Roslyn and I have decided to complete the West Coast Trail next summer. Its a 75 km long 1508 m of elevation trail that's half way across the country from us. We're going to be showing a bunch of our planning here and occasionally on our youtube channel to help others plan their own long trips.
The first step to any backpacking trip is either deciding what time you have available to go backpacking or what trail you want to go backpacking on. Since Roslyn and I already know what trail we want to do all we have to do is figure out a time to do it! For local overnight or day trip trails this is pretty easy to do, and for longer local trails in the 3-5 day category is becomes a bit more difficult but still not too onerous. Unfortunately for us, the West Coast Trail is half a country away and from what we've read so far takes 6 to 8 days to complete.
Here's a list of what needs to be considered when selecting when to go:
1 - How long will the hike take?
2 - When will the weather permit the hike?
3 - What are travel arrangements like?
4 - What happens if you need to extend the time on trail?
5 - What happens if we don't get a trail permit on our ideal day?
Lets work through each of these one at a time.
1 - How long will the hike take?
The West Coast Trail is 75 km long with 1508 m of elevation gain according to AllTrails. While not mountain climbing, that's still a lot of height changes over that distance. From reading the reviews and talking to a co-worker that has done it, 6-7 days seems to be about average. Roslyn and I are going with 6 days, putting us at a mere 12.5 km per day of travel. That should give us plenty of time to look around, explore, and if something happens like a creek being impassable we will be able to make up the delay.
2 - When will the weather permit the hike?
Since its on the coast, the window of good weather if pretty wide, but we still want it to be warm out. We narrowed our window down to June, July, or August, as that was the time period with a temperature and rainfall amount we found acceptable.
3 - What are travel arrangements like?
We are going to be travelling to BC 3-4 days before our hike starts to visit with Roslyn's sisters. Because of this, we really only need to figure out 4-6 hours of travel to get to the trail head from their place. The only other consideration is that you need to do an orientation session at the trail head, which is only held twice a day. Since the 4-6 hours travel time means we will miss the morning orientation, and we don't want to start the hike a 3:30 we are going to have to arrive the day before we plan on starting the trail.
4 - What happens if we need to extend the time on the trail?
Due to the chance of injury or lots of rain, there is a possibility of having to stay on trail for an extra day or two.Roslyn and I are planning on staying with my dad for a few days after were done the trail, so we can eat into that. If you aren't planning on staying in the vicinity of the trail after you're done, you should give a day or two leeway on your final departure date. Missing planes or other expensive travel costs makes an injury or trail delay even more disappointing.
5 - What happens if we don't get a trail permit on our ideal day?
Given the above information, Roslyn and I picked an ideal start date. But because the passes for the trail are first come first served, we needed to pick a couple of secondary (and tertiary) dates. Since we were staying in the area both before and after our hike, we picked dates in that were right beside our ideal date so that it impacted our overall plans as little as possible.
If you can go through and answer those five questions you will be well on your way to planning a longer backpacking trip. The next steps are to actually figure out our travel itinerary and how were getting around, but before we can do that all of the start-end dates needed to be figured out.
If you have any questions about this, or anything else, let me know!
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