Planning a day hike is easy with these tips. Get advice on backpacking, hiking, and the great outdoors in this video.
Consult a guidebook or map
Determine your level of fitness
Consider the climate
John Flaherty has a great love for the outdoors. In 2003, John and his wife started Central Coast Outdoors in northern California. His company provides hiking, kayaking, and biking services for those wanting to be closer to nature. John has traveled all around the world through his love of hiking.
JOHN FLAHERTY: Hi, my name is John and today we are going to talk about how to plan a day hike. A day hike does not need to be a complicated thing. Most people live quite close to a beautiful natural area that is perfectly appropriate for a day hike. And by day hike we mean anything from a mile or less, all the way to about eight or ten miles would be considered to be a really full, full day hike. Usually what I look for in a place to day hike is an area of natural beauty. Around us where we are today is Montana de Oro State Park. A wonderful, beautiful coastal state park here along California's central coast. When you are planning a day hike, if you do not know the area right around or where you are, you might consider getting a guide book. I have a selection of guidebooks here and a map. And most areas that have excellent hiking opportunities will have someone that has documented that. These types of books are commonly available at good quality local bookstores or at sporting good stores with a good book section. REI would be an example of that type of a store. These hiking guides, what you look for is ones that have a lot of information, maybe a little bit of natural list information about the area. And then detailed hiking descriptions with perhaps mileages. And of course you are also going to be looking for ones that have nice quality maps. If you know where you want to go and do not necessarily need a trail guide, maybe all you need is a nice quality map. A map such as this one, which is a map of the Mammoth Lakes area up in the mountains in California, has lots of detail on it. The topo lines really help if you can understand how the elevation works by reading those lakes, trails, roads, all planed out in the map. And then you can put together your own hike sometimes. It might not be mentioned in the trail guide and you can link together different hikes. I also when I am thinking about where I want to go hiking, I want to think about the seasons. Is it appropriate to go hiking there? Way up in the mountains in the winter time, it might be snowing, not a good place to go. Out in the desert, in the middle of summer time, it might be very, very hot. So, I would look for some climate statistics or some weather information about where you are going to go before you plan a hike to a particular area that might be away from your home. So that are just a few tips that I have about planning a day hike for whatever length.
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