Hot answers tagged preparation
13
You could use Naismith's rule which goes as follows:
Allow 1 hour for every 3 miles (5 km) forward, plus 1 hour for every 2000 feet (600 metres) of ascent.
A lot of hikers in the UK use this as a guide of course bear in mind terrain and altitude! and of course this is not appropriate at higher altitudes.
Some sites recommend corrections to the above:
...
8
It depends a lot on what exactly you mean by "around there". While there are no real mountains in the immediate area around Prague, you can find a number of great places to hike there. If you a willing to go a bit further, you can find some nice mountains, too. Also, I am not sure if by two day hike you mean a backpacking trip with sleeping outdoors, or if ...
8
Ask specific questions here, or browse the other questions and answers!
For your first time, try and make sure you have fun. The following may help:
Check the weather forecast, avoid cold, wet, windy or whatever weather will make you miserable.
Practice pitching your tent before you go, perhaps in your garden or local park. Pitching an unfamiliar tent can ...
8
Time of year is very important
Bucks don't keep their antlers year round. They grow towards the fall and drop in earlyish spring. This time of year, if you did not lift the tail and check, it may have been a buck.
Outside of mating season, you probably have zero concern. No antlers, no worry.
During mating season bucks can be VERY territorial. ...
7
Here's one data point, also based on the Grand Canyon.
I'm a 40 year old male, of average fitness and slightly overweight (5'10", 215 lbs.), and ascending the Grand Canyon (4320', ~1300 m) took me almost exactly one day. By contrast, the descent took me 3 hours. (The rule of thumb at the Grand Canyon is that every hour down takes two hours up.)
Later ...
6
I can not give a lot of information about hitchhiking but have spend a lot of time wildcamping in Europe. Sure most land is privatly owned, and most countries have regulations against it, but in most cases you will be fine and undisturbed if you take some things into account:
Try to hide your tent, only set it up right before you want to go sleep.
Find a ...
5
The website of the Heilbronner Hütte has a pretty nifty leaflet concerning the tour you are planning. It is in German but I guess you'll be able to read the graph.
Be aware that it states:
Diese großartige und abwechslungsreiche aber sehr lange Tour wird nur
ausdauernden Berggehern empfohlen.
which roughly translates to "This amazing and varied, yet ...
5
There's no general rule of thumb that I know of...
I lied, there is Naismith's formula as correctly cited in another answer. I just tend to stay away from it because more often than not I find it better to make a judgement on the individual situation. There's so much variation the "average" would almost always be wrong in any specific case! It depends on ...
5
There is really only one way to determine this, and that is experience. Do a few hikes in different terrain, different settings (dayhike vs overnight), different weather and different group sizes, keep track of your time and thus build up a "library" of situations and times.
Once you have a few of these reference hikes, you can then apply these to new ...
5
I feel only qualified to answer the first portion of your question:
When you are in a rural area, just ask if someone lets you set up camp on their property. Farmers often don't mind. Whenever I had the chance to do it this way I did. I sleep a lot sounder not thinking about police officers waking me up at 6AM and you are interacting with the local ...
4
Specifically for biking, they do make spray cans to keep dangerous animals away. Most of my experience with these products have been dealing with loose dogs. I would think it could be used for an animal the size of a buck, but obviously more research than my word should be taken there.
Dog repellent
Larger animal (bear) repellent
I haven't seen any spray ...
4
You always learn how to do things better by doing them. But take baby steps:
Start by spending a night in your back yard. See if you can do dinner, sleep, breakfast without going back in the house. Take note of what things you use and what things you don't.
There are campgrounds you can drive to. So drive to one & spend the night. If things don't go ...
4
You can use IFTTT (If This, Then That). You can use it to create your own rules to check the weather for you and then email or even text you with a link and what kind of condition changes.
For example, mine is set to email me whenever there is more than X change in temperature, or if it is going to specifically rain/snow or have something out of the blue ...
4
This isn't pretty, and seems to be somewhat limited in locations (I couldn't get it to work for my area) but this looks to have potential. Though there is no "subscribe" feature.
National Weather Service Weather Activity Planner (Example)
4
There's no such site that I know of, but there's a couple of alternatives that may suit your needs:
Google calendar has an add on you can enable which shows the weather as an icon by the next few days. I find this quite useful (obviously it depends if you use Google calendar!)
There's a few websites which will do a general email newsletter. While you want ...
4
Getting trail conditions is region-specific. For example, in New England the Appalachian Mountain Club provides a good deal of trail info. I'm pretty sure there is a web site about trail conditions, but for the White Mountains of New Hampshire you can get trail conditions info directly at the Pinkham Notch visitor center run by the AMC, the National Forest ...
4
This will depend a lot on the region you are hiking. Hiking in the Adirondacks, for example, trip reports from forums are often useful. There are some general trip report sites, but if the area you are hiking sees a good amount of use, it is likely you'll be able to find a site with specific trip reports for it. Try searching Google for something similar ...
4
First, sorry to hear the diagnosis, but you are not alone. I've shopped out many a trip for gluten-free clients, and, fortunately, it is surprisingly easy to replace just about every back-country meal** with a gluten free alternative.
Quinoa. Corn. Rice. Potato. Soy... there are lots of substitutes.
Most large grocery stores in the US are getting better ...
4
There are three main, popular trekking regions in Nepal - the Anapurna circuit, the trek to the Everest Base Camp (and side trips) and the area surrounding Gosaikund, which includes the Langtang valley and Helambu. All three of these treks are very popular and quite safe; I saw people of all ages, including families and children. There's a good page on Nepal ...
4
I did this trek in early April (of 2004), flying to Lukla and walking to Kala Patar and the base camp. However, I didn't sleep at Gorakshep (the highest point at which it was possible to sleep in a lodge) but at Lobuche (4900 m). I purchased a -10 degrees Celsius (14F) sleeping bag in Kathmandu, which was fine for me. At Lobuche my water bottle froze during ...
3
This NASA web-interface provides a somewhat recent (several days old) interface to global daily snow-maps. From the main page, click on Land (immediately below the map), then click on Snow cover in the drop-down menu that appears. Then, on the right, under "Matching datasets", select "Snow cover - 1 day (Terra / Modis)" and click "Select". This will show a ...
3
The USGS Fort Collins Science Center published the following map of the conterminous United States in 2005:
It has been published as a factsheet with a PDF (that can be zoomed for more detail):
Watts, R.D., R.W. Compton, J.H. McCammon, C.L. Rich, and S.M. Wright. 2005. Distance to the nearest road in the conterminous United States: U.S. Geological Survey ...
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That's actually a very difficult question to answer, since there's a lot of ambiguity about what's a "road," etc. Some geographers in Alaska tried to tackle a similar question here, in an Alaska Dispatch article.
3
There are many wave height buoys along the Atlantic sea board and would allow for much better prediction than weather system prediction. There are some good resource for surf forecasting on the east coast such as http://www.surfguru.com/ (no affiliation) which is focused on Florida but does provide information up through SC.
3
I follow a paleotic diet (which is gluten-free) for fairly similar reasons. I will give you some of my recommendations; I have tried them all myself except for the hard boiled eggs:
Beef jerky/pemiccan: it is very nutritious. It's my number 1 recommendation for food on the trail (regardless of whether you have celiac disease or not). You can make it ...
3
I spent about eight weeks in the high Himalaya of Bhutan and Nepal during the fall of 2010, during which time I had the amazing opportunity to complete the classic Everest Base Camp trek, from Lukla to Kala Pattar and back. The adventure was replete with the exciting and the unknown, to the extent that my travel companion and I were among a cohort of ...
3
Basically the answer to your question is no, unless you're in very specific areas doing very specific activities. US wilderness areas are much bigger, much less accessible, and much less populated and developed than the Alps. You can get information, but it typically won't be very informative about specific places at specific times.
Here in California, the ...
2
If you want an exact answer, there is not and will not be one until about 15 seconds after you finish walking the walk.
For a decent ballpark, I was taught in scouts:
day hiking:
3 miles per hour, + 1 hour for every 1000 feet of elevation climb.
backpacking:
2 miles per hour, +1 hour for every 1000 feet of elevation climb.
Use the formula, and then take a ...
2
I live about 35 miles northwest of Boston, so I can answer this.
The first thing you should do is join the Boston Chapter of the Appalachian Mountian Club (AMC). Once you are a member, you will have access to the extensive list of hikes they run. There will be a bunch in the White Mountains of NH, but also many shorter but closer local hikes in areas ...
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