Trekking on an Alaskan glacier. For two months. Over 160 kilometres. In fall storm season. With a baby and a 2 1/2-year-old.

Did I mention the glacier?

Any one of the above, by itself, would be a deal-breaker for most. Surprisingly, that wasn't the case for Alaskans Bretwood (Hig) Higman and Erin McKittrick.

Just to be clear, we're talking about camping every night for two months in a tent - albeit with a tiny woodstove and slender chimney - and walking across a glacier every day lugging two kids, food, wood and other essentials.

Of course, this was the couple that decided the best way to get home to Alaska after Higman finished his PhD in geology in Seattle in 2007 was to . walk.

I'm a big walker. I love walking. But Seattle to Alaska?

At least they had the sense to realize such a large-scale expedition - later turned into a book by McKittrick - wasn't going to work with their two tiny children.

In fact, Higman told a Victoria audience at Robinson's Outdoor Store this week that the couple - who live in a yurt in the tiny community of Seldovia, Alaska - actually thought they'd have to put their ambitious trekking adventures on hold for a few years when they had kids.

Then they got the idea about the glacier and it seemed manageable - much in the same way walking 20 minutes to school with my four-and five-year-old seems manageable.

They would fly in, set up base camps and toodle around with smaller expeditions, including some overnights. It would still be an adventure, just more on a toddler scale (or, as I like to call it, a "normal human" scale).

The decision to go in the fall, the worst time of year for weather, wasn't just an indication of some sort of weird interest in driving sleet.

They wanted to finish their subsistence gardening and food preservation for the winter. They were curious to see the fall storms on the glacier, and they figured - a slight miscalculation, as it turned out - that the bears would be all tucked up in bed for the winter.

Just in case, they packed pepper spray and a bear fence, a wire that would shock any bruin who tried to get too close to the tent.

Higman shocked himself a few times on the fence. But they got a shock of another kind later, when the snow arrived. Walking back to the tent after a day of trekking, they followed their own tracks - and noticed a few other sets of tracks behind them: an adult bear, a cub, a wolverine and some kind of canine, possibly a curious coyote. Surprise!

Luckily, all their animal encounters were from a distance. (Perhaps even hungry animals are smart enough to keep far from tantrum-prone toddlers.)

Transporting food and wood - not to mention the kids - was a daily challenge, Higman says. They stashed some of the 135 kilograms of food they brought in tree caches along the coast. As for wood, they brought only enough for four fires and had to collect the rest. Fortunately, trees sometimes grow on the gritty surface of glaciers.

Where possible, they shlepped family and gear over water in their pack raft, an inflatable dinghy that doubled as a ground sheet.

Then there was the diaper issue. They brought gDiapers, which include a cloth outer layer with a plastic layer inside and a compostable liner. Not sure what they did with the used liners - perhaps archeologists will be digging perfectly preserved poo out of the ice 300 years from now.

Higman and McKittrick, who founded a non-profit organization called Ground Truth Trekking, had a goal. The wanted to document the impact of a receding glacier, in this case the largest lowland glacier in North America: the Malaspina, on a remote stretch of coast between southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound.

They wanted to see what was happening at ground level, how the coastline is dramatically eroding, and rivers and lakes are being reshaped by the process.

Higman confesses there were moments when they questioned the wisdom of their adventure - especially near the end, after a week of lousy weather and too much time stuck in the tent. But he says his wife's stubbornness and his own "baseless optimism" typically get them through tough times. Fortunately, the weather cleared up for the final week.

Their pictures are startling and beautiful. Imagine cabin-sized icebergs scattered like boulders, or paddling through a natural tunnel under a glacier, not to mention the stark beauty of the snow-capped mountains.

While you're at it, imagine holding your toddler by the feet so he can look down the blue depths of a moulin, a deep hole in the glacier. No danger of bubble-wrap parenting here - these kids weren't even three and they seemed to know their way around a wood stove and an icy crevasse.

If the couple's goal was to raise awareness of the beauty of the glacier and complexity of coastal erosion, they did that.

But they did something else, too. They showed just how much it's possible to do with young kids.

It was a courageous and risky trip, one that will undoubtedly help shape those children into incredible adults, even if they're too young to remember the experience.

"I really feel like they had an awesome time," Higman says. Aside from almost constant access to rocks and dirt - a bonanza for any child - "They had our undivided attention for two months."

What more could a kid ask for? pcoppard@timescolonist.com For more information about the organization and trip, go to groundtruthtrekking.org