Scraping Heaven: A Family's Journey Along the Continental Divide by Cindy Ross
325 pages
Published 2003
Read from March 7 to March 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I seem to rate these hiking narratives (or, in this case, llama-packing narrative) as a simple ratio between the amount of trail and scenery description and the amount of (to me) extraneous matter, like politics, religion, broad gender stereotyping, and weird interpersonal drama. I liked this book both for its glimpse of a new (to me) long distance trail and for its depiction of hiking long distances with young children, as Ross and her husband take their offspring along the Continental Divide Trail over the course of five summers. However, with each passing year Ross devotes less and less space to descriptions of what they see and do in the mountains; by their third or fourth season, Ross summarizes weeks of adventure into a single paragraph, leaving proportionally more and more of the narrative to reiterating the same basic points about how the journey is tough on their kids but teaches them self-confidence, how her husband is an uncommunicative male who gets grumpy because they can't have sex, how her kids marvelously adapt and entertain themselves, and oh, did she mention she feels this string of adventures teaches her kids their capabilities and how to believe in themselves? It gets a little preachy at times, diminishing what could otherwise be an interesting and unusual adventure tale. (Also repetitive: Ross makes sure to work in some variant of "scraping heaven" into her account of each and every summer on the trail.)
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