Little Si
February 7, 1998
Saturday, February 7 was the date of the first (of hopefully
many) BoBaby hikes. Bryden Robertson and Evan Steiner were
the only two toddlers to brave the challenge of the mighty,
yet innocuous, summit of Little Si (1569').
They each arrived at the trailhead with a porter and a Sherpa
to help them on this arduous journey; the porter to carry
their gear, and the Sherpa to use an ingenious variation of
the short roping technique to aid them in their ascent.
Instead of having their Sherpas tie in to them with a short
piece of rope, and then help pull them up the mountain,
Bryden and Evan decided to skip the rope all together, and,
once safely ensconced in their modified "seat" harnesses, had
their Sherpas simply wear them. By doing this, one link was
eliminated from the safety system, reducing the possibility
of gear failure. This seemed to create an environment that
felt safe enough to allow both adventurers to nap most of the
way to the summit.
Once on the summit, however, the excitement was far too great
to sleep - for Evan, the milk bar opened for a little snack,
and Bryden became deeply fascinated with some of the local
fauna - I believe he was attempting to use one of the native
languages of the region when he happily chanted over and over
"buppy gog, buppy gog, vuv vuv!"
(For you non-parental types
out there, I believe this loosely translates to "Puppy dog,
puppy dog, woof woof!", referring to the mooching golden
retriever that was greeting each new climber, checking to
make sure they had at least one of the ten essentials - extra
food). After a few obligatory summit photos, the climber's
attention turned to the geological aspects of the summit - I
believe Bryden determined that the rocks making up this
summit massif bore a strong resemblance to the rocks found in
our local climbing gym, at least from the aspect of taste,
which is where his realm of expertise lies.
Although the weather was wonderful, we did not want to linger
too long on this airy pinnacle, so forsaking the summit we
started the descent back to the trailhead, knowing we had a
supply of fresh diapers waiting for us there. Filled with
excitement from his recent zoological and geological
discoveries, Bryden decided to take a decidedly botanical
bent on the descent, and insisted, as only a 14 month old
can, on touching every tree that grew alongside the right
hand side of the trail all the way to the base of the Little
Si climbing area. There are a lot of trees along the right
hand side of the trail between the summit and the climbing
area. Evan took a much more sensible approach, and napped.
Last updated: April 3, 2001