This is a continuation of our Inspired By Nature series, where we highlight Canadians who are dedicated to sharing the health benefits of nature by getting others outside and unplugged. Know someone who we should feature? Email news@bcparksfoundation.ca.
Meet Tanya Koob from Family Adventures in the Rockies
I’m an outdoor loving mom to a spunky 10-year-old boy, and together with my husband, we enjoy getting outside as much as possible for fun adventures across Alberta and B.C. We live in Calgary, AB which is a great spot for accessing multiple national and provincial parks within a short drive.
Getting outside
As a family we enjoy everything from hiking and mountain biking to camping, backpacking and paddling. My boys love rock climbing but I’m partial to stand up paddle boarding and my board comes with me everywhere we travel. In the winter we enjoy both downhill and cross-country skiing, and we love wild mountain skating on freshly frozen lakes before they become snow covered.
Our home base of Calgary makes a convenient base camp for weekend trips across the B.C. Kootenay Rockies, one of our favourite mountain playgrounds. We spend many weekends in the towns of Radium Hot Springs, Invermere, Fairmont Hot Springs, and Fernie each year (in both summer and winter).
We also travel to the Okanagan, camping in Penticton every summer where we like to soak in the sun, pretending we’re in Mexico for a week.
Closer to home, we spend a lot of time in Kananaskis Country which always feels like our backyard playground.
Family Adventures in the Canadian Rockies
I started this blog when my son was 3 years old as a means of sharing our adventures with family and friends. I never expected to become a freelance writer, or for my blog to inspire so many other families, but writing about our trips has become a huge passion of mine.
I get very excited when we discover a new favourite trail, destination or campground, and I want to shout it from the top of the mountains to encourage others to also have the same incredible experience – something that makes me great at blogging (just don’t tell me your secret swimming hole because I’ll never be able to keep it to myself).
The inspiration behind it
It may sound crazy, but it bothered me that I’d go hiking or skiing, and not know every other family on the trail. I wanted to create a community of outdoor loving families that would get to know one another, seek to inspire the other families, and even travel together.
It was this goal that caused me to first create the Calgary Outdoor Playgroup on Facebook, now over 4,000 members strong, and to create my first Facebook page. From that came the blog and my other social media accounts.
Connection will always be first and foremost with me, and I’m happy to say I have been on hiking trails where I actually did know every other family on the trail.
Favourite moments with Family Adventures in the Canadian Rockies
We recently hiked into the Bow Hut, one of the Alpine Club of Canada properties, and spent a night at the edge of the Wapta Icefield. The weather didn’t look promising, but we gambled on the forecast and won with great views and an amazing experience hiking to the top of the Onion, a nearby peak 300 metres above the hut.
The best part of the trip was running down the Bow Glacier from the top of the Onion to find an ice cave as we hiked back down to the hut. We hadn’t been planning on getting on the glacier, but once my husband determined the conditions were safe and that it had sufficient snow coverage, we had the most amazing time running down the snow (my son and I both screaming and laughing.)
The trip was a highlight of our summer and we hope to return next year again, perhaps to climb one of the bigger peaks for a first family mountaineering trip.
Advice if you want to get outside and unplugged, too.
My biggest suggestion is to choose one sport per season that you want to fully invest in. Buy the gear, get the training if necessary, find a support network of friends to enjoy the sport with, and focus fully on that activity. You can always branch off from that afterwards as we’ve done, but for us, it started with hiking and cross-country skiing as a family. Everything else was built on that.
I also encourage families to do what they know. My husband and I were big into scrambling and mountaineering before having our son, and so it’s a natural progression that we’d want to pursue these sports as a family.