Hiking the Billy Goat Trail

Noah, Ethan, and Dylan on the Billy Goat Trail

We hiked part of the Billy Goat Trail today – section C to be precise. If you are from DC than you are probably familiar with the Billy Goat Trail. It’s a great series of trails along the Potomac River in Maryland, and has been a favorite of our family for many years. (In fact, Grace and I hiked it on one of our first dates many years ago.)

Parts of the trail can be extremely challenging, while others are far more kid friendly, especially with a posse of under 8’s in your crowd. For some reason, whoever names these trails has conveniently labeled the major sections A, B, and C, to make it harder to determine what level of hike you might be embarking on. But with a little research on your Google machine, you can keep it straight.

Section A is by far the most difficult of the three sections – in our family it has taken on the same fabled mystique as Everest. The boys talk about someday hiking section A in dreamy whispers, and when they are in the presence of someone who has hiked Billy Goat Trail Section A, they listen with rapt attention. Ethan recently asked me whether we could try to hike it “when Noah turns 20.”

So we embarked today on Billy Goat Section C, a far more kid friendly hike, but still with enough rocks, bridges, and mud for a fun experience. Definitely not stroller friendly, but not to difficult to do with one of those back pack kid carriers. Noah traveled in ours for many of our hiking adventures but there are no free rides here at Camp Daddy! So he proudly put his two little legs to the test on section C.

We hiked for nearly 3 minutes before our first break.

Resting our legs and refueling with bananas and water.

I don’t know exactly what it is about boys, stones, and water. But they could spend an entire day throwing stones into the water. The problem, as most of you know, is that after about 15 minutes, they begin to up the ante. A single rock becomes a handful of rocks, and then the rocks become bigger. Until someone is holding a boulder over his head and yelling “watch this!” to his brothers. So slightly wet, we resumed our hike.

The entire hike was about 1.75 miles and Noah walked the whole thing! He didn’t even show signs of being tired until we hit the C&O Canal towpath on the return leg.

We went swimming in the afternoon, where Dylan made progress on his freestyle stroke and put his whole head under water (a HUGE first for him!).

Thanks for the comments and encouragement on our blog so far. We will be taking your advice and adding a “Camp Daddy Recipe” section soon. Stay tuned!