When it goes wrong on the fells

Fell running incidents concentrate around five causes: losing the line in poor visibility, a lower-leg injury a long way from a road, getting cold, running out of daylight, and a river or beck that is higher than expected. That is very nearly the whole list.

What connects them is that each has a decision upstream of it — where to go, what to carry, when to set off, and when to turn round. The sport is unusual in how completely the outcome is determined by choices made before anything felt wrong, which is why fell runners talk about judgement far more than about ability.

Most common serious incident

An ankle, far from a road

Most common bad day

Navigation, in cloud

What turns either into an emergency

Getting cold while stationary

The decision that prevents most of it

Turning round earlier than felt necessary

Fell running navigation goes wrong in cloud, and cloud arrives quickly and without much warning on British hills. The characteristic failure is not being hopelessly lost — it is drifting a few degrees off a bearing on featureless ground and arriving somewhere that looks plausible and is not.

• Stop as soon as you are unsure, not once you are sure — The distance covered between "this looks odd" and "I am lost" is what makes recovery difficult. Fell runners cover ground fast, and being lost at speed is much worse than being lost slowly.
• Go back to the last thing you were certain of — Unglamorous and almost always right. Continuing in the hope of recognising something is how people end up in the next valley.
• Carry a map and compass and know they are the backup — A phone is a fine primary navigation tool right up until it is cold, wet or flat, and all three are more likely in exactly the conditions where navigation matters.
• Handrails and catching features — A wall, a stream, a ridge line or a fence you can follow, and something you cannot miss that tells you when you have gone too far. The standard technique for exactly this problem, and it is taught properly on navigation courses.
• This guide gives no routes and no grid references — What is safe depends on the day, the visibility, the ground conditions and the person, and none of those is knowable from here. Local knowledge, a club and a map are the sources for that.

• Daylight runs out faster than the calculation suggests — Cloud, valleys and tree cover all take usable light well before official sunset. The last hour of a route is the one most likely to be run in the dark, and it is usually the descent.
• A head torch weighs almost nothing — And is the difference between a slow descent and a stationary night. Worth carrying whenever finishing near dusk is even plausible.
• Wind matters more than temperature — A still day at 4°C and a windy day at 4°C are entirely different problems in running kit, and the summit is not the valley.
• Becks rise fast and fall slowly — A crossing that was ankle-deep on the way out can be impassable on the way back after rain upstream that you did not see. Turning round is a real option and so is a long detour.

The decision that prevents most fell running incidents is abandoning an outing, and the sport has an unusually healthy attitude to it. Nobody in a fell running club thinks less of somebody who came back early because the cloud came down, and "we went and had a look" is a completely respectable account of a day.

That culture exists because the alternative has consequences that fall on volunteers. Mountain rescue teams in Britain are unpaid, and the fell running community overlaps with them heavily — a great many fell runners are on a team. Turning round early is not caution; it is the normal competent behaviour of the sport, and the people who are best at it do it most readily.

• What actually goes wrong in fell running? — Five things, and very little else: losing the line in cloud, a lower-leg injury a long way from a road, getting cold, running out of daylight, and a beck that is higher than expected. Each has a decision upstream of it, which is why fell runners talk about judgement more than about ability.
• What should I do if I turn an ankle miles from anywhere? — Put a layer on before you feel cold — you have just stopped generating heat in wet kit, and that is how a minor injury becomes a serious situation. Then decide a direction before moving, because the shortest way down is often not the quickest way to help. Message somebody while you still have signal, and if you are genuinely stuck, call 999 and ask for police then mountain rescue rather than trying to walk it off.
• Is it embarrassing to turn back? — No, and the sport is unusually good about this. "We went and had a look" is a respectable account of a day in any fell running club, and the runners who are best at the sport tend to be the readiest to abandon an outing. The culture exists partly because the consequences of not turning back fall on volunteer mountain rescue teams, whom fell runners overlap with heavily.