What It’s Like To Write a Guidebook for Kids

In honor of upcoming Mother’s Day, and the newly released Hiking with Kids Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks: 42 Great Hikes for Families by our own Managing Editor Roxy Dawson and her husband, Ben Dawson, she sat down to let us know what it’s like to actually write a guidebook for kids.

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When Falcon Guides approached us to write for our third guidebook, my husband and I knew what was ahead of us. This time though, we’d be hiking and writing with a kid in tow—so naturally, it had to be about hiking with kids.

Glacier National Park has long been one of our favorite places, and we’d visited many times before, doing 20-mile days and easy 20-minute miles. This time, we returned with our toddler, determined to rediscover the park as a family—document it for families like ours, and take our mileage and pace wayyyyyyy down.

The Reality of Researching a Family Trail Guide

People often imagine writing a guidebook as this idyllic process: hiking beautiful trails, taking notes, snapping photos. And yes, there’s a lot of that. But it’s preceded by hours and hours of research and planning. Glacier National Park, especially, was hard because of the permit process and highly sought after camping. We booked campsites months in advance, hoping the trails we needed to hike lined up.

By the time we were road tripping up north from Colorado, we had a daily itinerary of two to three hikes a day for 35 days straight.

We hiked every trail in this book—and then some. Some days we carried our son in the carrier for five miles straight while he crumbled granola bars onto our necks. 

Other days, he walked a quarter-mile in 40 minutes and called it a day. We stopped to watch squirrels and to examine exciting rocks, and to eat more snacks. Every trail was recorded on three to four separate GPS devices, as well as a GoPro so we could go back and relive the entire thing for writing later.

The Actual Hiking

We wanted this book to be useful for all kinds of families, so we included hikes that ranged from easy, paved walks to more adventurous, half-day treks. We skipped anything that felt like a suffer-fest or had limited payoff for kids (kids need water to look at and play in, always).

Each hike in the book includes where the bathrooms are, where the shade begins, how much elevation you’ll actually feel with a kid on your back. Everything is noted in our phones as we hiked, each item accompanied by a description and its own GPS coordinates. It’s a different way of hiking, not nearly as relaxing and meditative. You have to be aware of anything that might be of note, pull out your phone, make sure the GoPro battery is still charged, and wrangle the kid.

The Hard Work

The hardest part of writing a guidebook? Writing it. The hiking, while a different type, is wonderful and immersive. You’re camping for a month at a time, exploring new trails and seeing different landscapes every day. Then you get home. And you have to translate it all to paper. 

We split the writing between my partner and I, often trying to tackle writing a hike or two a day. Each hike requires looking at all the GPS tracks taken, getting GPS coordinates for the trailhead, sorting through the one hundred or so photos taken of each hike and picking the best three of four, then following the exact criteria Falcon lays out of all the information required for each. It’s going back and checking the National Park website, watching the GoPro footage through, and researching what foliage and fauna are in the pictures so readers get correct information. Honestly it’s a lot of work with little reward because it takes so long for the publisher to put together the guidebook after you’re finished.

The Finished Product

We are so proud of all the work that went into this guidebook. Thousands of hours both on and off the trail. We hope you fall in love with Glacier and Waterton National Parks like we did. We can’t wait to go back (now with two kids to explore with! That’s how long it takes to create a guidebook, there’s a whole new human around). And of course, check out our new guidebook, Hiking with Kids Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks: 42 Great Hikes for Families, available now.