How to Snowshoe Series: Winter Hiking in the Backcountry, Planning Your First Snowshoeing Trip
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Getting out in the cold months can be extremely rewarding. You get to avoid crowds. You get to experience nature in a condition in which you don’t often see it. You get that feeling of your smallness compared to the power of nature in a way you can’t always appreciate when everything is perfectly comfortable.
But that’s not to say that being out snowshoeing needs to be uncomfortable. It’s just that the consequences of bad decisions - whether that be bad clothing choices, bad gear choices, or bad route choices - is heightened. Luckily, the easiest ways to mitigate the inherent risks of being out in an environment that is a bit more harsh can all be done from the comfort of your home. Good planning can go a long way to ensuring you have the best possible experience when you and your family head out.
In this week’s video, we highlighted a number of websites that you can use for free to help you in your trip planning efforts. Here are the links to the sites that we mentioned:
Now, despite this fairly rigorous planning effort, we try to keep in mind that a plan is just a plan; it isn’t a ready-made reality. We want to keep some flexibility and open mental space around the expectations we set for what we hope to accomplish and by when. In no small part, this is due to having kids. Just like all of us, kids can have bad days. They can catch a chill and just not want to push through. They can lose some key piece of equipment. They can just crash on energy because, no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get them to eat a good breakfast that morning. Those, and a million other reasons. (Editorial note, all three of those examples have really happened to us.)
For us, a plan works best as a template, not as a finished product. The plan is something that is a starting point for us, something that prompts us to think through our goals and all of the associated choices. It is up to us to modify that template in a way that meets our needs. We not only modify that template as we are forming that plan for the first time, from our desks or from the couch, but we also modify that plan while we are out in the field. We can be more confident in our in-the-moment choices that we make while outside because we have thought through what the goals and risks and options are, already. Planning is a process that starts before you begin packing for your trip and doesn’t end until you are unpacking at home. In many ways, going through the process is more valuable than the end product of the plan, itself. Going through the process fills your brain with the knowledge about the area, the weather, the route, and many other things which all provide you with a solid foundation for the trip. And that solid foundation allows you to be more flexible without toppling the whole trip to the ground.
So, if I could offer one word of advice: take the process of planning seriously, and don’t take too seriously the plan, itself. It will pay off handsomely when things go wrong and you have to adjust on the fly because you already have thought through a bunch of different options and their outcomes.