This was my first endeavor of planning a section hike from “scratch”. What I mean by that is I didn’t use a pre-planned route like I have in past (Example: SNP Backcountry Trips). We decided that we wanted to do a section hike instead of a out and back hike or circuit hike. That way we were getting to do more of the trail without backtracking over the same area. However, with starting and ending at different points brings up different logistical planing.
Below are several resources that I used to plan and read up about this trail:
- Pinhoti Trail Alliance (This was a huge resource for me to show the different sections. However, it has been designed in such a format that it is difficult to read)
- Pinhoti 2014 Trail Map/Waypoints
- Guthook Guides (This app has been downloaded to my phone and will be my main source of mapping on the trail)
- Darwin OntheTrail 2018 Pinhoti Trail Thru-hike
- Whitewater’s Pinhoti 2016 Thru-hike Journal
- Greenbelly Planning Your Thru-hike 101- Pinhoti
- Alabama Hiking Trail Society- Pinhoti Trail
- Pinhoti Trail Alliance Facebook Group
Once I had an overall sense of the trail, read and watched as much as I could, I decided that going for an average of 10 miles a day for the 5 days that I had would be a good feasible goal. Being this my first time in attempting a multi day trip, the heat, and how much shape I know I’m in, I didn’t want to over shoot the mileage.
Next, step came “Which 50-60 miles should I do?” and that answer came through asking some questions on the Facebook page and reading through multi people’s trail journals to see what their highlights of the trail were. Nearly every thing I saw lead me to the Cheaha State Park area, which are in sections 6 & 7, so throwing section 5 on the front end and section 8 on the back end gave me a total of 53.9 miles.
