Hey, it’s Doug with Backcountry Pilgrim, and this video is all about one of my favorite parts of hiking: planning the hike. I’ve kept a spreadsheet of my hikes for years—distance and elevation gain and all that—but when my daughter decided she wanted to climb Half Dome (after we failed our first attempt), I needed a clean way to sort hikes by difficulty so we could build a smart ramp-up training plan. The problem is, distance and elevation gain don’t play nice together once you get into that gray area (like 3 miles/1,500 ft vs. 4 miles/1,000 ft), and they completely ignore terrain. So I tested a few popular approaches, including Naismith’s rule (more of a time estimate), the Yosemite Decimal System (terrain classification), the National Park System difficulty score, and the Petzl “energy mile” calculation. The NPS and Petzl formulas were the closest to my real-world experience, but both missed badly on certain hikes—until I added a terrain rating multiplier. What I ended up with is my own Backcountry Pilgrim hiking difficulty calculator: distance × 2, plus elevation gain ÷ 100, plus a terrain term (terrain rating squared × 1.2), with an extra 20% bump for backpacking trips. I also share a simple time estimate that’s easy to do in the field: distance ÷ 2 (2 mph with breaks) plus 1 hour per 2,000 ft of gain. And I’ll show you the spreadsheet link, plus a few automation tweaks like auto-filling season/month so you can sort hikes for training and trip planning.