A first glaciated peak is usually booked by someone with hard treks behind them, and that experience is where the trouble starts. The mountaineering mistakes that end first summits on Rainier, Mont Blanc or Cotopaxi tend to come from fit trekkers who expect a glaciated peak to be a longer, colder version of a trek.
We’ve climbed Baker, Rainier, Orizaba and Cotopaxi, and summited Aconcagua. What follows comes from those climbs and from what our guides told us they see each season. The seven are listed roughly in the order people make them.
Mistake 1: Booking a mountain two rungs too high
Aconcagua comes up early on a lot of first summit wish lists. At 6,961 m (22,838 ft) it’s the highest peak outside Asia, and the normal route needs no technical climbing. That’s true, and it’s the wrong reason to book it. Aconcagua’s difficulty is altitude, cold and three weeks of attrition, and on a first big peak you have no data yet on how your body handles any of those above 5,000 m.
The ladder works better in order. Mount Baker, 3,286 m (10,781 ft), is a three day guided climb where you learn crampons, rope travel and crevasse terrain on forgiving ground. Rainier, 4,392 m (14,410 ft), is the next step: the National Park Service calls it the most heavily glaciated peak in the contiguous United States. After that come the 5,000 m volcanoes of Mexico and Ecuador, then the 6,000 m peaks. Baker and Rainier are two of the five classic first peaks we’d point a strong trekker to. The order holds all the way to Aconcagua: skills first, then scale, then altitude, then length and cold.
Mistake 2: Training like a trekker
A trekking day is five to eight hours under a daypack. Our summit day on Rainier ran 13 to 15 hours, and the day before it we carried everything we owned to high camp. Our packs weighed 22 to 26 kg on that carry. The standard routes gain over 2,700 m (9,000 ft) across roughly 16 km, and you descend all of it.
Trekking fitness gets you to the trailhead in good shape. It doesn’t prepare your shoulders, hips and lower back for 25 kg over several hours of vertical, or for a day twice as long as a typical trek day. The gap shows up on the carry, in the final hours of the summit push, and on the descent.
The fix is loaded vertical, built up over months, with the load set as a share of your bodyweight so a 60 kg climber and a 90 kg climber are training the same relative task.
Mistake 3: Learning the skills on the mountain
Guided climbs include a skills day. People read that and assume the skills are handled.
The skills day covers walking in crampons, holding an ice axe, moving on a rope and arresting a fall. On most programs it runs when you’re fresh, in daylight, with a guide watching every step. Then you use those skills at 2 a.m., at 3,800 m (12,500 ft), in wind, after four hours of sleep, with a rope team relying on your footwork. Fatigue and altitude both slow recall, and a technique you’ve practiced once is slow when it counts.
Crevasse rescue is the gap a skills day rarely closes. Stopping the fall, building a snow anchor, backing it up and rigging a pulley to haul someone out is usually taught as its own one or two day course. On a guided climb the guides carry that responsibility. On anything you climb without a guide, take the course first.
Some of it you can drill at home, where it’s warm and nothing is at stake. Put your crampons on and take them off with gloves on. Tie a clove hitch, a Munter hitch and a figure 8 with gloves on. Pack your summit pack by headlamp until you can do it in a few minutes.
Take a skills course before the trip, or practice what you can at home, so the skills day on a guided climb is a review rather than your first exposure. If that afternoon is the first time your hands have touched a crampon strap, you’re learning on the mountain, and the mountain is a slow place to learn.
Mistake 4: Flying in and climbing
Cotopaxi shows this well. Quito sits at about 2,850 m (9,350 ft). The refuge on Cotopaxi is at about 4,800 m (15,750 ft) and the summit is 5,897 m (19,347 ft). Fly in Monday, go up to the refuge Tuesday and start the climb that night, and you’ve raised your sleeping altitude by about 2,000 m in one move, then climbed another 1,000 m above it. That’s why the better itineraries spend several days on the lower volcanoes around Quito first.
The CDC, citing the Wilderness Medical Society, recommends raising your sleeping altitude by no more than 500 m (1,640 ft) a night once you’re above 3,000 m, with an extra night for every 1,000 m (3,300 ft) gained. The same page says training and physical fitness don’t affect your risk of altitude illness. The variable you control is time.
Short trips sell well because they cost less and fit a work calendar. On a 5,000 to 6,000 m peak the saving often gets paid back as a headache at the refuge and a turnaround somewhere on the glacier. You can’t acclimatize at home, so the only place to buy acclimatization is the itinerary. Buy the long one.
Mistake 5: Meeting your boots and crampons on the glacier
Mountaineering boots are stiff, heavy and rated B1 to B3 by how much flex they allow (the UK scale, where North American shops mostly say insulated single or double boots). A common pattern is to buy them a few weeks before the trip, wear them around the house, and put them on a glacier for the first time at high camp. Rentals are fine for a first climb, and the Rainier guide services recommend them. The risk is fit, so pick them up early, wear them on the skills day, and bring the socks you trained in.
The boots blister feet that have never walked 12 hours in a rigid sole. And because the crampons were never fitted to the boots at home, the first adjustment happens in the dark with cold hands. Our boots guide covers the ratings and the crampon match. A B2 boot takes C1 or C2 crampons, never C3. Check that fit in your kitchen, with the gloves you’ll climb in.
Wear the boots on your long training days in the final weeks before the trip, loaded, on real vertical. If you’re renting, ask the operator to confirm the model in advance and train in the same socks you’ll climb in. Carry what you need for blisters, because by summit night it’s too late to prevent them.
Mistake 6: Treating the turnaround time as a suggestion
Guided teams set a turnaround time before the summit push. If the team isn’t at a given point by a given hour, it goes down, summit or not. The time exists because the snow softens, the rock loosens, the afternoon weather builds, and the descent takes longer on tired legs than anyone expects at 4 a.m.
On a first summit it’s tempting to treat that time as a target to beat, or a rule written for slower people. It applies to you. In 1987 Ed Viesturs turned around about 90 m below the summit of Everest because the weather was worsening and he doubted his team could get back down. His rule, “Reaching the summit is optional, getting down is mandatory,” is the reason for the next mistake.
Mistake 7: Training the climb and improvising the descent
A 2008 study in the BMJ looked at every death on Everest between 1921 and 2006. Of the 94 climbers who died after going above 8,000 m, 53 died on the way down from the summit. Nine died on the way up. That’s an extreme mountain and an extreme sample. The reasons are the same on a smaller peak: on the way down the legs are spent, attention drops, and the snow has softened since 3 a.m.
The descent on a first summit is also bigger than any trek day. On Rainier’s standard routes you descend 2,700 m in one day, under a pack, on legs that have been moving since 1 a.m. Every downhill step is a braking contraction. The quads lengthen under load, and that eccentric work damages muscle more than climbing does. It’s the same reason the descent does the damage on long treks, except that on a glaciated peak a stumble happens on a rope, near crevasses.
Training the descent means slow step-downs, split squats with a controlled lowering phase, lower leg work, and loaded walks that finish downhill.
The mountaineering mistakes you make at home
Six of these seven are made at home. Only the turnaround decision happens up there, and it’s easier to make well when the other six were handled, because you aren’t making it exhausted.
Crevasses are usually the first worry, and on a guided climb the rope team and the guides manage that risk. Your part is fitness for the carry and the long day, skills you don’t have to think about, and legs that still work on the descent.
Our 10-Week Mountaineering Fitness Plan builds the fitness part of that week by week: the carry, the long aerobic day and the legs for the descent.
