Winter walking: what changes
Snow, ice, short days and avalanche forecasts: what a winter hill day asks of you.
Snow turns a familiar hill into a different one. Paths vanish, daylight is short, and a slip that would cost a bruise in summer can become a long slide. Winter is also when the hills are at their finest, and all of this can be learned.
What changes
- Time. Everything is slower: deep snow, more kit, more care. Halve what you'd plan for a summer day and start at first light.
- Ground. Hard snow and ice need an ice axe and crampons, on boots stiff enough to take them. Having them in the bag is not enough: you need to be able to walk in crampons and stop a slide with the axe, and both take practice.
- Navigation. Paths and cairns are buried and cloud on snow gives a white-out with no horizon. You need to be able to walk on a bearing and count your paces.
- Cold. Wind chill on a winter summit is often well below minus ten. Carry more insulation than you think, spare gloves and goggles.
Avalanches
Avalanches happen in British hills every winter, mostly in Scotland. Most slide on slopes of about 30 to 45 degrees, often in the day or two after fresh or wind-blown snow, on the side of the hill the wind has loaded.
- The Scottish Avalanche Information Service publishes daily forecasts through the winter for six mountain areas. Read the forecast and plan your route around the aspects and heights it warns of.
- Ridges and broad shoulders are usually safer than gullies, bowls and the slopes below them.
- Cornices, the overhanging lips of snow on the lee side of ridges and plateau edges, break further back than you'd expect. Stay well away from the edge.
Boots and crampons
Boots are rated B0 to B3 by stiffness and crampons C1 to C3. A B1 boot takes a C1 walking crampon; B2 takes C1 or C2; B3 takes any. A bendy summer boot (B0) won't hold a crampon safely.
How to start
- Do a winter skills course. Two days with an instructor covers axe, crampons, avalanche awareness and winter navigation.
- Pick short days on hills you know, in settled weather, and build up.
- Or enjoy winter lower down: Winter walks that don't need an ice axe.
Under snow, a walk's grade no longer applies
Routes on TRXO are described and graded for summer conditions. Under snow and ice, a Moderate walk can be a serious mountaineering day.General guidance from the TRXO team, last read through on . It is no substitute for training or for your own judgement on the day.