About how many miles could an expert hiker cover on a hard trail in a day?
by admin on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 | 2 Comments
I’m just wondering, because I just got really into hiking (103.2 miles in a month of Cheley Colorado Camps)
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Depends on the terrain, but from my experience, >10 miles would be quite good.
The link below has classified 16-24 miles per day as expert. But personally, I doubt you would be able to see or enjoy much at that pace.
An expert hiker if such a thing exists covers as much land as is reasonable to do for that place in that weather and with what there is around to take up the day.
If that’s a mile it’s a mile. If it’s thirty miles it’s thirty miles.
Getting five miles done through the jungles of Seramban in a day is hard going. Getting another 5000 feet up Acongagua might take all day and involve only five miles of walking. Other places on it that much is a morning’s easy walk.
I’ve walked home many times from the big city when the last train has already gone, 32 miles to home from Covent Garden. 29 from the sports ground at St John’s Wood.
5 miles an hour and a couple of breaks that’s around seven hours. Home two hours before I’d get home on the first train out in the morning, and early enough to get to work.
I can walk. I was at Nijmegan international marches. Tough one. Marching for team and country.
Most folks, around 4 miles an hour for getting distance done with a pack and the usual regime is a ten minute stop every hour. Ten hour day in summer as two lots of four hours plus breaks, there’s a bit over thirty miles of good going
Three days of it and a couple of hours more for 103 miles.
27 days of a month for sightseeing. Not bad.
A month of 30 days of it gets more than 900 miles done. 700 with a few days off for sightseeing, enjoying the local company,( ahuh?), resting, relaxing, and getting fit for a another bash at it.
300 miles allowing for more fun and good times on the way.
No effort then, Two stopping days for each walking day. Easy time.
That’s Roman marching speed, that four miles and a stop, hence every four miles along a Roman road there is village or a town…that grew from stopping points for Roman legions. Wells, river crossings, ale houses and inns, pie and bread makers knowing where to sell.
That’s real history, not the textbook big stuff.
Some places there are gaps. Most times you can find a settlement of sorts every four miles on Roman roads in UK, France, Germany, Italy, wherever Romans kept garrisons.
One of those is where I was born and grew up, walking the road that Romans walked 2000 years before me..the old Watling Street from London to North Wales.
I hiked many times 300 miles on a month’s trip. In Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and cycled many hundreds of miles.
Expert hikers are not measured in miles, whatever some silly website or journal says. Some guys are naturally fast. On his first day out a guy might walk faster than another guy who has trekked for years but it doesn’t make him an expert.
Don’t count distance as conquering distance unless you are a distance fan or racing to a finish
Is that extra 0.2 miles so important? 300 yards?
You sure it was that you did or was that what some gadget said it was, not allowing for inclines, just straight lat.long difference?
Reality is, you could have done 120 on hilly land even if the map or the gadget, GPS or whatever, told you 103.
O…errr…103.2 as if that’s worth a light.
Hard trail? Not flat ground then. That 103.2 is only reliable if you calculated the distance actually done, not the distance shown by flat ground reckoning on hilly ground.
See contour profiles and ‘actual land to cover’ in the map reading manuals
Expert is what you know, not how far you go.
Count what you see and do on the way, not the miles.
That’s the good stuff.
Buses beat legs for distance but they don’t have eyes, nor know what they are passing through
If distance matters more, get on a bus.
What you have from a trek is a quality of experience if you trek for that.
Or you can keep your eyes down, arms swinging well, keep up a fast stride,and see nothing while you walk the land
That’s competitive walking, not trekking. Against the clock just for you or against other competitors.
Trekking is enjoying and knowing about where you are for the fun of the experience, not for guzzling miles down hungry leg gullets.
Some days the camp is exactly where is was yesterday.
And that’s where it belongs if you find a place worth stopping at for a while.
Have fun.
Nijmegan. Honor. Distance. International friendship. And fun
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090923174328AAgtem1 . . . . .
O yeah…it was distance wasn’t it? See this.Our annual 85 mile Parish Walk.
On flat land and hills on a hilly island that is now home.
15 hours and 18 minutes of hard walking for the winner. Job done….85 miles of it.
http://www.parishwalk.com/ . . . .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/isleofman/content/articles/2009/04/17/parish_walk_feature.shtml . . .
How many days of that month were you walking to do 103.2 miles or maybe 120?
There’s into hiking and there’s…into competitive hiking.
You’re asking about distance in a time….as if that qualifies as a step on the way to being an expert in trekking.
103 miles in a month is less than 3 1/2 miles a day….an hour’s walking.
My two daughters were doing much more than that at seven and eight years old on two-week treks in the Alps on high level trails and paths from one mountain hut to the next, and camping out some nights at over 6000 feet.
At ten they were higher and walking further. But only if the next hut was further.so the distance was necessary.
What you do on the way is the joy, not counting miles.
What you learn and appreciate makes you more expert as a trekker, not how fast you can move or how far you go.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AhWXOoiQcxPIdpHT7MQ_RJEhBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20100702034515AA2wNYA&show=7#profile-info-9EIoDXksaa . . . . .
How to do it in South America for the Inca trail…cheap.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ag69kZbTO1iSWr9eXV6REFchBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20100610123540AAF1i22&show=7#profile-info-pmtI1dzWaa . . . . . .
Enjoy the treks.