Most of my friends have moved to other parts of the country, so I don't take nearly as many "just hanging" trips as I once did. However, I am developing some new hiking buddies as an offshoot of some organized group trips. Like my old friends, we're following a couple of general "rules" (which is way too formal a classification.)

First, we treat each trip as a solo trip taken together from the point of view of gear. Each of us brings a full complement of gear. Yes, we could lighten our loads, but most of us are already under 25 pounds for a weekend anyhow, so there's no reall suffering involved in each person carrying all the gear he/she needs to be self-sufficient. It's also a bit of insurance, in case someone does need to leave the trip early because of a last-minute change in plans, or just "hitting the wall" partway through the trip, or gets lost (hard, but not impossible, to do in the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana pocket-sized hiking areas.)

But mostly, it's that we don't get out every weekend, and so when we do, we want to play with our toys.

It also simplfies planning: we don't have to keep checking to see who has a big enough pot for 3 people, who's going to get the food, and how much, etc. It also means that, if work or family forces someone to drop out a couple of days before the trip, we don't have to start over to make sure we've got everything covered.

We also plan the trip as a group, rather than having one individual make all the decisions. The person who comes up with the original idea usually takes the lead, but we make the final decision on the specific hiking route and the intended campsites as a group consensus. We also discuss whether any of us might want to spend one night alone, at a different campsite, and if so, we plan when and where we'll separate and meet back up. We also frankly discuss our physical limitations (those of us in our 60's don't have the same hiking abilities as those in their 30's), and plan hiking routes to meet those abilities. Sometimes, this means one or two of us will take a shorter or less difficult trail than the rest - but again, we make definite, mark-on-the-map arrangements of where we'll separate and when and where we'll meet again. That kind of joint decision making seems to make the actual trip go pretty smoothly.

My own personal "thing" is making sure everybody has his own map (prefereably a topo, but a trail map is often adequate in Ohio, Indiana, or Kentucky.)

This seems to work pretty well. Of course, we're lucky: we all feel the same way about being honest with one another, not taking offense when others are honest, and we all are very willing to compromise (these are work habits for most of us, and they carry over pretty seamlessly.)