Building your own hike spreadsheet
We've spent three lessons on gain per mile, elevation profiles, why mileage on its own doesn't tell you much. Today we build the thing that holds all of it. A spreadsheet.
I know. Not everybody gets excited about a spreadsheet. But this is the tool that turns you into the person who actually plans hikes instead of just showing up and hoping. And once it's built, it takes about three minutes to fill out per trail.
What goes in it
Open whatever you've got. A spreadsheet program, a notes app with a table, a plain notebook if that's really more your speed. I use columns. Here's what mine has:
- Trail name
- Mileage (round trip, not one-way, this trips people up)
- Elevation gain (total, from the profile, not the trailhead-to-summit difference)
- Gain per mile (mileage divided into gain — the number that actually tells you what kind of day you're in for)
- Water carried
- Start time
- Planned turnaround time
- Weather at trailhead
- Notes (this is where the real information lives)
That's it. Eight columns. You don't need more than that to start.
Filling it out before you go
Before you ever put boots on dirt, fill in the first four columns from the trail description and the elevation profile, the way we've practiced. This is the planning half. You're deciding, on your couch, what water you'll carry and what time you need to leave the house and what time you need to be off the ridge if it's summer. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: you'll want to be done with anything exposed by early afternoon from July into September. The canyons build storms almost on a schedule. Decide your turnaround time before you leave, not when you're already tired and the sky's doing something you don't like.
Filling it out after you go
This is the half people skip, and it's the half that actually makes you better at this. After the hike, go back and fill in what really happened. How much water did you actually drink. What time did the clouds start building. Did the "moderate" trail description feel like a joke by mile three. Write it in the notes column while you still remember it, ideally that same evening.
After a couple seasons of this you've got your own reference. Not some stranger's blog post guess at difficulty, your actual data, from your actual body, on actual Wasatch trails. That's worth more than any trail app rating.
Using it to plan your training, not just your pack
Here's where the spreadsheet earns its keep beyond a single hike. Once you've logged a handful of routes, you start to see your own pattern. Maybe 1,000 feet of gain per mile is fine for you but 1,400 leaves you wrecked. That's useful. That tells you something about the next trail on your list before you're standing at the trailhead finding out the hard way.
I'll admit I tried to shortcut this once. Downloaded one of those training apps that wanted to build me a plan, log my runs, tell me my VO2 something-or-other. Gave up on it in a week. What actually worked was walking the hills in my own neighborhood before work with a loaded pack — same pack I'd carry on the trail, same weight, water and all. I paid attention to what left me winded and adjusted from there. No app told me that. My own legs did. If you want to train for a bigger route this summer, that's my honest recommendation over anything you'd pay a subscription for.
A caution on the data itself
Your spreadsheet is only as good as what you write down honestly. If you drank two liters and log one because you're embarrassed, you're lying to the next version of yourself who's planning off that number. Write down what actually happened, especially the parts that went wrong. Those rows are the valuable ones.
And one more thing while we're building good habits: keep a paper map in your pack regardless of what your spreadsheet says about a trail you've done ten times. I lost signal once up the canyon relying only on my phone. Got down fine. But the map goes in first now, before anything else, and I don't leave home without it.
Before next time
Build the spreadsheet this week, even if it's just three trails you're dreaming about for this season. Fill in what you can from the profile and mileage, and we'll fill in the rest as we go.