Brave New World

Before her eldest son leaves for college, Heather Greenwood Davis heads to British Columbia with her family for one more epic summer adventure

- Heather Greenwood Davis

YOU GOT THIS MOM!" The voice floating down the Bella Coola Valley belonged to my firstborn, Ethan. To see him, I raised my gaze from the carabiners that were preventing me from falling more than 100 feet into the Great Bear Rainforest below. I took a deep breath, shielded my eyes from the sun, and looked up at the 19-year-old above me. Then, despite how precariously I was perched and how uncertain I was, I kept climbing.

This particular journey marked the end of an era. Ethan was about to leave for college a few hundred miles away, and his impending move had triggered a sense of panic in me that I never expected. Traveling together is as much a part of our family culture as Scrabble tournaments and backyard barbecues. But this trip-a 10-day adventure through British Columbia-was likely the last chance for me and Ish, my husband, and Cameron, our younger son, to spend time with Ethan before his next chapter began. It was my reprieve from the grief of losing him to the world.

The very act of climbing this mountain was distraction. The via ferrata, a network of metal cables and rungs set into the rock face, is the first of its kind in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. Our guide, Krista Gooderham, had helped calm my fears by suggesting I focus not on the distance I still had to go, but on the next rung in front of me. "Just keep going and don't look back."

Ethan and I took our first trip together when I was pregnant with him. It was my first real assignment as a travel writer: a story about a new Texas spa designed specifically for pregnant women. Without Ethan in my belly, the opportunity would likely have gone to someone else.

Since then, we've been on numerous family trips across the United States, the Caribbean, and our home country of Canada-as well as a yearlong around-the-world escapade when he was eight that included 29 countries on six continents. And now here we were on the face of Mount Walker.