My Daughter Set the Pace
This trip had its own momentum from the very beginning, which was the best part of it. Two colleagues of mine wanted to get out on the coast, my pre-teen daughter wanted in, and I was glad to come along carrying a little extra weight and following the lead of a group that had the whole trip well in hand. We pointed ourselves at Coast Camp in Point Reyes, in April, with the entire headland in bloom.
The crew was two colleagues and my daughter, packs on and the ocean behind them, which is to say the three people who actually ran this trip.
This is the actual Coast Camp trip in Backpackers Friend, with the route, the mileage, and the elevation. Scan the code to open it on your phone.
Point Reyes earns its reputation in April. The Coast Trail runs out along the bluffs with the Pacific falling away on one side and green hills rising on the other, and in spring the whole slope is shot through with lupine. Great drifts of pale violet climb the hillside and pour over the top, thick enough that the trail stops being a line across grass and becomes a narrow parting through flowers. The bees work the entire hill at once. The air comes off that hill warm and smelling of pollen and salt together, and out to the west the ocean lies in a blue so flat and so bright that the water seems to have been laid down rather than poured. We walked in under a clear sky and took the day as a gift.
My daughter set the pace, and she set it in earnest. She was out front the whole way in, visor down and sunglasses on, marching through the flowers with the rest of us strung out behind her, and for the entire walk to camp she held exactly one speed, which was faster than mine. My colleagues thought this was wonderful. Failing to keep up with a pre-teen on a hillside full of lupine is a fine way to finish a workweek.
Out front through the lupine, where she had exactly one gear for the entire walk in.
We had camp set up before the light went. Coast Camp sits back from the beach in an open bowl of grass, and that evening the fog stayed offshore and left us a long, slow, blue dusk to sort dinner out in. A thin crescent moon came up over the dark line of the hills, and one of the tents lit from the inside while somebody rummaged through a food bag, so that it stood there glowing in the grass like a lamp set down and forgotten.
Coast Camp at dusk, with one glowing tent, one crescent moon, and the whole evening free.
The beach is the reason to come to Coast Camp, and we gave it most of the following day. The water was cold, the surf came in heavy and bright, and the sand ran wide and flat and firm for as far as anybody cared to walk on it. My daughter went straight down to the waterline to dare the waves, which is the correct response to the Pacific at that age and arguably at every other, and before long she was flat on her back in the dry sand above the tide line while one of my colleagues built a sand creature around her.
The traditional beach burial, carried out with a good deal of care.
The walk out reversed the entire arrangement. The child who had set such a punishing pace on the way in was thoroughly finished with walking by the way back, so the three adults spent the return inventing reasons to keep her moving. We used games, snacks, and an enormous downed eucalyptus that had to be climbed into before anyone was permitted to take another step. The tree earned the stop. Its trunk had the look of a piece of geology rather than a plant, split and hollowed and bleached pale, with roots the size of the branches on ordinary trees, and she settled into the hollow of it and held court there for a while.
A tree too good to walk past. Distraction is a perfectly legitimate trail strategy, and this was the finest one on offer.
The part I think about most came near the end, where the trail turns up a short steep climb back above the beach. It was exactly the sort of stretch that becomes a small triumph if it is handled properly, so I gave away my trekking poles, dropped back to her pace, and we took it on together one switchback at a time with the long curve of the beach falling away beneath us. It was the slowest hundred feet of the trip and comfortably the best part of it.
The ridge near the end. I handed over my poles and we went up it together, one step at a time.
We came out salty, sunburnt, and in high spirits, which is a condition a group photograph catches all by itself. Two colleagues who had turned into trail family over the course of a weekend, a daughter who ran the first half of the trip and made us earn the second, and me, perfectly content to carry the poles and keep up.
Salty, sunburnt, and pleased with ourselves, on the last morning.
That is what a good group does for a trip. A trip runs on momentum more than on leadership, and everybody takes a turn carrying the momentum. She carried the momentum on the way in. We carried the momentum on the way out, and carried her besides, and Coast Camp got the easy middle. That division of labor remains the best I have ever been part of.
Let the pace-setter set the pace
Some of the best trips run themselves. Backpackers Friend tracks your distance, pace, and time as you walk, and tells you how far it still is to the next stop, which turns out to be exactly the number you want on hand when a tired kid asks how much farther for the ninth time. Plan the route, then keep up. Free to start, works fully offline, no account required.
