Oleg K. Gusev started to speak about trail building around Baikal Lake more than thirty years ago. He personally hiked all the way around the lake and described points of interest. As the result of his work, several books with pictures were published, one of them being the album "Around Lake Baikal". However his idea didn't find any support that time. The main argument against the building of the Round Baikal Trail was the concern of allowing uncontrolled access to forest reserves and the effect on the untouched nature of Baikal coast.

Later, the famous tourist guide and regional expert, Valentin P. Bryanskii wrote a lot about the Round Baikal Trail. His book "Desired, furious, gorgeous" was published in 2000.

More and more eco-tourists wish to travel to Baikal, and many of them would like to hike the Coast of the Siberian Sea. Some parts of the trail are already built, like the "Round Baikal Railway". There are trails from Listvianka city to Kadil'naya and to Goloustaya, then to Bolshoe Goloustnoe village and to Peshannaya bay. Also there are existing trails in the northern part of Baikal, in the Bargusinskii reserve, in Zabaikalskii National Park and several interpretive from Gremiachinsk village to Zarechie village. None of these trails have proper management and their states vary.

Creating a centralized system of eco-trails is necessary for the development of ecotourism - an efficient mechanism of increasing economic standards for the local community and preserving Lake Baikal's biological diversity. Creating new and interesting segments of trail will allow diverting many tourists from existing over used trails to new ones.

Volunteers can build the Great Baikal Trail. And that is a very important aspect of this project. Considering that the trail around Lake Tahoe in California (Tahoe Rim Trail) was built over the period of 20 years by volunteers, a Russian system of trails modeled on the volunteer aspect of the Tahoe Rim Trail could in the future be place of meeting for many people including schoolchildren and students from all over the world. One example of such an experience is Tahoe Baikal Institute program, where young adults work together on environmental projects and one very important result of this work is a friendship between people from the different continents.

There are several groups with the experience of creating trails in the Baikal region, among them, NGO "Ustie" from Bolshoe Goloustnoe, the "LUT" club from Ulan-Ude, School of the tourist-environmental education from Severobaikalsk city and others.