Thanks! A lot of our ideas come from hikes we've already done. We go to the top of a peak or see something along the way and ask "I wonder what's up there?" or, "can we go over there?" or, "what can we see from there?" If it's interesting enough we'll look at maps and Google earth and see what the area is all about. Is it a ridge, how much bushwhacking is involved, what might be hidden in the bushwhack that we have to plan for, what would be the best approach to summit, things like that. Then we might load waypoints into our gps apps to guide us around certain features such as cliffs. It's always a big unknown because any map only has a limited resolution of the terrain. You just can't see every obstacle that might force you to change course. But we have a compass to help us orient and gps to fix our location on a map. Eventually as we get to know the area, what we see in real life as landmarks -a slope here, a boulder field there- starts to mesh with what we only knew on a map. Then we can make informed decisions about the best routes. We're still learning. There are some general principles that we're learning too, about what makes a good route for humans, lol.