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Colorado Hiking
Planning a hike                                                                          

The first thing to think about is the snow condition. If you're planning a regular hike, you don't want  to drive out to the trailhead only to find that there's a foot of snow on the ground. The higher the altitude, the longer the snow lingers from the last winter, and the earlier it starts showing up with the new one. In the mountains, south and west facing slopes generally melt off faster than north and east facing ones. Some of the ski resorts keep the web cams on their mountain running outside of ski season. You can check ski resort webpages to see how much snow the web cams are showing through the links on this page.

Altitude also factors in another way. The first hikes of the season should be at lower altitudes to give your body a chance to adjust to altitude. Making a "fourteener" your first hike after having laid off for the winter might not be the optimal approach.

So, early and late in the hiking season, plan hikes that cover relatively low altitudes, and do the high ones in mid-summer. 

Budgeting time and effort

You can't plan a hike without  being able to "guess-timate"  how fast you can cover ground.  Several factors influence how fast people can hike.  Obviously, physical condition is important.  But so are things like the gradient (elevation gain over horizontal distance),  how much weight you're carrying, whether the trail has good footing or not, altitude and weather conditions.

It's foolish to push yourself and go fast on a long hike.  My personal experience is that it is not the longest hikes or those going up the steepest (highest gradient) terrain that were the most physically difficult.  It was the ones on which I pushed myself at the start to go fast. Every time I do that I get tapped out, and the last 20 or 30 percent of the hike winds up being a physical grind.  Your overall strength throughout a day is greater if you stay within a moderate level of exertion.

Everybody has their own optimal pace. Experienced runners have a rule-of-thumb method for gauging the intensity of their physical activity. During a run, if you can easily carry on a conversation then you're probably taking it too easy.  If it is very difficult to carry on a conversation then you are probably working too hard.  In between, if you can carry on a conversation with only a moderate amount of difficulty, than you're probably at the right level of exertion.  In hiking, you are usually best off in the area of where it is easy to just a little difficult to hold a conversation.

Following is a way of estimating hiking speed versus gradient of the hike.  It assumes a person in reasonably good physical condition, carrying a five to ten pound pack, hiking over a reasonably good trail, on a five to fifteen mile long day hike.

The way to calculate the gradient of a hike is to divide the total elevation gain by the associated distance covered.  For example, a 5 mile hike (one way) up a mountain with 4000 feet of elevation gain has a gradient of 0.15 (4000 / (5*5280)). The chart below indicates that you can expect to hike at roughly 1.6 mph average over the entire round trip.  So about how long will it take you to do this entire hike assuming no long breaks for sight seeing or napping? Ten miles (round trip) divided by 1.6 mph gives 6.25 hours of travel time, round trip. Usually you can hike downhill about 20 percent faster than uphill -- but in some cases that won't hold true due to being tired on the return trip and/or uncertain footing due to lose rocks and steepness.  I think trying to break out uphill and downhill speeds implies too much precision to something that is at best a rough estimate. 

If you keep good records of your hikes then you can develop enough data to make a personalized gradient versus speed chart. 

Timberline Considerations.

If your hike is going above timberline (usually about 11,500 ft), then planning the hike is important so that you can get above and below it before the possibility of a mid afternoon Colorado summer thunderstorm rolling in. Being above timberline, hiking along as the highest local object, is not pleasant or sensible during electrical storms.  If you're not going above timberline, then you might still want to plan your hike to avoid any possible afternoon storms.  Of course, hiking in the dark is usually another thing to avoid, so you want to be aware of what time sundown occurs.  

If you ever find yourself exposed in open terrain during lightning, the central idea is NOT to be the highest object around, and NOT to be standing close to the highest object around - like a lone tree for instance. Keeping dry under a tree doesn't compensate for getting zapped by a million volts of electricity. Get off ridgelines or peaks, crouch or sit down,  and nestle into a rock outcrop or a bunch of shrubs and wait it out. 

An electrical storm does not have to be right on top of you to present danger. Lightning strikes can originate a couple miles from where they hit.

Let's run the through an example.

Say you want to hike up a fourteener (a mountain with a peak altitude of 14,000 ft. or greater). From a written up description of the hike, or by your own calculations,  you have determined that the trail distance up to the peak is five miles and the altitude gain is 4000 feet. You will hike up and return on the same trail. From the green coloring on a map of the area, you see that the timberline altitude is about 11,500, which is average.  You decide you want to summit and descend back down to timberline by no later than 1:00 PM. You study the map and figure that the trail above timberline is about 1.5 miles long.

 ·                  The gradient for this hike is about 0.15.  

·                    From the chart above you estimate you will hike at about 1.6 mph.

·                    The distance you want to cover before 1:00 PM is 6.5 miles.

·                    You calculate that it will take roughly 4.1 hr. of travel time to summit and then descend to timberline.

·                    You add 1/2 hour to take a break on the summit and see the view; that's 4.6 hrs.

·                    You make it an even 5 hrs. for margin of error and because time decimals annoy you.

·                    1:00 PM minus 5 hrs. gives you 8:00 AM as the latest time to leave the trailhead for the summit.

·                    At this point, you can decide whether to drive in to the trailhead the morning of the day you hike, or drive in the day before and camp.

Planning a hike doesn't take much time.  It makes you think out what's involved and prepares you for the kind of hike you will be doing.  If it's a long hike up steep terrain it's best to know that right from the beginning. You don't want to go on a long tough hike with only the food, water and mental attitude that you would bring to a short easy one. Remember, the longer and tougher the hike, the more important it is to conserve your energy with a measured pace at the outset.  

Before you leave town to go on a  hike, check the weather. The link below will let you fill in the town nearest your hiking area, and give you the current conditions and several days of forecast. If you're going to camp out, be sure your sleeping bag is rated warm enough for the overnight lows which are shown.  http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecasts/

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