Six miles. Uphill. At eleven thousand feet of altitude, climbing to higher. On ancient stone steps worn smooth by five hundred years of feet. In the thin air of the Andes, where adults find themselves winded after a single flight of stairs.
Our son Ben hiked all of it. He was four years old. He was not carried once.
If you have landed on this page, there is a reasonable chance you are wrestling with a version of the question we wrestled with before this trip: are my children too young for something like this? Here is our honest answer, built from one specific day on one specific trail.
――――――――――
The Decision
We were in Peru with our family of eight and Matt’s brother and his family — fourteen people in all, with children ranging from four-year-old Ben to the teenagers. The plan was to hike the final stretch of the Inca Trail: kilometer 104 to Machu Picchu, by way of the ruins at Wiñay Wayna and up to the Sun Gate, the high pass where the lost city first comes into view.
The evening before the hike, we met our guide, Chris, in Ollantaytambo. Chris had been leading groups to Machu Picchu for most of his adult life. He had the quiet authority of someone whose knowledge is so complete it no longer needs to prove itself. He looked at our group — four adults, ten children, one of them four years old — with the expression of a professional recalculating something.
Six miles uphill is not nothing. Six miles uphill at altitude is a real undertaking. Six miles uphill at altitude with a four-year-old is the kind of plan that deserves genuine consideration, and we gave it genuine consideration. Then we decided to try, with the understanding that we could turn back, that someone could carry him if it came to that, that we would let Ben set the pace and watch him honestly.
We never needed the backup plan.
――――――――――
The Climb
Ben walked. He walked the way small children walk when they have decided something is an adventure rather than a hardship — with total absorption, stopping to examine things, asking questions, then marching on. The altitude that slowed the adults did not seem to register with him in the same way. He had less distance between himself and the ground, less body to oxygenate, and an apparently bottomless reserve of the energy that four-year-old’s bring to anything they have decided is interesting.
The favorite moment for Ben and Clara was the section near the end that the guides call the monkey steps — ancient stone stairs, steep enough that you use your hands, climbing toward the pass. For two of the youngest children in the group, this was not an obstacle. It was the best part. They climbed it like the staircase had been built specifically for them. The adults were using their hands. The four-year-old was not.
And then we came through the Sun Gate, and Machu Picchu was below us in the morning light, and the whole family stood there together looking at it.
Standing at the Sun Gate as a family, looking down at one of the most extraordinary ruins of the ancient world, the hike and the trip and our entire commitment as a family to travel were all, in a single moment, completely validated. We had brought a four-year-old up the Inca Trail under his own power, and at the top, the reward was the kind of view that people cross the planet to see.
――――――――――
The Guide’s Verdict
That evening, after the bus down the steep switchback road to Aguas Calientes and dinner with the group, Chris found us by the entrance of the restaurant.
In decades of guiding the trail, he told us, Ben was the youngest child he had ever seen hike it without being carried.
We already knew Ben was something. He was something before Machu Picchu and he is something after. The only difference is that now a Peruvian guide with a lifetime of experience on that trail is on the record agreeing with us.
――――――――――
What This Means For Your Family
We are not telling you to take your four-year-old up the Inca Trail tomorrow. We are telling you that the ceiling on what young children can do is almost always higher than the one we imagine for them. The objection that stops most families — “my kids are too young” — is, in our experience, the objection least supported by what actually happens when you let children try.
If you’re considering the Inca Trail with young children: • Acclimatize first. Spend at least a couple of days in Cusco or the Sacred Valley before hiking. Altitude is the real challenge, more than the distance. Drink enormous amounts of water and walk slowly the first day or two. • Hike the short route. Kilometer 104 to Machu Picchu via the Sun Gate is a single long day rather than the four-day trek. For families with young children, it delivers the iconic arrival without four nights of camping. • Hire a guide who has worked with families. A good guide adjusts the pace, knows where the children will struggle, and turns the history into something a child can hold onto. • Let the child set the pace, and watch honestly. Have a real backup plan. But don’t assume from the parking lot that they can’t. Let them show you. |
Ben does not have a detailed verbal memory of that day. He was four. What he has is something more durable: he is a person who, before he was old enough to fully understand it, hiked to one of the wonders of the world on his own two feet. That knowledge is part of who he is now. No classroom gave him that. The trail did.
Have you hiked the Inca Trail, or are you considering it with young children? Questions about altitude, the short route, or hiking with kids? Leave them in the comments — we answer every one.
