Essential Tips for Mountain Trekking: Hydration, Rest, Layers, Diet

July 17, 2024

prashanth-sarma

There are usually 4 arrows in one’s quiver to counter the massive mountains might. Following these steps will help you withstand the Harsh Mountain Hardships.

Hydration

Hydrating your body on mountains is the only magnificent weapon you can use to withstand the might of mountains. Maintaining frequent fluid intake would not only boost the electrolyte saturation in your body but also help you counter headaches, ear pain, and all the top-tier mountain sicknesses such as HACE and HAPE. Between all the trekking, hiking, ascending, and descending our body sweat a considerable amount of fluid from our body. Supplementing our body with electrolytes would help us acclimatize much faster.

Sleep and rest

After a long day of trekking, one would feel tired. Having good sleep and rest breaks at night and throughout the day is key to maintaining your energy levels at maximum all time. Usually, trekkers use sleeping bags to rest. As the saying goes the more the merrier
You would be much more comfortable sleeping with other members in a tent rather than sleeping alone. When 2-3 trekkers sleep aside it maintains the overall temperature of the tent and helps trap the heat emitted from our bodies in one place thus helping us have a comfortable, long, and cozy sleep

Layers and protection

One mistake trekker usually make is they fail to cover their entire body parts and leave some parts partially exposed. Thus, reducing the body temperature. Just like a sleeping bag, we have to trap the warmth produced by our body amidst the layers we wear. How to do that you say? Let’s say one wears 1st layer of fleece, a shirt, pants, and gloves. Now when we wear fleece shirts and pants, make sure you tuck the shirt inside your fleece pants so that there is no flow air around inside. Wrists are often left exposed, for that, you have to use your fleece gloves and tuck them into your fleece endings of shirt just like you do it with pants. Repeating this process with all the layers you wear would trap the heat inside your body and it helps you keep warm no matter what the situation. One final step is adding a cover to your neck. When chilly wind streams hit your body, your neck would be the pathway to your inner body, wrapping your neck with a muffler and tucking it into collars of layers you wear would choke the airflow completely. This is an important step because of the rapid weather changes mountains would create.

Balanced Diet

This is a dormant yet most powerful practice one could follow to conquer your trek. Trekking for hours and hours in a day would be appetizing. we have to use that hunger to get lots of protein intake which helps in muscle-building and carbohydrates restoring your physical stamina to optimum levels to get you ready for the following day. Trekkers usually ditch food intake due to nausea and other issues. Doing this would have much worse effects on you and could lead to some dire situations. Having dry fruits, snack bars and energy bars with nuts and honey are massive energy boosters