My family survived a near stranding at Gerty Johnson beach.

With the tide crashing around us, threatening to pull us out to sea, we were only able to escape by helping each other scale a tidewall.

…Okay, the beach was on Bainbridge Island and the tide was only up to our knees, but it was quite exciting and makes for great family lore…

We “adopted” Gerty Johnson Beach a few years ago during a clean up event. How can you not fall in love with a beach named Gerty Johnson? So we’ve returned over the years with our bag and trash pickers to check things out and tidy up.

This afternoon we took the ferry from Seattle to Brainbridge and set off along the beach. We didn’t check the tide tables before we left and were so captivated by the sand dollar colony (hundreds of them!!), the view of Seattle back across Puget Sound and the twisted shapes of ragged driftwood that we didn’t notice the tide closing in behind us.

Total newbie mistake we never would have made had we been out on the Olympic Peninsula or on the Oregon Coast.

It wasn’t until we turned around to go back that we noticed that the path we took had been totally erased by crashing waves with a wicked riptide.

…Okay, it was a pretty protected bay and the water was relatively placid…

But it was wet! And the woods above us were wild with thorny blackberries! And we had hoped to go out for lunch, which we couldn’t do if our shirts were torn and our pants and shoes were soaking wet!

We quickly assessed the situation, scanning the shoreline for a way back. We huddled and debated. We blamed each other good naturedly for not checking the tide tables. We gasped at the ever rising tide, watching the danger grow exponentially as each minute passed.

Finally we had a plan and we set off along the near shoreline which was crowded with boulders and driftwood (more like drift trees).

We hopped from boulder to boulder.

We scaled the roots of giant, felled trees washed up on shore.

We helped each other so we wouldn’t disappear into the massive crevasses between rocks and trees.

… Okay, we were mainly making sure we didn’t get wet and scraped up…

The final test of our fortitude and team work was scaling the tidewall at the end of the beach. The girls and I pushed my husband up and over the wall. He then reached down and helped each of us scale it.

We made it! And we also enjoyed much laughter over lunch as we wove the story that would become family lore.

Any parent of teenagers will know it’s hard to get time with them, hard to get them to talk and more often than not laughter is directed at you instead of with you.

But this adventure was magical in how it pulled us out of our traditional roles, made us vulnerable to one another at the same time reinforcing the safety we feel with one another, and made us laugh in the face of fear (my kids were legit scared).

I strongly urge teams to play together as a way to build trust, spark creativity and deepen bonds. It’s a safe way to practice the kind of risk taking that leads to creativity and innovation.

Putting groups of people together in new, fun or unusual settings, in which they depend on each other’s individual strengths and attitudes to work through challenges and problem-solving can have immensely powerful consequences.

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