#10: Trek To Tryon Creek

Near our house is this little gem of a state park in the middle of Portland/Lake Oswego.  

It's got dozens of miles of hiking and horse trails, but only two small loops of paved trail that you'd call wheelchair accessible in the conventional sense.  The rest varies from wide packed dirt-and-gravel lanes to narrow mud-and-root backcountry scrambles.

Sunday I was feeling adventurous, and my wife wanted some time alone, so I gathered up the boys and set out to see if I could break Henry out of the old paved-loop rut.

It was a beautiful day with not too much recent rain, so trail conditions were decent enough.  With Pete leading the way, I maneuvered Henry's chair along the trail down into Tryon Creek's canyon. The going was mostly smooth.  Just a few spots where I had to hop a small drainage trench or a root; or squeeze through a particularly narrow bit of trail; or dig in my Danner heels and slowly, steadily descend a steep grade with both hands firmly gripping Henry's handlebars for dear life, with the full weight of his 45 or 50 pounds and the 25 pounds of chair trying to drag me to the bottom.

Soon, there we were at the creek.  Lovely.

The way back up featured a few railroad-tie stairs I had to back Henry's chair up, and a mud bog where Pete stomped around until he (inevitably) filled one of his boots with water.  But a quick change of pants and socks and a thorough swabbing out of the inside of his boot, and we were good to go again.  Just one thing: what goes down, must come up, so now it was time to dig in and shove all those 70+ pounds of Henry and chair back up them steep grades.  He, of course, thought all this was awesome.

Back up at park headquarters, Pete fell in effortlessly with a gaggle of Cub Scout boys twice his age, playing their war games.   I explained to him that Cub Scouts is basically about playing in the woods and learning skills for playing in the woods more effectively, and he was like, where's this been all my life?  Now he wants to be one.  

One of the dads there said you have to be at least 6 years old, their website says 7, so we have a wait on our hands.  Easy to forget this boy is 3.  But maybe I can start him early on woodcraft so he can just demolish those merit badges when he comes of age.

And now I know it's possible to hike Henry down to Tryon Creek itself.  At least on a nice day.  He loved it.