Being found is a communication problem, and the tools for solving it are cheap, light and widely misunderstood. A whistle is not a phone and a phone is not a beacon; each closes a different distance, needs a different condition to work, and fails in a different way. The sensible approach is not to pick … Read more
Altitude illness is usually filed under expeditions, but the hikers most often caught out are day walkers. A cable car in the Alps delivers you from a valley at 1,000 m to a station above 3,800 m in twenty minutes. A road in the Rocky Mountains takes a car to 4,300 m (14,100 ft). The … Read more
Sooner or later every walker ends up somewhere the forecast does not reach: a third day out with no signal, a hut whose bulletin is two days old, a valley where the printed forecast is for a town on the other side of the range. The sky still tells us most of what we need, … Read more
Darkness and whiteout are different problems that produce the same effect: the world shrinks to a few metres, and every technique that relied on seeing a feature and walking to it stops working. What remains is the compass, the count, the watch and a set of decisions made in advance. This article covers how to … Read more
A group is safer than a solo walker in almost every way that can be measured, and less safe in one way that cannot: it makes decisions differently. Individuals get tired and turn round. Groups get tired and keep going, because nobody wants to be the one who spoiled the day. Most of the mistakes … Read more
Blisters end more hikes than bad weather does. They are also the most preventable injury in the sport, because they are mechanical, predictable and announce themselves before they form. A hiker who understands what a blister actually is, and who obeys one simple rule when the first warning arrives, can walk for weeks without one. … Read more
The months either side of summer are the best and the worst of the hiking year. Trails are empty, the light is long, the huts are closed and the ground has not decided whether it is winter or summer. Three hazards define the shoulder season and they are all, at root, about snow: the old … Read more
Above the treeline the path often fades into a braid of sheep tracks, then into nothing. Off-trail in forest or tundra there was never a path to begin with. In both cases navigation stops being a matter of following and becomes a matter of choosing: which line across the ground is easiest to hold, easiest … Read more
The ten essentials began in the 1930s as a checklist compiled by a mountaineering club in the north-west of the United States, drawn up after members kept turning up on trips without the things that turn a mishap into a story rather than a rescue. The original list was ten objects: map, compass, sunglasses and … Read more
A contour line is a simple promise: every point along it sits at the same height above sea level. Everything else in map reading grows out of that one idea. Once we can see a hillside in a bundle of brown lines, the map stops being a drawing and becomes a model of the ground … Read more
