Planning Expeditions
Sun Aug 10 2025 17:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
How To Plan An Expedition
There’s a lot of variables to line up for an expedition which all must come precisely together in order to be successful. This can be very daunting if it's your first time. A lot of preparation and money and personal investment is going into this one trip, so you don’t want to f*** it up. Here are the basics. Put it all in a spreadsheet. Contact me for help beyond this.
There And Back Again
The first step is figuring out where you’ll be going and how you’ll be getting there. Are you flying? Are you taking local public transportation? What’s required for this area? What are the limitations? If you’re traveling to remote Alaska, you’ll need to buy tickets from small bush plane services. Make sure you know exactly which ones you need because sometimes these businesses close and flight patterns change. Call locals or embrace not knowing exactly who you’ll be flying with until you get there. Build this into the schedule. There will be time between flights and maybe you’ll need to take a taxi or rent a car to go between Anchorage and Fairbanks. If you’re traveling to a different country try to make sure you have the local currency on hand for transportation. Some buses require you to pay with an app that you can only download if your cell phone is from that country. The only way around this is to pay a local to buy your bus fare. Taxis almost always take cash, but they drive around busy cities so you’ll have to call one to pick you up if you’re in a small remote town or offer to employ a local to transport you. Oftentimes it's cheapest to look into combining multiple forms of transportation, especially between borders. Internal flights are cheaper than international flights but buses and trains often have costs only based on the distance traveled.
Conditions and Culture
What is your expedition going to feel like? Are you sleeping in hotels or in tents? Is it warm? Sunny? Rainy? Cold? Snowy? Windy? This is going to determine a lot of things like what equipment you need to bring, what food you can pack, and how long you can go for. If you need to sleep in hotels or hostels you need to research what the costs of these are and make sure you know exactly where you stay and for how long. You need to make sure you have the equipment up to the task of the conditions and have spent time practicing in the same conditions you’ll face.
What about the culture? Do the locals speak your language? Are there customs you need to be aware of? If you’re traveling to different countries (remote Alaska might as well be included in this). It would behoove you to research the local culture. Find out what they do seasonally, how they feel about foreigners, and learn some of the language (it only takes a few months of dedicated practice to speak and understand basic interactions and they will appreciate the effort).
Basic Needs
You have to be able to sleep well, drink clean water, and eat decent food. On many trips half the fun will be exploring the local cuisine. Try to get accurate estimates of the cost of groceries and restaurant prices wherever you’ll be traveling. Make sure you know if the water is safe to drink and if it isn’t then have some solution to treat it or factor in the cost of bottled water. Don’t eat unwashed/uncooked vegetables and fruits in remote areas. The locals may tell you it's fine, but they also might have immune systems that are used to fighting the common diseases that can hang onto foods in their area. Do you need a water filter? Is all the water frozen? Do you know how much fuel your stove needs each day to melt snow/ice into water? Make sure you have a safe, and habitable place to sleep each night. This goes back to conditions, culture, and on to equipment. Research the safety of the towns you’ll be in and make sure you have the gear suited to the weather. Plan and pack food that will last through the journey. This rarely includes freeze dried backpacking meals for real expeditions. You need real food with real nutrition. Aim for a balance of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, but know that fats are lighter to pack and keep you energized for longer. 3k calories is a good benchmark to start at if you’re working hard each day hiking, climbing, paddling, skiing, etc.
Equipment
Define a clear objective and get accurate information on the terrain and weather you will be experiencing on your expedition. Budget how much funds you will have available for the expedition and work from there. Start with food, water, and travel because no matter how fancy your gear is you can’t perform without food and you have to make sure you can get to your destination. Next move to what will be the essential equipment that engages with your body and the terrain. If you’re trekking, the most essential equipment in order is footwear, shelter, backpack, and sleeping bag+pad. Think about the bigger picture when you buy these items. If you buy a backpack before you buy a tent and realize your tent doesn’t fit with all your other gear in the pack then you messed up. Try to test things with real life weight and situations before committing. If you need to go into the gear shop and fiddle with some piece of kit while wearing goggles and mittens or bring in a bunch of metal weights to put in a backpack then do it.
How Do You Define An Adventure?
An expedition is as much an exploration of yourself as it is the world around you. Don’t let anyone else’s idea of what an expedition should be spoil your dream of how you want to explore the backcountry. If you want a transformative journey in the backcountry you’ll likely be playing with risk, unknown, and fun. It’s up to you to decide how much of each and what exactly it looks like for you. If you do not start with a clear vision of what and why then the how will be nearly impossible to deduce. This is what keeps you motivated to find a way through the obstacles that will inevitably arise in the wild. This is both the first and the last step and should inform all of your decisions.