About Trailomen

Trailomen does one thing: pre-trip hiking math. How long a route really takes, how much water to carry, how many calories the day costs, what the pack should weigh, and how cold the summit will feel. Nothing else — no trip reports, no gear reviews, no social feed.

Why we built it

Hiking apps are excellent at recording what you did. Almost nothing is good at telling you what to expect before you go — and the generic calculators that exist tend to use fitness-app math that ignores elevation, load, and terrain, the three things that define hiking. We wanted the planning tools mountain clubs teach on paper, as fast interactive pages.

Our methodology

Every calculator is built on a published, citable model — never a tuned-by-feel constant:

• Hiking time — Naismith's rule (1892) with terrain corrections after Langmuir's Mountaincraft and Leadership.
• Energy — the Pandolf load-carriage equation (Pandolf, Givoni & Goldman, 1977, USARIEM) with Soule & Goldman terrain factors.
• Water — US National Park Service hydration guidance (0.5–1 L/h) with heat, altitude, load, and sun adjustments.
• Wind chill — the JAG/TI standard adopted by the US National Weather Service and Environment Canada in 2001, plus the ISA lapse rate for altitude cooling.
• Pack weight — community-standard base-weight definitions and the 20% body-weight guideline used across load-carriage research.

Each tool page states its formula's limitations as plainly as its strengths — where a model is not valid, the tool says so instead of inventing a number.

Accuracy & corrections

The formula implementations are covered by an automated test suite checked against hand-computed reference values from the source publications. If you find an error — in the math, a factor, or a citation — please tell us; verified corrections ship fast and are noted on the affected page.

One honest disclaimer

These are planning estimates, not guarantees. Mountains produce weather, terrain, and days that beat any formula. Build in margin, check local advisories, and make conservative calls on the ground — the calculator is the start of good judgment, not a substitute.