My Difficulty Scale

 

I met with a friend of mine recently and she asked me what are some of the best easy hikes and my brain started going a mile a minute and ultimately I only had 1 or 2 ideas for her. I thought to myself, I sure wish there was a way for me to sort my blog by difficulty so from idea to fruition here is what I came up with.

Instead of using the standard Easy, Moderate, Hard I came up with the following scale:

DR1: Get out and look Seriously drive up to and see. May need to take a few steps.

DR2: Paved (or like paved) most likely wheelchair accessible.

DR3: Mostly flat, slight elevation gain, well maintained trail.

DR4: Steep uphill terrain and/or rocky footing footing. Possible short sections with steep drop offs.

DR5: Long steep segments. rocky trail, bush whacking, steep drops offs.

DR6: Too much for me to handle. Extreme heights, rock climbing, above waist water crossing, etc. Honestly I don’t think I will post any of these

Furthermore to be expressed as DR# in future posts, and I am going to try to go back and re-tag old posts.

My difficulty rating system is based upon my personal experience as an out of shape smoker, your experience may differ greatly.

Lastly, part of why I chose this more detailed scale and, partially the reason I didn’t have one before, is I get ragey on other peoples. We’ll hike something marked easy and we don’t think it was easy. Hike something marked as moderate and we think it was a cake walk. Also aside from this being from my own experience, there are other factors that really just make this my opinion, which can change.

For example I re-hiked Davis Creek yesterday and I remembered it being easy with some difficult parts. On hiking it yesterday I am probably going to put it at a DR5. It was a lot more difficult than I remembered. Then I realized, last time we hiked it was late in the season, we had already done a bunch of long, hard hikes. This was the first REAL hike we had gotten in this year so it seemed quite a bit more difficult. This is another reason I decided to define my difficulty levels. Easy, Medium, and Hard are really subjective.