Great Hikes Of The World

Why Most Hikers Skip The Actual Planning And Regret It Later

I spent seven years leading commercial treks across three continents before I stopped treating itinerary preparation as an afterthought. The difference between a group that finishes a route smiling and one that spends three days arguing over blisters and rationed water usually comes down to how thoroughly someone read the terrain beforehand. There is a resource called Great Hikes Of The World that covers exactly this kind of planning at a level most trail guides ignore, and I have been using it as a baseline reference for about four years now. It is not a single book. It is not an app. The way people actually use the Great Hikes Of The World project is as a living database of route assessments, seasonal breakdowns, and logistical data points organized by region. You can find route summaries with elevation profiles, typical water source availability month by month, and notes on where cell service actually exists versus where people consistently pretend it does. Most people I see online treat it like a Pinterest board for inspiration photos. That is the wrong entry point. The real value shows up when you open a specific route and work through the logistical tables. I pull it up before I plan any trip longer than two days, and I cross-reference its data against current satellite imagery and recent trail reports from the region I am heading into.

How To Actually Use This For Trip Planning

Here is the workflow I use, and I know it sounds tedious until you try to cook cold beans at altitude because you did not factor in that the creek campsite dries up in September. First I pick a trail or route from the Great Hikes Of The World index and scroll past the scenic descriptions immediately. The photos are nice. They do not help you navigate. I go straight to the seasonal conditions section and note the months marked as high-risk for water scarcity, snow persistence, or monsoon runoff. Then I open a topographic map for that same corridor and overlay the seasonal data. I mark tentative camp spots where water exists year-round if possible, and I flag any alternate exits at least twice along the route. There is a specific problem I ran into on the Torres del Paine W trek last October that illustrates why this matters. Great Hikes Of The World listed Refugio Grey as accessible via the main trail at all times. The map data was correct. What it did not reflect was that an afternoon wind event had blown a mature nothofagus tree across a 40-meter section of trail between Lago Nordenskjöld and Refugio Paine Grande. I arrived at that choke point with forty people behind me, all thinking they could reach the refugio before dark. I had to split the group in half. The first half I sent back down to the lakeshore while I walked ahead with three stronger hikers to find a bushwhack around the obstruction. We lost roughly two hours and nobody made camp that night. If I had checked recent trip reports from the forum section attached to Great Hikes Of The World a few days before departure, someone would have flagged that blowdown within a week.

The workaround I adopted after that was simple and has saved me from similar situations ever since. I always check the date-stamped user reports for a route before finalizing my itinerary, and I filter for posts mentioning trail closures or detours. Even stale reports contain useful context about terrain difficulty that the official data omits.

What Beginners Miss About Route Assessment

One thing that catches people repeatedly is that elevation gain numbers are meaningless without context. A climb of 1,200 meters over 8 kilometers in the Cascades feels completely different than the same grade in Patagonia. Wind, exposure, and loose scree change the metabolic cost substantially. Great Hikes Of The World includes pace estimates based on standard alpine hiking speed, but those numbers assume reasonable weather and packed trail conditions. On scree fields above treeline, actual pace drops to roughly 3 kilometers per hour even for fit hikers, and the published estimates do not always adjust for that. Another detail people skip involves resupply logic. The route pages list towns and trailhead parking, but they rarely note which services are seasonal. I learned this the hard way on a section of the Camino de Santiago near Ponferrada when I showed up at a marked resupply point in early May and found the only store closed for the off season. The Great Hikes Of The World entry had the correct location but used summer operating hours. I ended up hauling an extra day of food that I did not want to carry, which shifted my entire schedule by thirty-six hours. Now I verify service status through the local tourist office website before committing to a resupply town.

Where The Resource Falls Short

I should be straightforward about the limitations because I have seen people make mistakes relying on it blindly. The database is crowdsourced for many regions, and the quality varies wildly. Trail infrastructure in New Zealand and Switzerland tends to be well documented with frequent updates. Remote sections in the Hindu Kush, the Ethiopian Highlands, and parts of the Patagonian steppe have sparse reporting that may be years old. I treat entries for those regions as starting points rather than reliable plans. Another gap is real-time conditions. The Great Hikes Of The World does not have live weather integration, trail camera feeds, or official park service alerts built in. It is a static reference with community updates appended. If you are hiking anywhere where weather shifts rapidly or where permits are required on short notice, you need separate systems feeding into your planning. I run alltrails for recent photo verification, check the national park or forestry service site for closures, and keep a weather app with GRIB files for multi-day routes above treeline.

Practical Steps Before You Start Hiking

Pull up your target route in Great Hikes Of The World and read the difficulty rating. Note whether it uses a technical rating system or just descriptive labels. Technical ratings vary between countries, so I always cross-reference with at least one other source before trusting a single classification. Then download or print the route overview page. Cell service disappears on most of the trails this resource covers, and your phone battery drains faster than you expect when you are using maps continuously. Build your daily stage targets using the elevation and distance data, then cut those distances by roughly twenty percent to account for terrain drag. A route that says 18 kilometers in a day usually takes closer to 7 hours on real ground, and on bad terrain it can stretch to nine. Factor in rest breaks, food stops, and the time it takes to negotiate herd animals on shared trail sections, which happens more often than people admit in places like the Alps and the Scottish Highlands. I keep a simple spreadsheet with columns for planned distance, estimated time, water points, camp options, and alternate exit routes. I update it after every major hike with actuals versus projections. The discrepancy between estimated and real time is usually my most useful data, and it compounds into better planning over subsequent trips. Great Hikes Of The World gives you a solid starting line. The work happens after that in the details most people skip.