In the back of my mind, I always wanted to take my daughter along for a gravel kids adventure, but have always been a bit weary about pulling it off.
While our WeeHoo has served us in many capacities, trying to bring that into a mountain experience has always been the question.
First of all, hauling over 100 extra pounds is not conducive to riding dirt, especially since most off road opportunities in my area aren’t flat (makes me think of the joys of owning an e-bike).
Another worry was how dirty she would get trailing me even though the WeeHoo has a fender.
For these reason, a gravel kids adventure was on the back burner until the week before riding up to Mount Lowe.
Reaching the top, I realized Mount Wilson Road was closed to vehicular traffic which gave me the idea: why not just bring the bikes and see where they’ll take us.
I grabbed some backpacks and hiking goods and drove into the Angeles National Forest to Red Box to begin our adventure.
Turning onto Mount Wilson Road, I knew I was going to cut out Mount Disappointment on the return because already climbing at 7% was stretching it.
Along the way, we passed a work crew and a handful of hikers who were a bit surprised to see this set up rolling by them, but how often to you get to take advantage of a closed road like this?
Once I got to Mount Lowe Road, I knew it would be a bit of a stretch to go dirt from there remembering the shoddy conditions up the trail which I discovered got worse in the week since I had been there.
Still, my daughter loves hiking too so I knew Mount Lowe Road offered a lot of bang for the buck no matter how far we went.
Obviously, she got a first look at the Gravel Kids Adventure video and was ecstatic to relive it all, but these types of experiences are all around us.
You’ve just got to taken them along!