Route Planning and Following

What route planning and following are

Route planning is choosing the path you intend to walk before you start walking it. Route following is executing that plan once you're on the ground. The two are tightly coupled: how you plan a route depends on how you intend to follow it, and how you follow a route is shaped by the choices you made when you planned it. For that reason planning and following are treated as a single topic.

The work of route planning is not drawing a line on the map between where you are and where you want to be. It's building a navigation story: a sequence of legs joined by recognizable points on the ground, with deliberate choices about which terrain to use as your guide, what you'll see along the way that confirms you're still on plan, and what you'll do when the plan doesn't survive contact with the weather.

The work of route following is then largely about reading the story you wrote, watching for the features you said you'd see, and noticing — early — when what you're seeing doesn't match what you planned.

Almost everything that follows is vocabulary and technique for doing those two things well.

Two reasons to follow a route

Before planning a route, be clear about which of these two problems you're solving — they call for very different plans.

You need to reach the destination. You may not care much about being on the planned line; another acceptable line is fine if the terrain offers one. Most recreational hiking is in this category.
You need to travel close to the planned line. Hazards on either side (cliffs, private land, avalanche terrain, a closed wilderness boundary), or a project goal that defines the route itself (a survey transect, a search pattern, a specific traverse you came to do).

The second case is the more demanding one. It requires a tighter plan, more attention to off-line drift, and — almost always — a preprogrammed GPS route to tell you when you've drifted, since a compass bearing tells you which direction to walk but not whether you're still on the line.

Factors that drive the plan

The route you plan is the product of trade-offs among several factors. Different trips weight them differently; the planner's job is to be honest about which ones matter on this trip.

Hazards to avoid. Cliffs, water crossings, avalanche terrain, hunting zones in season, private property.
Destination and schedule. Where you need to be, by when.
Difficult terrain and vegetation. Boulder fields, dense brush, blowdown, deep snow, marshland. These don't show up as obstacles on a paper map the way a cliff does, but they can turn a 2 km leg into a 4-hour ordeal.
Fastest, shortest, easiest — they are rarely the same line. Shortest is the straight line. Fastest usually follows the trail network or the easiest terrain. Easiest minimizes elevation gain, route-finding difficulty, and physical work. Pick which one you actually want.
Area coverage or avoidance. Sometimes the point of the route is the line, not the endpoints — surveys, search patterns, a deliberate scenic detour, a deliberate avoidance of someone else's camp.

On-trail versus off-trail

A trail almost always beats a straight line. A trail at 1.5x to 2x the straight-line distance is an easy trade in most conditions — easier walking, faster pace, no route-finding load, and the trail itself does the job of a handrail for you. Difficult cross-country conditions push that ratio higher: in dense brush or steep loose talus, a 3x detour on trail can still be the faster option.

The corollary is that an off-trail route is a deliberate choice. It needs a reason: there's no trail, the trail doesn't go where you're going, or the off-trail line is meaningfully shorter or more scenic. "It looked shorter on the map" is rarely a reason that holds up on the ground.

Time factors

Many a trip has turned into a disaster because a pressing need to be back in time didn't survive a route that took longer than planned.

If you have to be back on time, leave extra time for the unexpected. A flat tire at the trailhead, a stream higher than expected, a wrong turn that costs forty minutes — these are the normal events of a backcountry day, not exceptional ones. Plan for them.
Build bailout possibilities into the plan, and decide in advance when to use them. These are choice points: places on the route where, before you started, you wrote down what would cause you to take the bailout instead of continuing. Deciding that on the ground, tired and behind schedule, is much harder than deciding it the night before.
The drive home is often the most dangerous part of the trip. You're tired, possibly under-slept, on a long winding road out of the mountains, usually in late afternoon or after dark. The route plan that ends at the trailhead is incomplete; the plan that ends in your driveway is the real one. Build the drive into the schedule, and into the bailout logic.

Building a navigation story

The route on a map is a line. The route in your head should be a story: a sequence of named, recognizable pieces you'll narrate to yourself as you walk it. The components:

Legs. Discrete sections of travel between two recognizable points. A leg is short enough that you can keep yourself oriented on it without needing a fix in the middle. In good conditions on familiar terrain, a leg can be kilometers long. In poor visibility, a leg should usually be 500 m or less — short enough that small navigation errors don't compound into large ones before the next checkpoint.
Checkpoints. Places along the leg where you expect to be able to confirm "I am here, on plan." A trail junction, a stream crossing, the corner of a forest, the top of a rise. Checkpoints are confidence-builders. A plan with checkpoints every few hundred meters tells you quickly when something has gone wrong; a plan with no checkpoints between the trailhead and the summit tells you only after you've already drifted a long way.
Course-change points. Places where the plan calls for you to change direction or transition between travel modes (off the trail onto a bearing, off a bearing onto a handrail). These are the points where errors creep in — easy to miss in poor visibility, easy to misidentify in unfamiliar terrain — so they deserve extra attention in the plan. Good practice: position each course-change point at a feature that's not just on the map but is unmistakable on the ground. A nondescript bend in a contour line is a bad course-change point; a clear trail junction or a stream confluence is a good one.
Choice points. Places where the plan has options, and where you decide between them based on conditions. "If we reach the saddle by 1:00 PM, continue to the summit; otherwise turn back here." Writing the choice down in advance — with the specific condition that triggers it — is what makes it real. A vague intention to "see how we feel at the saddle" is not a choice point.

A useful self-check during planning: if you can't narrate the route out loud as a sequence of "first I'll do this until I reach that, then I'll turn and do this other thing until..." you haven't planned it yet — you've drawn a line.

Linear features: the planner's primary tool

Most of route planning, once you've decided roughly where to go, comes down to identifying linear features and using them. There are three categories, ordered roughly from easiest to follow to hardest.

Man-made linear features

Roads, trails, fences, power lines, walls. These are the easiest to follow — they're designed to be linear and visible, and most are explicitly marked on the map. When the map shows a trail going where you want to go, the planning problem is largely solved.

Natural linear features

Rivers, creeks, shorelines, vegetation transitions (forest edge to grass, treeline). These are nearly as good as man-made features, sometimes better — a river is rarely obscured by snow the way a faint trail is. Vegetation transitions in particular are underused; a clear forest edge running across your direction of travel is one of the most reliable features you can navigate to.

Terrain breaks as linear features

The line where slope angle or direction changes obviously — the top of a steep section, the bottom of a slope where it meets the flats, the ridgeline, the bottom of a drainage. These don't appear on the map as drawn lines; you have to read them out of the contour pattern. But they're often the only good linear features in terrain that has no streams and no trails, and they don't disappear under snow.

A planner who can only see man-made linear features is limited to roads and trails. A planner who can read terrain breaks out of contour lines has access to a much larger and more durable network.

Handrails

A handrail is a linear feature along your direction of travel that you can see and follow. It does most of the work of keeping you on route; your job is mostly to walk alongside it.

When you hike on a trail, you're using the trail as a handrail. The skill that opens up the rest of the backcountry is learning to use terrain features as handrails in the same way: walking along the edge of a meadow, along the base of a cliff band, along a contour at the top of a steep section, along a stream.

The criteria for a good handrail:

It runs roughly in your direction of travel for the length of the leg you want to use it for.
It's continuously visible — you can see it from where you're standing, and you can keep seeing it as you walk.
It's unambiguous on the map, so you know where along it you are.

Even an invisible compass bearing is technically a handrail, but it's a harder one to follow because it requires constant compass attention. A visible handrail lets you put the map and compass away and just walk.

When you don't have a handrail

When no good handrail runs your way, the alternatives, roughly in order of ease:

Hike toward something you can see. A peak, a tower, a notch on the skyline — anything you can identify on both the ground and the map. This is the simplest possible navigation: keep walking toward the thing.
Hike along a compass bearing or in a general direction. Less accurate than a visible target, but works when nothing is visible.
Hike along a contour. Hold your elevation, walk around the hill. Without some kind of aid, most people walking on a contour will drift slowly downhill — gravity is patient. An altimeter helps.

The honest warning that goes with all of these: without something to reference against, people walk in arcs that eventually close into circles. This is well documented and surprisingly hard to overcome with willpower alone. The compass, the visible target, the altimeter, or the handrail are how you avoid it. Without them, on featureless terrain in poor visibility, you will end up where you started.

Catching features

A catching feature is a linear feature perpendicular to your direction of travel — something you're going to walk across whether you mean to or not. It's the navigational equivalent of a backstop.

Catching features are what you use to signal a course-change point or to confirm you've gone far enough. "Walk west until you hit the road" works because the road is a catching feature: it doesn't matter exactly which point on the road you reach, what matters is that you'll know unambiguously when you've reached it.

Good catching features are large, obvious, and continuous across your line of approach. A road, a major stream, a ridgeline running perpendicular to your travel, a forest edge running across your path.

Aiming off (deliberate course offset)

The standard mistake: you walk a bearing toward a stream junction, you reach the stream, the junction isn't visible, and now you don't know whether to turn upstream or downstream.

The fix is deliberate course offset — also called aiming off. Instead of aiming straight for the junction, aim deliberately to one side of it by an amount larger than your expected error. When you reach the stream, you know which way to turn.

The general technique works any time your destination lies on or near a linear catching feature. Aim to a known side of it; let the catching feature backstop you; turn the right way when you arrive.

Plan on errors of roughly:

±5° for casual travel — about ±100 m of cross-track error per kilometer of bearing.
±2° for careful travel — about ±40 m per kilometer.

Those numbers tell you how far off-line to deliberately aim. If you're walking 2 km to a junction at casual accuracy, you might be ±200 m off the line when you arrive — so aim at least 300 m to one side. If the offset you'd need is larger than the catching feature is long, the catching feature isn't good enough; pick a different one or shorten the leg.

Attack points

An attack point is something easy to find that's near something hard to find. The technique: navigate easily to the attack point, then do the detailed, careful navigation from there.

For a route to a small unmarked feature — a campsite in dense forest, a specific boulder, a cave entrance — the direct line is often a bad plan. Any error compounds across the whole distance, and the target gives you no help finding it once you're close. But if there's an obvious, easy-to-find feature within a few hundred meters — a trail junction, a distinct lake outlet, a named summit — you can navigate to that with confidence, and only then switch to careful bearing-and-pace work for the final approach.

The rule of thumb: a good attack point is within about 500 m of your real target, easy to reach, and instantly recognizable on the ground.

When you don't have a good catching feature

When the terrain offers no useful linear feature to backstop the end of your leg, the alternatives:

Use time to estimate distance. If you know how long it takes you to walk a kilometer under current conditions, you can use elapsed time to know when you've arrived. (See the timing section.)
Count paces. Slower than timing, but more accurate over short legs.
Use an altimeter and choose a catching elevation. The elevation contour itself becomes the perpendicular feature you're catching against — works particularly well on sloped terrain.
Take a bearing on a distant object and walk toward it.
Use the visual alignment of two known objects. When two features on the map line up visually, you're on the line between them.

These are all weaker than a real linear catching feature. If you find yourself using two or three of them on the same leg, the leg is probably too long.

Estimating time and distance

You need a working sense of how long a leg takes so you can plan, so you can pace yourself, and so you can use time as a substitute for a catching feature when nothing else is available.

The best estimate is one you've calibrated to yourself under current conditions:

Time how long it takes you to walk a measured kilometer on the kind of terrain you're on, with the pack you're carrying.
Use that figure until conditions change enough to warrant a new measurement.

Until you have your own figures, a reasonable starting point: 15–20 minutes per kilometer on reasonable terrain, plus 2 minutes per 40 ft of elevation gain. That's a serviceable estimate for adult hiking pace with a day pack; adjust upward for heavier loads, deep snow, dense brush, or larger groups.

A standard pitfall: estimates made at the kitchen table are almost always optimistic. The leg that took 22 minutes in October on a dry trail will take 45 minutes in February on the same trail under a foot of snow.

Bailout features

A bailout feature is something large and unambiguous that you can navigate to if the plan falls apart — typically without needing a map or compass to find it.

The classic form is a general direction of travel that eventually leads to safety: "Go west and downhill, you'll eventually reach State Highway 1." That's a bailout. It doesn't require precise navigation. It only requires that you can tell which way is downhill, which way is west, and that you keep going long enough.

Good bailout features in most settings:

Major roads.
Shorelines (ocean, large lake).
City limits, a populated valley, a power line corridor.
Sometimes a major river, with caveats — see the warning about gullies that follows.

When you plan a trip, identify the bailout direction before you go. "If everything goes wrong, head [direction] and you'll hit [feature]." If you can't answer that question for the terrain you're planning to enter, you don't have a complete plan.

A specific warning: streams and gullies are tempting bailout routes but often bad ones. They look like obvious downhill handrails on the map, and water does take the line of least resistance — but it does so vertically. A drainage that looks gentle on the contour map may contain waterfalls, cliffs, or impassable choke points that don't show up at the map's contour interval. If the drainage runs through a stretch of closely spaced contour lines, expect trouble.

Following a route in poor conditions

Darkness, fog, snow, whiteout — the conditions that make route-finding hardest are the same ones that make it most necessary. The problems compound:

You can't see the hazards you planned to avoid.
You can't see the checkpoints and handrails that would otherwise tell you you're on plan.
You're not sure when you'll recognize the catching features or course-change points that the plan depends on — and you're afraid of missing them.

What to do:

Pick very distinct handrails. Large terrain breaks. Well-defined trails. Major streams. Things that won't disappear because of the conditions — and in particular, things that aren't buried under snow.
Pick hugely obvious catching features. Roads, major valleys, ridgelines. Not subtle ones.
Shorten legs. Errors compound over distance, and your error rate is higher in poor visibility. Legs of 500 m or less are reasonable in heavy fog or whiteout.
Plan for larger errors. If you'd normally aim off by 100 m, aim off by 300 m. If you'd normally use ±5° as your casual accuracy, plan as if it's ±10°.
Use a GPS. This is what GPS is best at. Make waypoints for every course-change point and choice point. On long legs, put intermediate "on-route" waypoints to reinforce your confidence that you're still on plan. The GPS doesn't replace your map-and-compass plan — it confirms it.

A planning principle worth stating directly: the same route is two different routes in good and poor visibility. A line that works well in clear weather, using line-of-sight to a distant peak as a handrail, may have no usable handrails at all in fog. If there's any chance the conditions will turn, plan the route that works under the worse conditions.