Camping with Kids in Wyoming: How to Get Them to Actually Look Around

There is lichen on the rocks in Wyoming that is older than the state it grows on.

Crustose lichen is the flat orange and grey crust that looks like paint on granite. It grows on the order of half a millimetre a year, and in a bad year it does not grow at all. A patch the width of your hand has been working on that rock for well over a century. Wyoming has been a state since 1890. Some of what you are stepping over got started before that.

Almost nobody stops to look at it.

That is the thing about Wyoming. Most people come for the big version — the Tetons, the geysers, the bison standing near the highway. Those are worth seeing, and you have already seen photographs of all of them. There is a second Wyoming at your feet that most visitors never find, and it is the one I photograph.

Children are better at finding it than adults are. They are already closer to the ground, they have not yet learned that a rock is boring, and they will hold onto a real number if you give them one. What follows is how I go about it. Mine are still small, so some of this I have done with them and some of it is on the list for next summer. I will say which.

Before you go: make it a mission, not a hike

The words you use before the trip matter more than anything you pack. "We are going camping" sets one expectation. "We are going to find things most people never see" sets a different one.

Give them a specific job. Not "look for interesting things," which is too vague to act on. Try "find something alive that most people would walk right past," or "find proof that something was here before us." A child with a concrete objective is a focused child.

Give them a field journal rather than a notebook. The distinction is not decoration. Scientists keep field journals. A child with a field journal is doing fieldwork, not a craft project. Let them set it up however they want — sketches, notes, pressed leaves between the pages.

Take a paper field guide. A regional wildflower, insect or geology guide that they can flip through at camp and mark up is more use in the backcountry than anything that needs a signal. I do not identify things in the field myself. I photograph whatever it is and look it up weeks later, which means when a kid asks me what something is, we are in the same position and we find out together.

Tell them one real fact before you arrive. The lichen one works. Watch it land.

On the trail: the art of stopping

Most family hikes have a destination problem. There is a summit or a waterfall, and everything between the trailhead and it is distance to be covered. The child either keeps up or slows everyone down.

I do not hike that way when I am working. The trail is not a route to somewhere, it is a line through a habitat that I am looking at as I go. The destination is whatever turns out to be interesting.

In practice that means stopping on purpose every fifteen or twenty minutes. Not to rest. To look. Pick a spot, crouch, and spend five real minutes on what is actually there. There is almost always something.

Five things Wyoming trails almost always have, at eye level or below

Lichen, usually several kinds within arm's reach of any rock face. It looks like paint and it is not a plant. It is a fungus and an alga living as a single organism, neither able to manage alone, and it is slowly dissolving the stone it sits on. That is the first step in making soil.

Beetles going somewhere. Watch one patch of ground for two minutes without moving and you will see them working through the grass stems with obvious purpose. Where to is a good question. The field guide at camp can tell you what it was.

Quartz veins in granite. The white lines threading through grey rock are quartz that was forced into cracks in the original rock and hardened there. You are looking at a record of something that happened long before anything was around to see it.

Spider webs, and the fact that they are not all the same. Orb weavers, funnel weavers and sheet weavers all build differently, and once you know there are different designs you cannot stop sorting them.

Plant galls. The strange lumps and spheres on stems and leaves look like the plant is sick. They are not. A small wasp or fly has persuaded the plant to grow it a house, and the plant complied. They are everywhere once you start seeing them.

The gear that actually changes what you can see

Most camping lists are about comfort and safety, which matter. Three cheap things change what is possible to notice.

A 10x jeweller's loupe, ten or fifteen dollars at a rock shop, small enough to live on a keychain. It is enough to see the facets in a crystal, the scales on a moth's wing, the structure of a lichen. It is not a toy — it is the same instrument a geologist uses. This is the single best thing I have handed a child.

A small spray bottle of water. Wetting a rock shows you its real colour. Dry granite reads as grey. Wet granite shows pink feldspar, black biotite and white quartz. It is the same rock. The water just removes the noise. This gets a reaction every single time.

A headlamp they control themselves. Wyoming after dark is a different habitat — moths at the tent, the way a crystal catches a beam differently from every angle, and more stars than they will have seen. Night is not downtime.

At camp

The campsite is a habitat too, and a child with time and the right framing will find things an adult would need weeks to notice.

The square metre survey. Mark out a rough square metre with sticks at the corners and have them record every living thing inside it. Grass species count separately. Ants count separately. Anything that looks different under the loupe counts separately. The goal is the highest count they can get. This is real method — ecologists call it a quadrat survey — and I have not managed it with mine yet. It is the thing I am most looking forward to.

Rock collecting with actual rules. Not "find pretty rocks." Find a rock that shows evidence of water. One with two different minerals touching. One with something living on it. One that looks like a different rock wet than dry. The rules force looking instead of gathering. This one works with small children, and the spray bottle does most of the convincing.

Drawing the shadows. The hour before sunset here is low and warm and rakes across everything, which is why it is when I shoot. Hand them a pencil in that light and ask them to draw only the shadows, not the things casting them. It forces a completely different kind of looking. Also untested by me, and also on the list.

Four places that reward looking down

Vedauwoo, near Laramie. The granite is strange enough to feel like somewhere else, the surfaces are textured at every scale from boulder down to crystal, and the lichen is excellent.

Sinks Canyon, near Lander. The Popo Agie River goes underground into a limestone cave and comes back out at a spring several hundred yards down the canyon. Dye testing has shown the water takes many hours to make that short trip, which tells you the underground route is nothing like a straight line. That alone is a field journal entry.

Tensleep Canyon. Limestone walls with marine fossils in them, reachable from the road. Sea creatures, in a state with no sea. How they got there — ancient inland seas, then uplift — is one of the better geology lessons available anywhere.

The Beartooth highway corridor. Above treeline, everything alive is doing something remarkable just to stay that way. The plants are small and tough in ways lower-elevation plants never have to be, and some of the insects carry compounds that keep their tissues from freezing.

The part that sticks

Here is what I have found, photographing this country at ground level for about five years: the big version of Wyoming is easy to forget. The Tetons are beautiful and you already know what they look like.

The lichen that started growing before statehood is harder to forget. So is the quartz vein that records something that happened before anybody was here to watch, and the gall that is really a house a wasp talked a plant into building. These things do not have famous photographs. Most people have never looked at one. Finding one feels like finding something.

Not everything out there made it, either, and that is worth saying out loud to a child who is old enough to hear it. Half of what I photograph is something that did not survive — a leaf eaten down to its veins, a nest the colony abandoned, a heart shape in a boulder that let go of the rock the winter after I found it. The ones still standing had to get through something.

That is what I want them looking at.

Stop. Look closer.

If you want to take some of it home

Most of what is in this post is somewhere in the work: lichen on rock, an ant crossing resin, a leaf holding water. The rest is in All Works.