Cairns, routes, divisions: how Divide thinks about a trip
Every planning tool has a theory of what a trip is. Most of them think a trip is a line on a map. Divide thinks a trip is a sequence of commitments — and the whole tool falls out of that one disagreement.
Three ideas are enough to describe any trip I have ever planned, from a two-night car camp to a three-week multi-sport road trip. Where you will be. How you get between. And where the plan is allowed to change. In Divide those are cairns, routes, and divisions.
Cairns: where you will be
A cairn is a place you commit to being — a trailhead, a camp, a put-in, a summit, a diner in Bishop. On trail, a cairn is a stack of rocks that says someone stood here on purpose. In the plan, it does the same work. It is not a suggestion or a region of interest; it is a claim: on day 3 we sleep at Merced Lake.
That claim is what everything else attaches to. A permit belongs to the cairn that needs it. A forecast belongs to the cairn's coordinates on the cairn's date — not to the nearest town at a different elevation. Mileage and gain describe the work of reaching it. A plan made of cairns can be checked; a highlighted line on a map cannot.
Routes: how you get between
A route is the leg between two cairns, and it is where trips actually fail. Nobody blows a trip standing at a campsite. Trips blow up in the space between — the drive that was five hours, not three; the “six easy miles” with 3,100 ft of gain; the paddle that a headwind turned into an afternoon.
So a route carries a mode — drive, hike, bike, ski, paddle, transit — and an honest budget: distance, duration, gain. Change the mode and the numbers change with it. A plan that has budgeted every leg knows what time you arrive everywhere. A plan that hasn't is a list of wishes in chronological order.
Divisions: where the plan is allowed to change
The name Divide comes from the third idea. A divide is where watersheds split — where one more step commits you to a different valley. Every real trip has these points, whether you plan them or not: the lottery result, the storm forecast, the group that's slower than hoped.
A division makes the fork explicit. It lives on a route — a specific leg where the trip could go two ways — and it has three parts: a condition (“Cables permit drawn?”), and two named branches, each with its own sequence of cairns. Plan A and Plan B are both real plans, built in advance, with their own camps and their own paperwork.
How they fit together
The three ideas nest. Cairns are the nouns. Routes are the verbs connecting them. Divisions are the conditionals — the only places the sequence is allowed to branch. String them across days and you have the whole trip: a trunk of commitments, with a small number of deliberate forks.
The discipline matters more than the vocabulary. If something is a cairn, it has a place, a date, and its paperwork attached. If something is a route, it has a mode and a time budget. If the plan might change somewhere, that somewhere is a division with a condition and two finished branches — not a shrug. A trip written this way can be handed to a stranger, or to a version of you that is tired, cold, and behind schedule. That is the version of you the plan is for.