Finding Adventure Close to Home

A few months ago we set a goal: hike once a week for one year. Each hike has to be at a different location. We got the idea from the 52 Hike Challenge we saw on Instagram. The gorgeous pictures of mountain views, clear streams, and lush forests featured in the #52hikechallenge hashtags gave us the idea that this challenge would be an amazing addition to our regular daily lives. We did not take into account that we live no less than a full day’s drive from any sort of mountain or dense forest. They don’t call our part of the country fly-over country for nothing. We literally live in the dead center of fly-over country. So much so that people don’t even stop in our airport for layovers.

Today marked our 16^th hike. With zero mountains and zillions of acres of farmland, our biggest challenge so far has been finding different trails close to home. We know we will be visiting several different cities in the next few months and we look forward to exploring new terrain, but for now we are making the most of what we’ve got.

In these first 16 weeks, we have learned a lot about our local trails. For example, today we thought we would check out a suburban trail for a short hike with extended family and found a pretty sweet mountain biking park with legit obstacles that were fun for the kiddos on foot, and will be even more awesome when we return with our bikes in the near future.

We have discovered prairie reserves in the middle of town, SUP rental just minutes from our house, and hike-in lean-to camping just a few hours from our city. The hiking challenge is growing to be about so much more than just the hiking. It has pushed us to take our usual outdoor adventures a bit further in order to diversify our trail use. One of our most memorable hikes was the one where we started on a familiar flat limestone trail and ended up wading through a shallow river exploring sandbars.

We have gotten closer to nature discovering unusual insects, learning more about turtles and fish, and have really learned to choose our hiking locations according to the weather. Wet and muggy days are better for hiking in open prairie, while the woods are more enjoyable on dry, cool days.

And we are learning to love our gigantic, ever-changing sky. Some of our best photo ops are set by brilliant blues, feathery wisps of white over pink, intense goldenrod sunsets, or moody rolling graphite clouds. As the days shorten, we are also finding more opportunities to snap our shots when the shadows are long and the light is at just the right angle.

We still absolutely love the bigger wonders of our world like the mountains and the ocean, and we absolutely can’t wait to try our hiking shoes out on unfamiliar grounds. But while we are waiting, we are learning to recognize the little gems that are close to home.