Creating a JMT itinerary was a daunting task.  This part of the planning process was one of the most challenging aspects for me bc it’s such a long hike, there are sooooo many variables, a lot of weird mathematical equations, etc.  But mainly I really wanted to stay at awesome campsites and avoid making the mistake of choosing to stop .5 mile before what turned out to be the most beautiful campsite of all time 🙂 (for more info on that see My Favorite JMT Campsites). Needless to say I spent a lot of time researching the places to camp along the trail and the amount of information out there was pretty sparse.  I scoured the internet for different sample itineraries and only found one other 17 day JMT itinerary.

So to start the process of making an itinerary for the JMT there is the method of just dividing the total miles by number of days you want to go for.  This gets you how my miles to go per day, which is a great place to start, but, for those that are looking for specific camp sites I find other people itineraries to be really helpful.

Looking at the peoples itineraries was really helpful because you see what are the popular campsite, peoples favorite, what to avoid, etc.  Then you can use the basic mileage you should go per day and find the best campspots around.  Also you notice that most people don’t end up following their itinerary because of various reasons.  I will post both our “planned” itinerary and our actual itinerary, because they turned out to be pretty different.

There was also some advice for making an itinerary that I will pass on.  Do not have an absolute plan you are set on. Because it will never happen 🙂  It’s nice to have some guidance, which is why we made the intinerary, but as you can see we had several unplanned days, and several days where we didn’t make our goal, or just wanted to go further.

In the end it was really helpful to have an itinerary more so we knew where we should make it to everyday and if we didn’t make it what that meant for the next day.

Another Tip:  I printed THIS out (thanks to Alisa Marie Rodriguez) really small and taped it in to the back of my moleskin so if we ever wanted to go further or stop short we would know where good sites were.  It was really helpful to have.