The Elderhiker Handbook
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The main purpose of this chapter is to help you decide on a company, a location and a level of trip difficulty that you can handle with enjoyment. As soon as you can hike more than ten miles in a day, on a relatively level trail, and not feel particularly tired, you are ready for the world. Remember the 10 miles in 4 hours objective for your fitness training. Ten level miles are about equivalent to 6 miles of regular trail with an elevation change of up to 3000 feet. It is a rule of thumb that whatever you can do comfortably, can be doubled if you are pushed. If you can do six miles, with elevation gain and loss, easily and comfortably, you could do twelve if you really had to. Sure you would be tired, but you would make it. Almost all adventure travel companies organize trips in which the daily hiking distance is from 6 to 12 miles.
Be forewarned, the cost of these trips varies enormously, from a low of about $400/week to $3000/week or more for something really exotic. The more expensive trips are great if you are 'spending your children's inheritance'.
Why 'Adventure' travel companies? Because regular travel companies, without the adventure adjective, don't usually have trips that involve hiking as the major mode of transportation or as a major activity of the trip. While it is true that you will enjoy any trip more if you are a good hiker, and therefore in good physical condition, we are going to concentrate on trips where hiking is a major activity.
We choose to join a group and go with an adventure travel company, rather than doing it on our own, where there are not good trail maps or guide books, where the logistics would be difficult, and when we are going to countries where we don't speak the language. By logistics, we mean things like arranging transportation, renting equipment, selecting and making reservations in hotels, and hiring packers, cooks and porters. We are happy to pay someone else to do these things for us under these circumstances. If you are in a country where you can't read the street signs, or where there aren't any street signs, it helps to have a guide.
On adventure travel companies, we have been on numerous trips with Mountain Travel-Sobek, one with Geographic Expeditions and two with International Expeditions. All were great, and exceeded our expectations. We would not keep coming back otherwise. Many other companies and clubs have been in the adventure travel business for years. An example is the Sierra Club, with their hundreds of domestic and foreign trips. These companies and organizations lead treks, backpacking trips, and tours in all parts of the USA and the world. Their catalogues are like our Christmas Wish-Book. We can always find at least one trip we would love to go on.
You need to get as many catalogues as you can, for the kind of trips that would interest you. We have listed the names and phone numbers, e-mail and Internet addresses of many adventure travel companies in the appendix, but we cannot hope to list them all. There are simply too many. If we missed your favorite, we apologize. Also, we have not been on trips with many of those listed, so our list is just that, a list. It is not a recommendation. To get started in earnest, request catalogs from some of those on our list, and also buy some travel magazines. However, note that most travel mags consider a hike to be the trip from the airplane to the terminal. Their major focus is on bus or van tours, or cruise ships, the antithesis of what we seek. Start with copies of Outside, Sierra, the Elderhostel catalogue, and nature magazines like Audubon, that are aimed at hiking and outdoor activities. Don't worry about the articles, that describe some expedition or rock climb that you would not do on a bet; look at the advertisements by the adventure travel companies, and call their 800 numbers, and get their catalogues. Once the catalogues arrive, you can select a number of alternatives that interest you, and that fit your budget. Remember that most of these companies do not cater specifically to Elderhikers; you have to qualify yourself for the trip, in your own mind.
Deciding on a hiking trip or trek that you, an Elderhiker, will enjoy is not as difficult as you might imagine. The companies rate their trips as to difficulty. They use things like letter grades or numbers, with A or 1 being the easiest, and E or 5 being an expedition to climb Mount Everest. Others use words like leisure, moderate, and strenuous, and combinations of these. Most of us old folks can handle grade A and B
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Walking, Hiking, and Trekking,
and the Health and Fitness to do them!
This book has two purposes: To encourage seniors to keep on walking, hiking, and trekking as a way to slow down the aging process and to be a 'how to' book on do-it-yourself trekking and on choosing a trip with an adventure travel company.
After 50 it gets harder and harder to adopt a lifestyle of exercise and fitness that will keep you an active adult through life into your 80's, and beyond. This book will demonstrate to you that walking/hiking is a way to achieve this, is great moderate exercise, and is fun, too. You will learn: How to measure your hiking fitness, how to cope with some of the effects of aging, how to keep your pack light, and choose clothing, plan food for your outings, and more.
When you are ready for a trek somewhere in the world, you will learn how to plan your own trip, or choose a trip with an adventure travel company. In addition, the last five chapters are descriptions of treks taken by the author and his wife since they passed their 60th year, and are examples of both the do-it-yourself trek and of treks with adventure travel companies.
About the Author
Ed Bodington and his wife Helen were both born in 1930, and into hiking families, so they spent their early years being helped along the trail by their parents. Helen grew up in Southern California, and Ed in Northern. They still remember car camping in Yosemite National Park, and numerous day hikes, in their separate locales. Hiking severally with groups from the Sierra Club, the California Alpine Club, and the Contra Costa Hills Club, they independently covered a lot of the California scenery. They met looking at each other over an organic chemistry laboratory bench at Stanford University. They married in 1952 and, after Ed completed an MS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they took the 'Grand Tour' of England, France, Switzerland and Italy. Then they started a family. In about 1960, with two young children old enough to walk a little, they rejoined the Sierra Club and started going on what is called the Wilderness Threshold outings. They became leaders of these family outings, and after several years graduated to Family Knapsack and then to Knapsack, (Backpacking),trips. In all they led national outings for the Sierra Club for about 25 years. All of these trips involved hiking . In about 1975 good fortune saw them taking an extensive trip to the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. Thoroughly infected by an inoculation of the Travel Bug, they proceeded, over the last twenty years, to go on numerous adventure travel expeditions to Africa, Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. In addition they have designed their own adventures to Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, Europe, and New Zealand.