Social Media Got My Teen Into Hiking
What happened next will shock you.
Social media is the devil, haven’t you heard? An evil influencer inspired my son to spend three nights hiking in the wilderness without even a cell signal. And it gets worse. Another of those “scourges on society” showed my kid how to make chocolate-filled strawberry and banana pancakes last weekend. A curse on my diet! And now he’s following a devilish YouTuber’s journey through the USA to raise money for a children’s hospital: #thehorrors.
Despite my facetiousness, I am aware that social media is bad for their brains. I have seen my son “bed rot”, swiping through sped-up TikTok videos for hours on end. I hate to think what this is doing to his attention span. What surprises me, though, is what happens when he’s done rotting.
He emerges ready to get out and do something, perhaps inspired by images of a greater world out there, awed by others’ adventures and creativity. Or maybe he’s just feeling rested and ready to put the phone down. Either way, he comes out of it alive.
The disconnect for many kids likely lies in the lack of opportunity in their environment once that phone screen goes blank. Living in Queenstown, my son has grown up in a privileged bubble of easily accessible rivers and mountains, and has parents who are keen and able to take him exploring. However, even for those who are not so incredibly lucky, social media can widen your world. For some, it is a way to find your tribe, to express yourself, to gain recognition for your talents. For others, like my son, it is a source of ideas.
He got the inspiration for his first overnight hike from his favourite YouTuber, Ryan Purvis. Ryan (first-name basis in our house) mostly posts videos of snowboarding, but in the off-season, he hikes. His beautiful footage is accompanied by upbeat music, but it is mainly his commentary I like. He’s positive; he’s thoughtful; he talks about his need to get away from it all for a while, to challenge himself in the great outdoors. He manages to avoid sentimentality while presenting ideas like mindfulness and wellbeing. At 33, he’s young (and cool) enough to be relatable, but also old enough to be a role model.
Ryan posted a video of his solo hike to Liverpool Hut in Mt Aspiring National Park—and the child was keen to give it a go. This was, in hindsight, quite an ambitious first overnight hike for a 13-year-old. My husband joined him on the journey, which starts with an ambling three-hour walk through a valley dotted with river crossings and crowned by Rob Roy Glacier, followed by one kilometre of nearly vertical scramble through dense forest to reach a little red 10-bunk hut perched at the edge of a mountain face.
Despite the short distance, this second section of the track is so incredibly steep, it takes most people around three hours to complete. This was true for my husband and son, who described grabbing at tree roots and hoisting bags overhead to help each other up the rugged track. It rained the next day, which meant the descent involved following a stream that was more like a waterfall in places. They made it down completely saturated but satisfied—and my son was hooked.
Next, he and I did Mueller Hut, a gruelling uphill climb to another jaw-dropping, glacier-capped mountaintop where the sun set in apricot and powder pink over the peak of Aoraki. A relentlessly hot midsummer day and an entirely exposed ascent left us drenched in sweat and dehydrated as we reached the hut, but this was soon forgotten when the kea came to visit, hopping along the deck railing and trying to get their beaks under the water tank lids and into the toilet ventilation pipes. As we ventured out under a cold, clear night sky to get some astrophotography shots with the camera equipment we had lugged up that mountain, the iconic red hut was lit by head torches from within, while the Milky Way arched resplendent above the Mueller Glacier.
The Routeburn Track was my son’s first multi-day. The weather was kind to us and, after the previous two, this Great Walk was almost like a stroll for the boy. We relished the mossy trees, the waterfalls, the soaring kea, and the misty mountaintops. We shared a set of earbuds so we could listen to the same playlist as we walked. This also meant we had to stay close, as the music cut out if we got too far apart. Those songs will forever remind me of being on the Routeburn with my son.
For his fourteenth birthday, he invited four friends to Mid Caples Hut near Glenorchy. They spent the afternoon diving into aquamarine water, trying their luck at fishing, then playing Spotlight as the light faded. They arrived back in town buzzing but exhausted, with the friends already making plans for their own birthday hikes.
While we try to inspire a love of hiking in our kids, it seems almost counterintuitive that it was a social media star who got us there. In the age of the parental panic-inducing Netflix show Adolescence and government attempts to ban social media for under 16s, I present Ryan as a counterargument. While there are plenty of terrible influences and social media rabbit holes we would prefer our kids didn’t venture down, a blanket ban feels like the wrong decision. Surely the ban should be on those posting objectionable material and coaxing kids in with negative content, rather than on the platforms themselves?
Parents should, of course, be aware of what their kids are looking at. A quick scan over their TikTok “For You” page should tell you what you need to know. Right now, all I see on my son’s feed—thanks to Ryan and friends—is snowboarding, hiking, and cats. For that, I will gratefully like and subscribe.
