The first winter trip most people take is up a hill they already know. That is a reasonable instinct and it is also where the trouble starts, because the route in your head is the summer one. The grassy shoulder you strolled up in June is now a firm snow slope, and a slip on it is not a stumble. It is a slide that accelerates, on ground you cannot stop yourself on without an axe and the trained reflex to use it.
Winter walking is enormously worth doing, and cold clear days on snow are the best days on any hill. But the gap between summer and winter is a real step up in consequence, and it is worth being clear about which parts of that step you can take alone.
Daylight becomes the constraint
This is the change people underestimate most, and the one with no technical solution. A route that took seven hours in July has to fit inside a window that might be eight hours long, and everything in winter is slower: breaking trail, walking in more clothing, eating with gloves on, stopping to put crampons on and take them off again.
So plan in hours of light rather than miles. Start at first light rather than after breakfast. Set a turnaround time before you go and hold to it even when the summit is close, because the summit is never the problem. The descent, in the dark, on frozen ground, with a tired party, is the problem. Carry a headtorch you would be happy navigating by, with spare batteries kept warm in an inside pocket.
The part you do not teach yourself
Ice axe and crampons are not accessories you buy and figure out. Take a winter skills course with a qualified instructor before you go onto snow that matters. This is not caution for its own sake: the skills involved are physical reflexes under time pressure, and there is no version of reading that installs them.
Self-arrest, the technique for stopping yourself once you are sliding, has to be practiced repeatedly on a slope chosen for the purpose, with a safe run-out, no rocks below, and somebody competent watching. You need it to work when you are on your back, headfirst, with the axe in the wrong hand, which is how it usually happens and never how people practice alone. An axe carried without that training is weight and false confidence, and false confidence is what takes people onto ground they should have walked around.
Crampons also need boots that can hold them. Both are sold with compatibility ratings, and a flexible walking boot will flex a crampon straight off your foot at the worst moment. Match them properly, then practice walking somewhere flat and boring, because most crampon injuries are people catching a front point on a gaiter and going over.
Avalanche terrain
Snow slides. Most avalanches release on slopes somewhere between about 30 and 45 degrees, which is exactly the angle a lot of pleasant walking routes climb. Where a regional avalanche forecast exists, read it every time, the way you read a weather forecast, and learn what its categories actually describe.
If you have not done avalanche training, the mitigation available to you is avoidance, not rescue. That means avoiding not only the slope you are standing on, but slopes steep enough to slide above you, and the run-out ground below them where the debris ends up. Transceiver, probe and shovel are for parties who have trained together, and even then they are what you reach for when the decision-making has already failed.
Three hazards that catch experienced people
- Cornices. Wind builds an overhanging lip of snow out past the edge of a ridge, and the edge is not where it looks. It can be many feet beyond solid ground, over nothing. Stay well back from any corniced crest, and do not stand underneath one either.
- Whiteout. When cloud, snow and ground become one flat white, you lose the horizon and with it any sense of slope angle or distance. You cannot tell uphill from downhill by looking. Navigation becomes bearings, pacing and timing, done carefully, and if you cannot do that confidently the time to find out is not then.
- Verglas. A thin clear glaze that forms when rain falls onto frozen ground, invisible on rock and on paths. It turns a path you walked up into something you cannot walk down, which is why a falling freezing level matters as much as fresh snow.
Water crossings
Winter streams are more dangerous than summer ones, and not only because the water is cold enough to take your grip and your breath in seconds. Rain and thaw can raise a burn from ankle-deep to impassable within hours, and snow bridges across a stream can look solid and hold nothing.
The correct answer to a river in spate is almost always that you do not cross it. Walk to a bridge, wait for levels to fall, or turn back and take the long way. Fording is a skill with real technique behind it, taught in person, and even people who have that training treat a crossing as a last resort rather than an obstacle to be solved. Plan routes so that getting home never depends on one.
Small things that become large
- Losing a glove in wind is a serious problem, not an annoyance. Carry spares, and use leashes or clips so a gust cannot take one off a summit.
- Store water bottles upside down. Water freezes from the top, so an inverted bottle keeps the cap free instead of sealing shut. Hydration hoses freeze solid; blow the water back down into the bladder after every drink, or leave the bladder at home.
- Cold flattens batteries fast. Phone, headtorch and GPS all live in inside pockets, not in the lid of the pack.
- Take goggles as well as sunglasses. Driving spindrift stops you walking into the wind, which may be the direction home.
- Watch faces and fingers for frostnip: white or waxy patches on nose, cheeks and ears. Rewarm gently with skin contact, do not rub, and treat it as a signal to cover up and reconsider the day.
A sensible way in
- Start with low, sheltered routes on settled days, and go up in steps rather than jumping to a big snowy ridge.
- Go with a club, a guided group, or people who have done it for years, and let them pick the day.
- Do a winter skills course before you own an axe, not after you have carried one around for a season.
- Build the habit of choosing an easier objective when the forecast is marginal, on days when nothing goes wrong. That is when the habit is cheap to build.
The most useful winter skill is not a technique at all. It is being genuinely willing to walk back down having achieved nothing, in good weather, with hours of daylight left, because something about the snow or the group or the light is not right. Summer forgives a lot of marginal decisions. Winter forgives fewer of them, and the mountain will still be there in a fortnight.