How to tell how hard a hike really is
Kilometres mislead, elevation gain rules, and there’s a Spanish system that puts it all into numbers: MIDE, explained without claiming it as ours.
Why kilometres mislead
‘It’s only twenty kilometres’ is the line used to talk someone into coming on a walk, and it tells you absolutely nothing. Twenty kilometres along a flat old railway path is a long, pleasant morning. Twelve kilometres with 1,200 m of climbing is a whole day – and one you’ll remember.
The kilometre has stuck as the unit of comparison because it’s the one everyone understands, not because it tells you much. It’s the only figure that always appears and the one with the least to do with how tough the day will be.
Underneath it there are four different things people lump into the same word, ‘difficulty’: how tired you’ll get, how much you need to know to avoid getting lost, how technical the ground underfoot is, and what happens if something goes wrong. They can be separated out, and someone already has.
The key number
A rule of thumb that gets pretty close: 100 m of climbing costs about the same as 1 km on the flat. Twelve kilometres with 900 m of ascent behaves like twenty-one flat kilometres. It’s crude – it knows nothing about terrain or gradient – but it turns two routes you can’t compare into two numbers you can put side by side.
Elevation gain rules, and gradient decides
If you could only look at one figure for a route, look at the total elevation gain (D+). It’s the best predictor of fatigue, the thing that stretches the day most and the thing people planning from the sofa get most wrong.
But D+ isn’t enough on its own either, because it doesn’t tell you how the climbing is spread out. Eight hundred metres over fourteen kilometres is a steady, manageable climb; the same eight hundred packed into four kilometres is a wall averaging 20%, and a different route altogether. You see that in the profile, not in the route summary: how to read it is explained in how to read the elevation profile of a hiking route.
And on top of both there’s a third thing no number captures: the terrain. A kilometre of forest track and a kilometre of scree aren’t the same kilometre, even with the same climb. For that you need a system that rates things that aren’t figures.
MIDE: someone else’s system, and a very good one
MIDE (Método de Información De Excursiones, a Spanish ‘walk information method’) is a system for rating how demanding a route is. It was developed and is promoted by the Spanish mountain-safety programme Montaña Segura, and it’s the standard recommended by FEDME, the Spanish mountain sports and climbing federation. It isn’t ours, we haven’t adapted it and there’s no need to: it works as it is.
Its clever idea is not giving an overall score. Instead of saying ‘hard route’, it rates four different things, each from 1 to 5, because a route can be exhausting yet dead easy to follow, or short yet committing.
| Scale | What it rates | Level 1 | Level 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environment (Medio) | How severe the surroundings are: what could happen to you and how long help would take to arrive | The environment is not free of risk | There are many risk factors |
| Route-finding (Itinerario) | How hard it is to work out where the path goes | Well-defined paths and junctions | Navigation is interrupted by obstacles you have to work around |
| Terrain (Desplazamiento) | What the ground underfoot is like | Walking on smooth surfaces | Climbing moves needed to make progress |
| Effort (Esfuerzo) | How much actual walking time there is, in hours | Up to 1 hour | Over 10 hours |
Alongside the four scales come the reference data, which are the usual ones: timing, total ascent and descent, horizontal distance, type of route – out and back, loop or one-way traverse – and the time of year the rating applies to.
That last item is the one almost everyone skips, and it’s half the point of the method: the same route doesn’t have the same MIDE in July as in February. A scree slope with hard snow pushes up the terrain score; an obvious path buried under snow pushes up the route-finding one. A rating without a season means nothing.
How not to misuse it
Two common mistakes. The first is adding up the four figures: a 4-1-1-2 isn’t ‘an 8’, it’s a comfortable route in a serious environment, and that nuance is exactly what the method brings. The second is treating it as an official label you can stick on any track: MIDE is assigned by someone who has assessed the route with proper judgement, not by an algorithm running over a GPX file.
Turning it into ‘can everyone in my group come?’
This is the real question for whoever’s organising, and the four scales answer it better than any label.
Terrain 4 or above
RED LINELevel 4 means using your hands to keep your balance. With a mixed group, that’s the end of the conversation: someone is going to be scared, and fear on an exposed step is a safety problem, not a comfort one. With newcomers, stick to 1, 2 or 3.
Route-finding 3 or above
SOMEONE HAS TO KNOWFrom 3 upwards you need to identify terrain features and compass directions. It’s doable, but it needs someone in the group who can genuinely navigate, and the track downloaded on more than one phone. If that person is you and you can’t make it that day, the route changes.
Effort 4, with newcomers
6-10 HOURSSix to ten hours of actual walking is a long day for anyone and an unpleasant experience for someone who’s never done more than three. And remember that a group moves at the pace of its slowest member, not the average: in practice that scale behaves like one level higher.
Add one more check, which isn’t part of MIDE but decides plenty of Sundays: at which kilometre the big climb comes. The same route with the wall at the start or at the end produces two very different groups by the time you get back to the car.
What Suviard does about this
First, what we don’t do: Suviard doesn’t calculate a route’s MIDE. Putting four automatic figures on a track would mean making them up, because three of the four scales rate things that aren’t in a GPX file – how severe the environment is, how obvious the path is, what the ground is like. The method belongs to Montaña Segura, it has its own way of being applied, and we’re not going to pretend an algorithm can replace it.
What we do give you is the data to decide for yourself: distance, elevation gain, the full profile and – this is what sets us apart – the actual time taken by the person who recorded the route, not just a formula estimate. An actual time of seven hours on a route the formula puts at four and a half is telling you something about the terrain that no label ever would.
And in club events, the organiser sets the outing’s level plus the planned distance and elevation gain, so nobody signs up blind. The level is set by someone who knows their people, which is exactly who should be setting it.
In short
A route’s difficulty isn’t a number: it’s four things that have little in common. Kilometres are the worst measure and the most quoted; elevation gain is the best predictor of fatigue; gradient and terrain explain the rest; and MIDE is the serious way of putting it all together without inventing an overall score.
For a group, the useful question isn’t ‘is it hard?’ but ‘which scale goes beyond anything my group has done before?’ It’s almost always just one, and you can almost always pick a different route.
More on how we work with data: about Suviard.