A Comprehensive Approach Towards the Planning, Grading and Auditing of Hiking Trails as Ecotourism Products

The experiences of long distance walking: A case study of the West Highland Way in Scotland

“…Walking is greatly influenced by the social, environmental and managerial factors, and varies over time and space. The planning and management of these factors will, therefore, affect how the experience evolves (Hugo, 1999;Kay & Moxham, 1996;Stewart & Cole, 1999). Coble, Selin, and Erickson (2003, p.…”

“…Hugo (1999) argues that trails should be more than merely links between places, but rather enable the creation of holistic, integrated personenvironment system. Walking is greatly influenced by the social, environmental and managerial factors, and varies over time and space.…”

Who are wild enough to hike a wilderness trail?

“…These products and services include accommodation, game drives and various recreational activities, as well as hiking, 4 Â 4 trails and wilderness hiking trails. According to Hugo (1999) and Hartwright (2014), classifying hiking trails is mainly focused on the setting and the type of trail (see Table 2). …”

“…Furthermore, the wilderness experience provided by activities such as hiking embodies aspects such as autonomy, spontaneity, solitude, freedom of action, challenge, risk, spiritual values and aesthetic appreciation (Lynn & Brown, 2003). The locality of hiking trails makes it one of the most accessible activities to partake in, whether set in an urban fringe or a natural, pristine or wilderness background (Hugo, 1999). Wilderness areas are commonly found in national parks or protected areas and integrating wilderness trails into national parks is beneficial in diversifying product offerings, making the experience accessible and attracting a more diverse market (Saarinen, 2013;White, 2009).…”

An Emerging Paradigm for the UNESCO Global Geoparks: The Ecosystem’s Health Provision

“…Those components should provide information about the difficulty of motor execution and about the total biomechanical and physiological load on the participant during the completion of the course. At the end, the levels of difficulty should be directly indicated as a multiple of the difficulty of executing a certain horizontal nature trail, such as a trail of 5000 m, by following methodologies already published and applied using the energy equivalent and biomechanical load equivalent [73][74][75].…”