Treks

At Nature Trail, our planned tours by hiking that extend beyond a full-day’s duration to two days and beyond that to multiple days, we term our ‘Treks’.

Treks are longer than hikes in both distance hiked and in duration. Treks usually require traversing through wilderness country on tracks across terrain more difficult (steep, more uneven, and less defined) and so the undertaking is inherently more strenuous.

Treks also typically venture remotely from human settlements, outside mobile telecommunication reception and with no camping related facilities whatsoever.

So unlike day hiking, trekking requires each participant trekker to take full independent responsibility and accountability for his/her own self-sufficiency concerning supply of all food, drinking water, clothing, camping gear for the entire trek and all carried on his/her own trekking backpack. Our recommended volume capacity of a trekking backpack tends to be 60-80 litres (pack size) capacity for the complete internal gear storage of an individual trekker.

In our experience, the smart choice for trekking pack size is dependent upon:

The given trek’s duration in days
The track(s) maximum grade difficulty
The expected conditions (track/weather)
Each trekker’s own personal preferences

We sensibly recommend that each intending participant on a trek separately seeks out their own independent professional/expert guidance when choosing their pack and gear well before embarking on an intended trek with Nature Trail.

This is a sample 70 litre trekking pack and a hiking pole

So this is our distinction between hiking and trekking. We nevertheless respect and value the views of others and so this following introductory video is intended to be indicatively instructive.

Throughout our wild and vast Blue Mountains Region in which we are based, Nature Trail offers on a commercial basis a broad spectrum of 2-Day Treks and Multi-Day Treks (3+ days) venturing beyond the tourist trails and deep into remote wilderness country.

They are not for the faint hearted and not available to the general public. Nature Trail treks traverse terrain that can be typically graded ‘Difficult’ to ‘Very Difficult’, and demanding heavy backpack carrying, through sometimes changeable weather conditons which can unpredictably become extreme.

Our trekking distances for a given trek, range from 5km up to a considerable 132 km. We prefer to consider these challenging and somewhat elitist due to the exclusive high fitness and competency standards we prescribe of applicants before they can participate.

But we are not running, or pace-making or boot-camping our treks. We are professional about how we lead our treks, having the primary emphasis on safety before achievement.

Nature Trail is developing its Trek Policy, which so far includes the following prescriptive rules that each participant must accept and adhere to:

Daily planned walking trek distance limit of 10km
Be personally self-sufficient
To accept our Trek Leader’s decisions and authority throughout the trek
To actively maintain the group’s interpersonal cohesion
To ensure no separation from the group
The planned overnight campsite arrival be no later that 2 hours before sunset
No night hiking
To each don one of our active GPS tracking devices
Plus policy guidelines focused on ensuring participant safety, welfare and group cohesion.

Nature Trail’s policy toward trekking aims to professionally design, plan and deliver a trek to the safest best practice standards so they all participants finish together, with no injury, and ideally on schedule but this is secondary.

This is easier said that done, and we allow and encourage innovative ‘cheating’ by participants to arrange supply of periodic comforts and independent support team enroute if so required. On our treks, we are not on a mission.

For further information about Nature Trails Treks, please click on the following hyperlink to our relevant webpages under our Trek menu headers respectively as follow: