Planning a mountain day

Mountain days are measured in hours, and distance is a poor proxy because the same distance can take two hours or seven depending on the ground. What a plan needs is an estimate of elapsed time from leaving the car to returning to it, built up from the sections of the route rather than guessed at as a whole.

Two things get left out of nearly every estimate. Stops — for food, for layers, for navigation, for a photograph — add up to a substantial fraction of a long day. And descent is not free: it is faster than ascent on easy ground and slower on steep or loose ground, and a party that has budgeted nothing for it arrives at the top with no time left.

The other input is the party rather than the route. A group moves at the speed of its slowest member, on the day, tired, and not at the speed of its fastest on a good day. Groups routinely plan at a pace nobody in them has ever sustained over a full day, and then find themselves an hour behind by mid-morning with no mechanism for noticing that it matters.

A turnaround time is a time at which you go down, whether or not you have got where you were going. It is decided before setting off, it is agreed by everybody, and it is not negotiable at the moment it arrives — which is the entire point, because the moment it arrives is exactly when it will seem reasonable to negotiate.

The reasoning is about who is making the decision. At the turnaround time you are tired, invested, close to something you want, and in the company of other people who also want it. That is the worst possible condition in which to weigh a risk, and the fix is to have weighed it beforehand, at the table, with a clear head.

An escape option is a way off the route that does not involve completing it or reversing all of it — a col that drops into the next valley, a path that leaves the ridge, a line down that avoids the difficult ground. What makes them useful is knowing them in advance, including how long each takes, because the moment you want one is the moment you are least able to work one out.

The descent deserves the same attention as the ascent and almost never gets it. A large share of mountain accidents happen on the way down, when the party is tired, the objective is achieved and attention has dropped. Planning a route whose descent is long, steep, unfamiliar or in the dark is a decision worth making deliberately — and having chosen it, the party should treat the summit as halfway rather than as the end.

Somebody who is not going should know the route, the party, the vehicle, and — the part that is usually omitted — the time after which they should be concerned and what they should do about it. A plan left with somebody who does not know when to act is not a plan left with anybody, and "he said he might be late" has delayed a great many searches.

How to raise an alarm, who to call and what mountain rescue arrangements exist differ by country, sometimes substantially, and in some places the call goes through a general emergency number while in others it does not. Find out what applies where you are going, before you go, and make sure the person holding your plan knows it too.