Confidence and competence on the trail

On many hikes, confidence builds quietly. It usually starts with a run of good trips: navigation goes smoothly, camps get reached on time, decisions feel sound, and the terrain broadly behaves the way you expected it to. Over time that adds up to a real sense of capability. The track feels manageable. You feel like you know what you’re doing, because mostly, you do.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Experience should build confidence. But there’s a subtle shift that can happen as it grows, where the feeling of being capable starts standing in for the actual work of checking conditions, testing assumptions, and staying genuinely aware as the day unfolds.

That’s really where confidence and competence pull apart. Competence lives in process: how a decision actually gets made, how information gets gathered, how uncertainty gets handled in the moment. Confidence is a feeling, built from past experience, and most of the time the two track together closely enough that the difference doesn’t matter. It only starts to matter when they separate, and confidence stays high while the actual verification behaviour underneath it starts slipping. That doesn’t feel like overconfidence when it’s happening. It feels like familiarity. It feels like already knowing what you’re doing.

Julie and I saw this play out clearly on a multi-day walk through the Northern Circuit at Wilsons Promontory. At the first campsite, another group talked confidently about their navigation and their familiarity with the route, having walked it before. The next stage was described as difficult, largely off-track, and needing careful navigation. They left early the following morning.

When we set off later, the terrain didn’t match how it had been described to us. There was dense vegetation in places, but also genuinely clear lines of travel and features we could use to confirm where we were. Where the track went indistinct, we stopped, checked our position, and re-established direction before pushing on. Along the way we ran into another couple who’d already had trouble navigating one of the headlands, and the larger group who’d left before us still hadn’t come out of that same section. We reached the next campsite that afternoon. They arrived several hours later, having spent most of the day off-route in a section that should have only needed a short stretch of off-track navigation.

None of that says anything about how experienced that group was. What it shows is something more specific. When confidence is high, there’s a real tendency to move through terrain based on what you expect rather than what you’re actually confirming. If a section’s been described as difficult, that expectation can shape how you approach it, and movement continues in the assumed direction even when the ground in front of you isn’t actually confirming it. Competence looks different in exactly the small moments that matter: stopping when the track goes unclear, moving to higher ground to reorient, treating uncertainty as a reason to pause rather than push through. None of that is dramatic. It’s just procedural, done consistently or not.

Navigation never operates on its own. It depends on attention and on how information gets interpreted as you go, and when confidence is high, the threshold for actually stopping to reassess tends to rise. Continuing feels efficient. Pausing feels like it’s slowing you down for no reason. As movement continues without confirmation, small positional errors start accumulating, and in dense vegetation with few landmarks and limited visibility, those errors get genuinely hard to detect, because the environment simply isn’t giving you much feedback to notice them by.

At the same time, physical effort ramps up. Pushing through thick undergrowth is slow and draining, fatigue arrives earlier than it would have on clearer ground, and as it builds, attention narrows and decisions stop being as deliberate. The willingness to stop and reassess drops further right when it’s needed most. What started as a navigation question becomes a fatigue question, fatigue affects judgement, and worse judgement makes the next navigation error more likely. Time stretches past what was planned, daylight starts running short, and options narrow, not because of one failure but because all of it is compounding at once.

Confidence feels like a reliable read on capability because it’s reinforced by past success, by familiarity with similar terrain, by the absence of previous problems. But confidence doesn’t actually maintain anything in the moment. Competence does. It’s what confirms position before committing to a direction, what prompts a pause when the terrain doesn’t match expectation, what recognises an assumption needs checking rather than just following it. A run of successful trips can build genuine confidence even when some of those outcomes came down to favourable conditions or clear terrain rather than anything being tested. It looks like it’s working, right up until it’s actually put under pressure.

Confidence isn’t the problem. It’s a natural, necessary part of gaining real experience. The risk is specifically when confidence starts substituting for the behaviours competence actually depends on. In practice, that shows up in how uncertainty gets handled: confident movement tends to continue through it, while competent movement pauses, checks, and only then proceeds. Confidence grows from what’s already worked. Competence gets maintained by continuing to verify, walk after walk, even once you’re sure you already know the answer.

This essay is part of the Human Factors in Hiking series, exploring behaviour, awareness and decision-making on the trail. Explore the series →