[pct-l] Teach Your Children

[Bighummel at aol.com (Bighummel@xxxxxxx)]

Keep the introductions coming.  It is good to hear of your hiking roots and 
how the concept of the PCT came to grow in your mind.  

One of the themes that I am catching from the many introductions is that 
many/most found their love of hiking and camping in their youth, as children.  I 
thank my parents for this introduction to the wilderness and its virtues and, 
of course, I am trying to pass it on to my children. 

I enjoy taking them to some of the fantastic spots in the Sierra and in the 
Channel Islands and other great places and they look forward to the next one 
and now are getting into the planning.  I look forward to my first overnight 
campout with my 3 1/2 year old daughter and she bugs me about this constantly as 
she missed going hiking with her older brothers this summer.  

I hope that one of them will follow in my footsteps, or better yet hike side 
by side with me along the PCT again!  I know that this is a vain hope and that 
they will do what they find to love and not what I try to teach them to love. 


Greg Hummel
"Strider"

"To the Backpacker time and place have no meaning.  Independent and 
self-sustaining he is his own master.  That is the joy of backpacking.  Wandering where 
and when he wishes, darkness finds him "everywhere at home.""
                                             Clinton C. Clarke in "The 
Pacific Crest Trailway" 1943