Planning a route

The first and most important stage of preparing for any hike is choosing the route. Get it right here and you can foresee most of the difficulties waiting on the trail, and shape the route so there are fewer of them — and more of the joy of being with nature.

Mistakes made at the planning stage are very hard, sometimes impossible, to fix once you're out there. So we strongly recommend leaning on someone experienced — someone who can take a realistic measure of your abilities and match them to the route you have in mind.

At the very start you should ask yourself: "what do I want from this hike?" The answers vary:

to test myself and work to the limit,
to see a specific place, so I need to get there,
to take photographs,
I've never been on a hike, so I don't know. I want to rest and gather impressions.

...and so on.

Clearly these answers combine easily, and together they settle the choice of route.

As a rule, those thirsting for a test pick a route of substantial total length, with long daily stages, crossings of passes, ascents of peaks, river crossings and assaults on the rocky ledges that bar the way. You can add other "taiga joys of life" to the list, but even what's here is enough to demand work comparable to an athlete's preparation for the Olympics: full commitment, the ability to work to exhaustion, overcoming fear in hard situations, and a great hunger to keep moving forward. Why do it? A hard question — and it seems everyone answers it for themselves. And most likely no answer is needed: you simply need it, that's all. Such routes are worked out with great care over a year or more, and the group is drawn from a specific circle of people tested on one joint hike after another.

Photography is an inseparable part of any hike, but there are routes where the photo-hunt becomes the main goal: to catch roe deer on the move in early autumn (when you can photograph an animal from ten meters), or a capercaillie at its lek in spring (when, with a little skill and the bird's temporary deafness, you can get quite close). Beyond that, tempting subjects are the natural monuments — rock outcrops, waterfalls, mountain lakes — and the landscapes that open to a photographer's eye only at certain times of year (the first autumn frosts, when the taiga is transformed and plays with a riot of color). Such trips are usually seasonal, and the goal depends on the chosen subject. The route is designed to make the way to the shooting ground as easy as possible, so that every lover of photography can take part, whatever their fitness or health.

Route planning usually goes like this:

Set the reference points: the entry and exit, the places you must visit (mountain lakes, waterfalls, peaks, and so on), the base camps for rest, and the hard sections (river crossings, passes, and so on).
Estimate the length and difficulty of the stages.
Taking the group's make-up into account, settle the acceptable load, the daily stages and the campsites.
On the principle of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst", forecast the complications that may arise and draw up backup plans; work out the emergency-exit routes to the nearest settlements and choose your means of calling for help.

The third point matters a great deal. Looking at a map for the first time, it's tempting to "play with kilometers" and plan the whole route from formal distances alone. In reality it's far more complicated: an innocent ledge marked on the map can turn out to be an impassable barrier, and a stream's floodplain can prove overgrown with impassable scrub and littered with windfall. That is why you need someone who knows the ground like the back of their hand. Otherwise the trail will hand you "surprises" that bring no particular joy.

If the group is mixed, with people of different fitness, it's better to organize a walking route like this:

The average daily stage should not exceed 10 km.
After every 2 days of walking, set aside 1 day for rest and getting to know the country.
On the rest day, plan radial outings around camp for those who still have the strength and the wish to walk.
The route should return to the food caches (or they should be made along the way, if the route has no loops).
On our site you can look at ready-made route examples of varying difficulty.

Questions of gear, how much food to carry, and what to bring will be taken up in the next note, which you'll find on our site m-country.ru.