The members of this reporter’s family are no strangers to epic road trips: Each year during spring break, we load up the car and make our way west, usually stopping to camp in Utah, shop and quickly grow tired of Vegas, and dip our feet (and the rest of us) into the Pacific Ocean.
We’ve never, however, hiked the 489-mile Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango like author Andrea Lani’s family did.
The hike is the subject of Lani’s new book, “Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail,” which was released last month. It chronicles the experiences of the family: Andrea, husband Curry, and their three sons Milo and twins Zephyr and Emmet, and like the vast majority of family field trips, the group has fun, fights, makes up and ultimately grows closer on the trail.
Andrea was born and raised in Colorado, leaving for Maine to attend college. She met her husband there, and that’s where the family lives. And this wasn’t her first time on the trail, either – she and Curry first took to it in 1996. So for her, hiking the Colorado Trail was a homecoming of sorts, she said.
“The best part of the hike was definitely sharing the experience with my kids and seeing them grow and develop in really incredible ways,” she said. “And being able to spend time with them in my sort of motherland. That kind of closeness we were able to establish as a family.”
And with the good also comes the not so good: Lani said that along with some disagreements, there was also the sheer challenge of hiking that long. “I guess the hardest part was just that it was still very physically challenging for me – I get really bad shin splints – just that it wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be.”
“Uphill Both Ways” is also a history book of sorts as well. Lani intersperses facts about the area – historical, ecological, geographic and familial. She also includes illustrations she drew along the way of plants, insects and small birds she encountered on the trail, smaller parts of the bigger journey, one of the lessons she wants readers to take away from the book.
Buy the book!
Andrea Lani’s new book, “Uphill Both Ways,” is available at Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.
For more information, call the shop at 247-1438 or visit https://bit.ly/3JZdyXs.
“I definitely think one big takeaway is that life doesn’t end with kids – adventure is still possible. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on that big a scale, but it doesn’t have to just be drudgery or day care runs and carpools and that sort of thing,” she said. “Another one – the illustrations in the book, I wanted to draw attention to the very small things, it’s very easy to get carried away with the grand vistas and just the spectacular bigness of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, but the small details like flowers and little birds and insects and all of that is a whole other world of beauty and incredible detail and then kind of a balance between appreciation of the wonders of nature and an understanding that there’s a lot of damage out there, thinking about what we can do to mitigate that to an extent.”
Think you’d like to sign your family up for the hike? Lani said she recommends it, but if a 489-mile trek with fam seems a bit much, it’s OK to aim a little lower – like just getting outside and camping.
“If any family thought that they wanted to try a long-distance hike, definitely,” she said. “But even just doing something a little bit out of your comfort zone, like an overnight hike or if you’ve never been camping – absolutely every family should go camping; kids are just made to go camping, they love dirt, they’re just delighted to be outside, it’s a wonderful experience. But if anybody had the opportunity and the means and the opportunity to go on a longer trip with their kids, and they had enough experience so that they could be reasonably safe, absolutely.”
It’s been a handful of years since the hike – the boys are now 20 and 16 – and when asked if she’d do the trail again, Lani laughs.
“I don’t know. I would definitely like to go back, I think I’d like to go back and spend more time in one place, like really explore, maybe hike in somewhere to a base camp and explore an area less than covering miles, and maybe see some areas I haven’t had much experience with,” she said. “I’m not sure if another longer hike, longer than a week or two, is in my future, but never say never.”
katie@durangoherald.com
