We turned back at 1,180 metres

The seventh departure of the season stood at 1,180 metres on the south-west shoulder of Store Kjostinden at 12:58 on 19 April, in good visibility, with the summit ridge in front of us and firm snow underfoot. Turnaround is 13:00. We turned around.

I want to write this one down properly, because two of the six asked me on the ferry the next morning whether the rule had cost them the mountain, and the honest answer is: yes, on that day, it did.

What the ground was doing

The morning had been better than forecast. We left the hut at 05:40 in −9°C and cloud at 1,600, and by eleven the cloud had lifted off the ridge entirely. The party was moving well. Nobody was struggling. Two of the six had been on this shoulder before with another outfit and had also not summited, which I did not know until the walk down.

At 12:30 we were at 1,090 and I called the split: ninety minutes of daylight margin, a hundred and fifty metres of climbing left, and a party moving at roughly sixty metres an hour on that aspect. That arithmetic gives you the summit at about 14:30 and the hut at dark, in a valley we would be descending on a slope that had been in the sun since noon.

Why the clock and not the judgement

Because my judgement at 12:58, with the ridge in front of me and six people who had paid €6,400 standing behind me, is not the same instrument it was at 05:40 in the hut. That is not modesty. It is the well-documented reason that turnaround times exist at all, and the reason ours is a number set the night before rather than a feeling had on the hill.

What it cost

Six people did not stand on Store Kjostinden, having got within about forty minutes of it. One of them had booked the trip twice, the first time in 2024, and had been turned around by weather on that occasion. She was, entirely reasonably, furious for about four hours.

What it bought

We descended the south-west gully at 13:40 rather than at 15:20. By 15:20 that gully had released twice — we watched the second one from the flat at the bottom with a coffee, which is the sort of thing that sounds invented and is the reason I am writing this with the date in it.

I do not think either slide would have taken a moving party. I am also not going to run the experiment.

The debrief

On the last morning we went through it at the table, with the map and the times, and I put my own decision-making on the board first, including the two things I got wrong: I set 13:00 rather than 12:30 when the forecast suggested I could have set 12:30, and I did not say at 12:30 what I already suspected, which cost the party thirty minutes of climbing they were never going to get to use.

The party’s own conclusion, which I did not lead them to, was that the second one was the real error. They are right.

Four of the six have rebooked for 2027. The one who was furious rebooked first.