My wife leans toward summits, I'm pulled toward the rivers and the big trees, and our two kids stop for things the rest of us walk right past, and none of us has to give that up to get out together.
The outdoors isn’t one experience that everyone is supposed to love the same way, and the closer you look at any group sharing a trailhead, the more obvious it gets that each person came for something a little different.My Wife is pulled toward summits and thin air.I’d rather be down where the rivers run, and the trees are old enough to have watched centuries pass.Our kids, on the other hand, stop cold for things the rest of us walk right past, regardless of the trail.You don’t have to agree on what makes a good day outside to share the same park, because the bigger ones hold every version of it at once.None of that is a conflict to manage; it’s the reason the parks are worth the drive.The pull of the low country: forests, rivers, and the coastIf water and old forest move you more than a summit does, the lower trails pay you back for patience instead of punishing you, and they ask for a different kind of care than the peaks do.What the Redwoods ask of youAmong the coast redwoods of northern California, the trail is a deep duff of fallen needles and bark that soaks up sound, so you hear the creek long before the path bends toward it.The fog drips off the canopy for hours after the rain has stopped, keeping the understory of sorrel and ferns wet through a dry afternoon and your hiking shoes damp, whether it rained or not.Fern Canyon over in Prairie Creek humbles your gear choices, with walls of five-finger fern and a floor that’s a braided creek you cross over and over on whatever logs the last storm left behind.By the back half of spring, those crossings are still cold enough to remind you that waterproof hiking shoes only stay waterproof until the water comes in over the top.The coast adds the tideThe Pacific coast trails carry a hazard the forest doesn’t, and it’s the one I observe people underestimate.The tide chart is the most important thing in your pack on a coastal hike, because a beach that looks wide open at noon closes into a cliff-walled trap as the water …