Wilderness Navigation: Planning Efficient Routes for Off-Trail Hiking

Wilderness navigation requires planning routes across terrain that doesn’t have pre-defined trails or roads to follow. While following a route using a map and compass, GPS, map-to-terrain association or just dead reckoning is required, those tools and techniques don’t provide you with the skills to plan good cross-country routes. Part art and part experience, learning how to plan new routes that are efficient to travel, safe, and fast is a skill that is only mastered after you’ve spent a fair amount of time roaming off-trail and learned the kind of terrain and vegetation to avoid.

Three Principles

There are three principles of wilderness navigation that you want to keep in mind when planning wilderness routes: efficiency, safety, and speed.

Efficiency

Hiking cross-country is considerably more difficult than hiking on cleared and well-defined trails. One of the first things you’ll notice is that the ground is littered with rock and organic debris that you need to hike over or around. Tall grass, bushes, trees, bogs, and boulders may block your way. The hills will be steeper than you’re used to encountering on trails and your normal hiking pace will be much slower.

Careful study of a topographic map will reveal routes that are easier to walk than others, with gentler gradients and detours around difficult obstacles. For example, cliffs are best hiked around rather than tackled head-on and the sides of streams are best avoided because they’re often filled with dense vegetation and flood debris.

Safety

The need to hike across avalanche terrain, scree-covered slopes, and river crossings all increase the danger of getting hurt when you step off trails and head out into open country. It’s also best to avoid steep ravines as they are often catchments for ankle-busting boulders, fallen trees, and vegetation. While many of these hazards can be anticipated by learning to analyze topographic maps, you’ll also want to make real-time detours around dangerous terrain that you can’t anticipate  based on the information provided by maps or other planning resources.

Speed

Despite the difficulty of wilderness travel, there are land features that you can follow that make cross-country travel faster and easier. For example, hiking above treeline is often faster than below it, provided you have good weather. Hiking along gravel river bars is also much faster since there is no impeding vegetation. But there are also many types of terrain that will significantly slow you down because they’re boulder or vegetation traps such as steep hillsides or ravines.

A Route Planning Example

Learning how to plan a route that is energy efficient, safe, and fast to hike is the essence of wilderness navigation. Let’s look at an example to illustrate the process.

Assume we’re standing on top of heavily forested Mt Martha (on the map above) and want to hike over to a feature that’s 9/10 of a mile away, as the crow flies, called The Humps. If you have a GPS, it’s perfectly conceivable that you’d plug in the lat/lon location of The Humps, plot the shortest route to it, and set off to follow it. But that wouldn’t be such a great idea, since that direct route isn’t energy-efficient, safe, or fast to hike.

Notice that the route descends very steeply down the face of Mt Martha into a steep valley, before crossing what is likely some sort of drainage, before climbing uphill to The Humps.

1. The descent down the east side of Mt Martha is 774′ in 0.4 mile, which is quite precipitous, and there’s a very good chance that it is covered with boulders and trees that have eroded or fallen over and been swept down the hillside. Picking your way through that crap will take an enormous amount of energy, you can easily twist an ankle or break a leg in the process, and it’d probably be pretty slow going. Crossing the drainage (the “V” at the bottom of the valley) and climbing out of it is also likely to be a horrendous slog since all of the debris from the slopes overhead will collect at that point.
2. While the climb from the drainage to the high point of The Humps is only 250′ over 0.5 miles, you’d be side-hilling, or hiking up the slope at an angle. You can do it, it’s usually more efficient to hike perpendicular to the contour line to distribute the work equally between your legs. Side-hilling can be exhausting because one leg is always higher than the other and doing more work.

A Better Route

The blue route (above) from Mt Martha to The Humps can be broken down into two legs: a 0.4 mile leg which crosses the saddle to the unnamed peak south of Mt Martha, and the second leg, an 0.8 walk down the ridge to The Humps.

1. The first leg drops 164 feet to a flat area called a saddle before climbing just 108′ to the unnamed peak. The saddle is probably covered with trees, including some blown over trees on the ground, but easy to cross because there’s so little gradient.
2. The second leg gradually drops 550′ feet down the ridgeline to The Humps over the course of 0.8 miles.  I would expect spruce above 3000′ then turning to open hardwoods which are faster to hike through.

While the blue route requires about 50% less elevation gain than the red route, the biggest energy savings between the two is avoiding the debris below Mt Martha’s eastern slope that you’d have to hike through. That could be a complete nightmare in terms of effort, safety, and speed. There’s none of that on the blue route, even though it’s 0.2 miles longer, making it a better off trail route.

Wilderness Route Planning

The essence of Wilderness Navigation is learning how to make decisions about the best cross-country routes across unfamiliar terrain in terms of energy expenditure, safety, and speed.  While learning how to follow a bearing using a compass, GPS, or smartphone app is an important prerequisite to following a wilderness route, the most important route planning skill to develop is learning how to read a topographic map and making inferences about the landscape it depicts.

While there is an abundance of excellent GPS route planning tools available, the only way to learn the implications of different landforms shown on maps is to get out and hike off-trail as much as you can, preferably with a partner, because discussing different route alternatives hastens the learning process. When you can look at a map and quickly decide the best off-trail route to take, you’ll have internalized the three principles of wilderness navigation route planning: efficiency, safety, and speed.

Imagine, being able to hike anywhere your two legs can take you. That’s when you’ll experience the true freedom of the hills!

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