Planning trekking involves a lot of logistics such as buying flights, planning transportation, booking accommodations, considering all the equipment you need, checking the weather forecast, this, and many other things. It is an incredible and wonderful experience, but it is not just about going to the mountains already.
You don't have to be an expert mountaineer to trek, there are options for all levels. Just make sure you have the condition to run 5 km. in half an hour (this is personal advice that I was once given and it has worked excellent for me).
In this guide, I share some steps that I follow each time to plan a trek, specifically based on the most recent one I did in the Austrian Alps.
First of all, you have to choose where you want to go, does it sound logical?
On this occasion, I really wanted to go to know the Alps, but since it is a mountain range that covers different countries such as Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, among others, the first thing I had to do was choose which area to go to.
I was gradually discarding according to my criteria, the budget, and the time we were going to have to walk and thus make the final decision: Tyrol, Austria (the Lechtalen Alps, a mountain range in western Austria).
We had a maximum of five days of travel, so, considering two days of transportation (one outward and one back), we had three days of trekking left.
Now, the joke of planning a trek is to find route options that fit your itinerary.
It is the same as traveling to a city, you have to consider all expenses including flights, lodging, transportation, equipment, food, and others.
Considering that there are countries that are more expensive than others, you can shorten your list of possible options, depending on what you are looking for.
This has helped me a lot, although it will not always be your friends who have gone to that place, sometimes there will be "someone who knows someone" who can share their experience with you.
In my case, coincidentally a friend had recently been to the Italian Alps (the Dolomites) and another person I met in the summer, had lived for a few years in Austria and knew the Tirol area very well. So I didn't hesitate for a second to write to them.
On the other hand and losing the fear of asking, I posted on Instagram and Facebook groups if anyone had ever been to the alps.
You will be surprised by the answers! There are many more people than you think willing to tell you about their experience.
According to what they were telling me and what I was also researching on the internet, I shortened the list.
For example, getting to the Dolomites in Italy was much more complicated than other places, so I thought that for this option it would take more days to be really worth it.
On the other hand, Switzerland became more expensive and very popular for me, I wanted something not so crowded.
So I went with the different options until, this time, I stayed with Austria, my heart wanted to know this country, which I really fell in love with, it is the paradise for outdoor lovers!
That's when I started to google things like “hiking in Austria” or “multi-day hikes around Austria”, “hiking in Tirol” and things like that and I found this article that talks about a three-day trek on the trail of "Eagle Walk."
Eagle Walk is a route that goes from East to West Tyrol, it is divided into 33 stages and consists of more than 400 km. Of course, we did not do the entire route in three days, but we did only part of the trek.
I recommend you to set the schedules carefully and consider the number of kilometers and hours to walk, you should know that it is completely different from the time you do running in a park because in the mountains everything always takes more time.
This is not only because there are ups and downs, but because you carry weight on your back and maybe you are not used to this, or sometimes also because it is not so easy to identify the way, or you need breaks to drink water, eat something or take a breath.
There is an infinite number of things that can make the journey much slower than you expect. So, when planning a trek, I recommend that you always consider extra time for these kinds of things that are unpredictable (at least an hour).
