When it comes to planning a hike or backpacking trip, one of the most important things to factor in is trail difficulty.
But what does that actually mean?
Trail difficulty is subjective.
A moderate trail for me may be a difficult trail for someone else. So when you see a trail marked as easy, moderate, or hard, how do you know what that rating will mean for you?
The short answer is experience.
If you have hiked for any amount of time, you will quickly learn what trail ratings mean to you. Moderate may be easy. Easy may be hard. Eventually you begin to recognize what those ratings feel like in your own body.
Once you know the ratings, it is easy, right?
Well, no.
Trail difficulty is still subjective.
When you look at something like AllTrails, every person who hikes the trail is rating it based on their own experience. Their fitness. Their expectations. The weather. Their pack. How they felt that day.
There are trails I have hiked and rated as easy one time and moderate the next.
The trail didn’t change.
I did.
And that raises a more important question.
How do you know if a hard trail is pushing your limits or setting you up for failure?
Difficulty
Looking at trail reviews and guides is only half the battle.
Looking at updated topographic maps and, especially, trail profiles gives you another piece of the story.
A moderate trail may have a difficult beginning. The middle may be the hardest section. It may gradually get more difficult as you climb. Or it may remain relatively consistent from beginning to end.
A simple overall rating can tell you how people generally feel about a trail, but it can’t tell you exactly how the trail feels to walk.
That’s where the profile becomes useful.
Studying the trail profile and the maps lets you see how the trail changes from section to section. Reading reviews instead of simply looking at the rating can also help.
Someone saying, “This trail is hard,” tells you one thing.
Someone explaining that the first mile is easy, followed by a sustained climb with very little relief, tells you something much more useful.
You aren’t just learning how people felt about the trail.
You’re learning what the trail actually asked them to do.
Eremos Ratings
When I started hiking more often, I found trail ratings frustrating.
I wanted something that helped me understand what I was actually going to encounter on the trail.
So I came up with a way to rank trails based on how I experienced them.
I eventually turned that into a formula based on the trail profile.
I spent months manually ranking individual ascents and descents and putting a number to what I was feeling on the trail. Each feature was given a number based on its difficulty, and each trail received an average rating.
The resulting scale runs from 0–5.
A 0 feels something like walking a flat trail with very little variation in the terrain.
A 5 is approaching what feels like a vertical climb.
That system gives me another way to look at a trail.
But even this kind of personal data can be misleading.
When all of the individual features are averaged together, a trail with several very difficult sections can end up with an overall rating that makes the trail look easier than it actually feels.
That’s why the overall number isn’t enough.
Knowing the trail profile and having each feature ranked individually gives me more information, but even those numbers have to be understood in context.
A number is useful.
It just isn’t the trail.
So How Do You Know?
I don’t think there is one system that works for everyone.
For me, it is useful to look at individual ascents and descents and then consider the average rating.
For someone else, understanding the elevation profile may be more helpful.
For another hiker, an overall rating may be all they need.
None of these is necessarily wrong.
The best way to learn what trail difficulty actually means for you is to walk a variety of trails with different ratings.
Walk an easy trail.
Walk a moderate trail.
Eventually, when you are ready, walk a hard one.
Pay attention to how the trail feels.
Pay attention to how you feel.
And pay attention to what the rating actually meant when you were standing on the trail.
Over time, you’ll develop your own understanding of difficulty.
You’ll begin to recognize what someone means when they say, “That’s a hard trail.”
And perhaps more importantly, you’ll begin to recognize when a trail is hard for you.
Because the trail didn’t change.
You did.