph a hike, taking pictures of the things she saw, to compete the scavenger hunt for her American Heritage Girls Photography badge.
Which by the way, if you have littles you want to keep engaged on a hike I defiantly recommend printing out a scavenger hunt, (you don’t have to complete everything) and let them look for things, identify plants and tracks, look for different types of birds, or rocks. And other quick tip, sometimes it’s better when the littles don’t know how far they’re hiking. we hiked 4 miles and the kids have no idea, they thought we’d hiked close to two because for the first half they were having a ton of fun. Second half got a little rough.
After we hiked to the dinosaur tracks, the kids found some springs and had a ton of fun playing in the water, searching for frogs, splashing each other, and the dogs. If we had planned a little better we would have ate at the site where the tracks were, but we didn’t so we hiked back to the trucks and ate there.
So what I learned during this hike
you don’t always need to tell the kids how far you hiked
they shoes you wear can make a huge difference
Always pack snacks
Bring extra Electrolyte packets (These are my favorites)
Bring a scavenger hunt
Don’t be afraid to bring your dogs (I’ll probably write another post about that)
Also using a app like Map my Run is a great
Have Fun and actually enjoy the hike
Note- Using an App like map my run is a great way to compare how your trail looks compared to the map trail and if your going the right way!
What is the best hike or fondest memory you have hiking?
