Prepare your hiking
When you want to do a hiking, you should be prepared and to avoid bad situations. When you prepare your hiking, the equipments you will get depends of your hiking. If you will do a small hiking, it’s not mandatory to get all your equipments like a long hiking, so, it’s important to identify the distance is your hike.
The first thing to do, it’s to create your walking itinerary: for doing that, you have differents applications to create an itinerary, and they are important to identify the elevation you will have. If you will walk with someone, and you have a different levels, don’t do a long itinerary or with a lot of elevation. After you created the itinerary, you can synchronize with your GPS device and follow it. Me, when I do a long hiking, I like having the paper map.
The second things is to identify the weather of your destination, that can be awful to walk when it’s raining.
The third things is to have a good backpack, so, when you will go to buy one, choose one backpack suit you, because we’re all differents. Also, if you do a small hiking, it’s not mandatory to have a big backpack, like a 60L, but if you do a long hiking, you should take a big backpack.
When you do a long hiking, I recommand these things:
- It’s useful to have a compass, especially when you do a long hiking. Me, I like having a paper map, so, with that, I can found my way with my compass. I can use a GPS device or my phone, because nowday, a phone have a GPS device embedded, but if I don’t have battery on my device, that will be a problem to find my way. So, for this reason, I have always a map and a compass.
- Have a kniffe. With that, you can use it for many things.
- Have a care kit, very useful if you have an injury.
And also, I think you know that, but, always to take your bottles :). I recommand two bottles in your backpack.
Signs
When you do a hike, it’s important to identify some signs for find your way. In France, you have differents signs and they indicate the way, but, if you go in another country, they can used differents signs, so, find out when you do a hike in another country.
GR - Grande randonnées
In France, the sign
Bad way:
New direction
GR de Pays
In France, the sign
Bad way:
New direction
PR - Petite randonnées
