A guided route is the version we would book for a friend arriving for the first time. You are met at the airport, and from there the driving, the beds, the food and the timing are somebody else's problem — specifically, one of five guides who between them have run these twenty-six routes over four hundred times.

What you give up is the freedom to change your mind at eleven in the morning. What you get back is every conversation that only happens when the person leading you grew up two valleys over.