![\"Three](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Lede_TracyRoss_01.0.jpg\")
My 12-year-old daughter will inherit a warmer world \u2014 and, I fear, a lonelier one.<\/p>\n
When my son Hatcher and I started our hike down Idaho\u2019s Middle Fork of the Salmon River during the fall of 2023, we feared what we might see. <\/p>\n
We were backpacking through our favorite place, the Frank Church\u2013River of No Return Wilderness. It\u2019s almost 2.4 million acres of central Idaho that shelters wolves, black bears, river otters, and lynx; the Salmon River threads through it for 200 breathtaking miles. <\/p>\n
One of America\u2019s longest free-flowing rivers, the Salmon is so fierce that in spots it cuts a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon. And even though its tributary, the Middle Fork, is stacked with whitewater rapids that can flip your boat and suck you under, most drop into forgiving pools that let you recover. <\/p>\n
The main fork of the Salmon stretches across hundreds of miles and two time zones, existing as a dividing line between Mountain Time and Pacific. This means that for as long as you are on it, you are between time. Anthropologists call zones like this \u201cambiguous.\u201d <\/p>\n
To the Irish, they are \u201cthin places.\u201d To my husband, Shawn, and me, anywhere on the Salmon has always been the best place to raise our children. <\/p>\n
Salmon Time gave Scout, our oldest child, a reverence for wilderness and taught him that he can survive anywhere with the right skills and the right friends. He has since become an accomplished adventurer, outdoor writer, and justice seeker, a defender of wild places. <\/p>\n
![\"top](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Inline_03.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of Tracy Ross<\/cite>
It gave Hatcher a taste of independence he\u2019d never known, introduced him to kayaking, and started him on a journey that would make him one of the youngest licensed guides working multiday trips on this wild river. <\/p>\n
But this place, where both of my sons gained such reverence for the natural world, would also soon confront them with the environmental toll that the climate crisis<\/a> exacts. During Hatcher\u2019s first year of guiding, in 2021, fires torched 87,000 acres along the upper Middle Fork corridor. No one was hurt, but several groups, including a few of Hatcher\u2019s, had to row through smoke and past flames raging just off the river banks.<\/p>\n The next summer, torrential rains released tons of mud laden with rocks, boulders, bushes, and hundreds of Douglas fir and lodgepole pine trees into the river. I imagine it sounding like a freight train crashing through the wilderness. <\/p>\n That\u2019s one of the reasons Hatcher and I were here: to witness how fire had altered the river we consider a kind of home away from home.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the other reason: I was working through some serious anxiety over the state of the world and my children\u2019s places in it. <\/p>\n Scout will be 23 this spring, Hatcher is 21, and their little sister, Hollis, a member of Generation Alpha, is 12. If you lay their births out on a timeline of climate-change acceleration, you will understand why I lie awake at night worrying about their futures.<\/p>\n The dividing line between my low(er) anxiety and high is the year Hollis was born: 2011. That\u2019s the year the World Meteorological Service says we entered the \u201cdecade of [global warming] acceleration<\/a>.\u201d The \u201cacceleration\u201d was caused by an unprecedented rise in greenhouse gas emissions that fueled record land and ocean temperature increases and turbocharged a dramatic acceleration in ice melt and sea-level rise from 2011 to 2020 and beyond. <\/p>\n And, indeed, it does feel as though we\u2019ve entered a new chapter of the climate crisis. Where I live, chronic overuse of water resources coupled with a 20-year, climate-change-spurred drought<\/a> has sucked more than 10 trillion gallons out of the Colorado River Basin, threatening supply to more than 40 million people. This February, the Atlantic Ocean was warmer than it had ever been<\/a>, causing whales to move north following plankton in search of cooler temps and foreshadowing another devastating hurricane season this summer. <\/p>\n Over the same span of time, I\u2019ve also witnessed the way technology\u2019s grip on our children has tightened. The average 12-year-old spends 5.3 hours a day staring into their cellphone<\/a>, according to Sapien Labs, a nonprofit organization that runs an ongoing survey into global mental health<\/a>. Kids\u2019 eyes are even elongating to \u201cadapt\u201d<\/a> to their addiction. And \u201ctechnology overload\u201d is creating symptoms in kids that look a lot like ADHD<\/a>, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. <\/p>\n I see the signs in Hollis: She doesn\u2019t want to go outside anymore. She barely looks up from her screen. <\/p>\n Like most parents I know, I want to grab Hollis\u2019s phone and throw it in the nearest toilet. But she\u2019d immediately start begging me for a new one because her \u201centire life\u201d is on it.<\/p>\n When I think back to Scout\u2019s and Hatcher\u2019s childhoods, only a decade before Hollis\u2019s, they seem like a relative Eden. Climate change still seemed a distant and abstract threat, and they didn\u2019t have cellphones. Lucky kids, they grew up believing in Arctic sea ice and that play dates only occurred in person. And I believe the time they spent outside, in nature, gave them some skills to help them find their way in a more complicated world. <\/p>\n Hollis is coming of age during an age of disaster. <\/p>\n The childhood I want to give her, one immersed in nature, is changing, becoming more dangerous. All the while, the lure of her cellphone threatens to disconnect her even more. <\/p>\n As her mother, I want to help her navigate this new world, but I\u2019m not entirely sure how. I hoped days hiking along the Middle Fork with Hatcher might help me sort it out.<\/p>\n \n \n Our home, in the woods <\/strong>outside of Boulder, Colorado, lies within the Roosevelt National Forest. At any given time, moose, deer, bobcats, mountain lions, black bears, and coyotes walk through our property. Sometimes they do more than walk. The moose trap us indoors while they lick salt off our truck and the bears know how to open car doors, especially when there\u2019s a week-old burrito heel, wadded up in tinfoil, inside. <\/p>\n And because the early aughts were still the dial-up age for the average consumer, 5G hadn\u2019t been invented, and Elon Musk<\/a> hadn\u2019t littered the night sky with his snaking chain of satellites, the boys had zero access (yes, literally) to that sort of technology. So when they cried boredom inside, we shooed them outside.<\/p>\n Out on our forested property with a seasonal stream running through it, they hunted Bigfoot and convinced themselves that they saw him in every shaded space between the lodgepole pine trees. They built entire worlds out of rocks and dirt \u2014 Trolls Town and Bombs Berg, over which \u201cScout was a dwarf guy armed with pine cones for bombs,\u201d says Hatcher, and where both boys could disappear for hours \u2014 with The Lord of The Rings<\/em> looping in their imaginations. Their outside play imbued them with the skills we believed they needed to become well-adjusted adults<\/a>. <\/p>\n Scout and Hatcher sometimes moaned about going out when they wanted to stay in and play their Nintendos and later Xbox (we let them have those; we weren\u2019t monsters!). Yet they loved the camaraderie of doing outdoor adventures with like-minded families, of non-school-approved vacations, and of snacks with no end. <\/p>\n But rafting was a different story altogether, a different level of nature immersion and freedom. On a multiday raft trip on a river that limits crowds by requiring a permit, all the parents needed to do was row, set up camps, know how to negotiate the rapids, and keep the kids in life jackets, sun-screened, hydrated, fed, and safe from falling overboard, poison ivy, scorpions, and snakes. <\/p>\n The Salmon\u2019s waters were emerald green and primordial, coursing over Volkswagen Beetle-size boulders. We were awestruck by the evidence of the Indigenous Sheepeater people, a Shoshone band, that could be found in depressions on the river banks where they camped. The bright red salmon swimming toward their ancestral homes to spawn were cool as hell and spooky. <\/p>\n We all felt held and nurtured by things you could only find out there, in that wilderness. Those trips imprinted Scout and Hatcher with some of the most important lessons they would ever learn, including self-reliance, respect for nature, and the value of a tight-knit community. And the power of rivers. <\/p>\n \n As Scout and Hatcher grew<\/strong> from children to teens, Hollis grew up, too, eventually into the 7-year-old singing along to Frozen<\/em> playing on my iPad as we drove across Idaho for a family trip to the Middle Fork. <\/p>\n Like millions of caregivers, we weren\u2019t immune to the lull of sleek devices, sometimes letting our iPhones babysit our children. <\/p>\n We did it even though we knew it was a terrible way to rear them. We did it even as CEOs of the most powerful tech companies were starting to admit they\u2019d never let their own children have a cellphone<\/a>. And we did it knowing the lithium batteries<\/a> that power cellphones \u2014 and the phones themselves \u2014 are a major contributor to climate change through the mining of the raw materials they\u2019re made of, the energy it takes to build and distribute them, and our habit of tossing millions of them each year for new ones, our dopamine levels spiking with the transaction. <\/p>\n But during the first week of July in 2019, I was so excited to finally introduce Hollis to the river. I couldn\u2019t wait to be unreachable for six days, to hold her tight on the boat while Shawn rowed us through rapids, to swim with her in the deep, clear eddies, and to trace constellations in the stars from our sleeping bags laid next to the Salmon. <\/p>\n But as humans are sometimes like to do, we made a mistake. Our desire to raft the Middle Fork with our daughter eclipsed our instinct that it was too dangerous to bring her. <\/p>\n A series of misjudgments led us into a situation where Hollis was alone, on our boat, headed for a treacherous rapid. We\u2019d slowed to pull our boat to the shoreline, before a blind corner. Approaching the shore, Shawn and I jumped out, leaving Hollis alone, and tried to pull the raft in with a bowline, a rope rigged to the boat.<\/p>\n But it was too heavy, and the raft \u2014 and Hollis \u2014 headed for the bend and, somewhere below it, the rapid. <\/p>\n As I stood on the shore screaming and Shawn tried to pull himself back into the boat, a kayaker in our group saw what was happening, paddled over, climbed on, and saved Hollis. When I finally reached her, she scrambled into my lap crying and said, \u201cI thought I was never going to see Scout again. I thought I would never see Boone\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s our Chesapeake Bay Retriever \u2014 \u201cagain.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout the rest of the trip, we stuck together. I piggybacked her a mile to a storied hot spring. We made s\u2019mores, spread our sleeping bags next to the river, counted shooting stars, wished on them, and slept cozied up together. But when the trip was over and we were driving away, she stared at the Salmon out of our truck window, squeezed my hand so hard it left tiny fingernail marks, and said she never wanted to see the Middle Fork again. <\/p>\n We went home and in six months, Covid was upon us. Before it arrived, we could coax Hollis outside to ride bikes, play in our stream, or do campouts in our woods: no screens. When it hit, I could still get her to gear up, go outside, and ski laps on the hill across from our house. At first, I was the mom I\u2019d always wanted to be: baking homemade whoopie pies while she licked the bowl, lazing in bed reading her The Wind in the Willows<\/em>, cheering her on as we skipped down our deserted road. <\/p>\n But as the weeks wore on, I wore out, and the pull of our screens was stronger than ever. <\/p>\n I know I\u2019m no different from millions of other parents who\u2019ve been plugging in their kids while they worked or cleaned or \u201ctook a break.\u201d <\/p>\n It\u2019s no wonder, then, that by 2019 more than half<\/a> of American children owned a cellphone by age 11 and a third of TikTok users were 14 or younger<\/a>. I remember loosening my parental controls on social media during Covid because I wanted Hollis to \u201cstay connected\u201d to her friends during the forced absence. I saw how quickly that lifeline became a reason for her to stay on her iPad longer and longer each day, as warnings about the dangers of letting kids access social media<\/a> increased. <\/p>\n There\u2019s still much we don\u2019t understand about the long-term effects, and some recent studies have cast doubt that media use behavior is altering our kids\u2019 cognition<\/a>, underlying neurological function, or neurobiological processes. We need more data. <\/p>\n But I can confirm changes I saw in Hollis\u2019s happiness and self-confidence when, as a grade-schooler, she got into a conflict with a former friend. Hollis said her friend began controlling her, laying on guilt \u2014 usually through text and social media messages \u2014 whenever she didn\u2019t do what the friend demanded. <\/p>\n Hollis is a \u201cnormal\u201d kid \u2014 pleasant, kind, fun to be around. But between fourth grade through sixth, I started hearing from other parents that their daughters said she was crying in the school bathroom. She stopped confiding in me, for fear of letting details slip, because I would tell the friend\u2019s mom and the friend would retaliate. After asking her to \u201cbe brave\u201d in a situation that was clearly wearing her down, Shawn and I decided to take her out of school. <\/p>\n What followed was a disastrous second half of self-guided sixth grade \u2014 guess where \u2014 on screens. But even when she tried to start a new life as a seventh grader at a new school, Hollis still faced pressure from the same friend group on her social media. We pulled her out again. <\/p>\n Watching a bright, goofy, formerly confident kid dissolve into one wracked with anxiety upset me. But the thing that saddens me about Hollis\u2019s phone now is how it turns her into Gollum to Sauron\u2019s ring. Even when I can get her outside \u2014 which I still can, if we go skiing \u2014 she\u2019s so distracted by the rectangle in her hand or pinging constantly in her jacket pocket, she can\u2019t notice the beauty around her. <\/p>\n Here, you\u2019re supposed to say: \u201cParent. You\u2019re in charge. Do something.\u201d <\/p>\n Give me a minute. <\/p>\n \n Back on the Middle Fork,<\/strong> Hatcher and I saw no one. It was just us and the Frank. Normally that would be perfect, but under the circumstances, it was ominous. <\/p>\n On our first night, we huddled in our tents and listened to thunder that sounded like moaning aliens as a storm blew in. <\/p>\n On day two, we entered a section of trail where all of the trees had been torched to blackened husks, evidence of the fires that had recently ripped through. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s Mordor,\u201d I said to Hatcher.<\/p>\n \u201cIs it?\u201d he asked. <\/p>\n \u201cLook around,\u201d I answered. <\/p>\n \u201cBut there\u2019s fireweed,\u201d he said, pointing to one of the beautiful, purple-flowered plants. \u201cThat\u2019s hope.\u201d <\/p>\n Later that evening, we found our second camp, along the river. As we sat on the bank watching the current, a slick, brown creature swam past us. <\/p>\n \u201cLook, Hatch! An otter!\u201d I yelled. \u201cMy favorite!\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cOh my god!\u201d he shouted. \u201cIt\u2019s huge!\u201d <\/p>\n We continued marveling over our luck. It was only when the \u201cotter\u201d slapped its big, flat tail on the water that we realized it was really a beaver. But it didn\u2019t matter. We were in our favorite place. And apparently the beaver wanted to hang out. It swam upstream past us, and then floated back down toward us. \u201cAn otter would never do that!\u201d Hatcher said, and we laughed. <\/p>\n During rare stretches when he and I were talked out, I thought about ways nature had helped Hatcher when he was in trouble. As a young teen, he was lured by the escape of marijuana. One evening during his first year of high school, I found a significant amount of it in his jacket and admitted to myself that if I didn\u2019t step in and do something to help him, I\u2019d be partially to blame if he continued down a bad path. <\/p>\n That year, I helped him apply for a Youth Conservation Corps job in Denali National Park in Alaska. I figured plunging him into a 6-million-acre wilderness could only help \u2014 and I believe it did. That summer kicked off a new trajectory that would eventually set him up for his guide job in Idaho. <\/p>\n But now, back in the Frank together, we were getting close to the damage we\u2019d come to see on the Salmon. We made camp at the toe of one of the biggest rock slides I\u2019d ever seen. It was at a small unnamed creek and had stripped the drainage it ran through down to bedrock. Tons of loose dirt and rocks spread across the river bar and into the river. <\/p>\n But that didn\u2019t prepare us for what we\u2019d see next. <\/p>\n The inundation of tons of mud, boulders, bushes, flowers, and dozens of trees from a landslide in the aftermath of the Boundary Creek Fire had completely dammed parts of the Middle Fork. As in, you could walk on the bottom. As in, there was no water. <\/p>\n Miles farther downstream, we were stunned by more damage. <\/p>\n Debris at a rapid called Hell\u2019s Half Mile had blocked the river to the point that a large, unstirring lake now sat above it. When we saw the lake, we knew two of our favorite things had been forever altered by fires. There was the Middle Fork itself, and then the salmon that swam there. A lake shouldn\u2019t sit in a free-flowing river, and salmon can\u2019t live for very long in water that sluggish. Because they are a vital part of the food chain<\/a>, when salmon die in large numbers, a cascade of other deaths follows.<\/p>\n We stayed at the narrowing of the river and the lake above it for a long time. And then, with heavy hearts, we started hiking back the way we\u2019d come. <\/p>\n \n Post-wildfire, the Salmon River<\/strong> and the forest kept on doing their thing: adapting. Wildfires have recently gotten bigger, hotter, and more out of control in a forest of desperately dry trees, other flora, and soils. Only a month or so before my trip with Hatcher, another 26,000 acres burned on the Main Salmon, in what the incident report<\/a> called \u201cthe perfectly wrong alignment of fuels, terrain and weather\u201d and the 90-mile-per-hour wind \u201cblowing from all directions.\u201d <\/p>\n It was terrifying to imagine. Yet I still had hope. <\/p>\n Our path back to the trailhead took us along the most beautiful spot on the Middle Fork, where Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s and \u201940s carved a trail out of rock. At one spot, it\u2019s big enough that a not-too-tall person can lie down on their stomach and stare into the river. <\/p>\n I did that when we got there, and I saw the Middle Fork as it had always been to me: cool, refreshing, and free-flowing, with fish lingering along the shaded banks. <\/p>\n It was a perfect autumn day, with the sun shining, the temperature cool, and the mineral smell of the river rising around me. Everything felt right. <\/p>\n I wished Hollis was with us. I imagined her wanting to find an eddy, take off her shoes, and slip her toes into the water. <\/p>\n When Hatcher had been at his worst in high school, we tried everything to keep him from succumbing to the lure of drugs by transporting him to a new place \u2014 Denali, and later South America \u2014 with no technology, no cellphone. We didn\u2019t think about it, we just did it, and he healed and started thriving. <\/p>\n In the years since, I\u2019ve thought a lot about why that is. Why Shawn and I kept being drawn back to the Frank Church\u2013River of No Return Wilderness with our kids. Why we were drawn to nature in the first place. And why we think it\u2019s important for our children to connect with the outdoor world, too. <\/p>\n For our family, nature has been a fix, an antidote; the Frank, a vital and healing part of our story. <\/p>\n But there\u2019s something deeper to that, which extends beyond my own family, beyond a far-away wilderness in Idaho. In 35 states, nature has been recognized as an effective therapeutic approach to integrative health care<\/a> in the US. Time spent outside is being prescribed<\/a> for many conditions, including anxiety and depression. I think of the times I\u2019ve spent in green space, even in the middle of a bustling city, and the way the fresh air slowed my thoughts and relaxed my tightly coiled mind. <\/p>\n![\"Three](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Inline_05.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of Tracy Ross<\/cite>![\"Seven](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/IMG_4007.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of Tracy Ross<\/cite>![\"Three](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Inline_02.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of the Ross and Edmondson family<\/cite>![\"Two](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Inline_06.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of Tracy Ross<\/cite>![\"Left:](\"https:\/\/codez.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Inline_04.jpg\")
\n Courtesy of Tracy Ross<\/cite>