How to book a guided climb

Two companies can sell the same route, on the same dates, for the same money, and be selling different things. The variable that matters most is how many clients each guide is responsible for.

On a glaciated route you are tied to that guide by a rope. At 1:2 a guide can hold a crevasse fall and still manage the other climber. At 1:4 on a short-roped descent, the physics get worse and the attention each person gets is a quarter. On the pages here, ratios run from 1:1 on private Matterhorn days to 6:1 on a skills course — and plenty of companies do not publish one at all.

The same applies to summit day. A team of eight with four guides can split and turn half around. A team of eight with two guides usually cannot, so one person’s bad morning ends everybody’s climb. If a company does not state the ratio on the page, ask, and get the answer in writing.

“Professional guide” is not a protected term in the United States. These are:

None of this means an uncertified guide is unsafe — on some peaks the most experienced people working are locals with decades on the route and no interest in the certification track. It means the credential is a floor you can verify, and everything else is a judgement you are making on reputation.

Of the 165 companies whose terms we have read, 92 publish no cancellation schedule at all on their own site. Of the 66 that do publish deposit terms, 24 say in plain words that the deposit is non-refundable under any circumstances.

120 days is the number to remember. On the big expedition objectives it is almost universal: four of the seven Denali concessioners pivot there — refunds above the deposit before 120 days, little or nothing after — and a fifth refunds nothing at any point. Most take the balance at the same moment. On shorter domestic trips the cliff is nearer — 90 or 91 days at several companies, 60 at some, 30 at a few. Two operators on this site keep every dollar from the moment you book, whatever happens.

Three separate things get called “the deposit”, and they behave differently: a registration fee (often non-refundable and sometimes large — $500 is common, $2,000 on some expeditions), a deposit that counts against the price, and the balance, which has its own deadline. Ask which of the three your first payment is.

Buy the insurance when you pay the deposit, not later. Cancel-for-any-reason cover and pre-existing-condition waivers generally have to be purchased within about two weeks of your first payment — after that they are simply not available to you, whatever you are willing to pay. Several operators require trip-cancellation insurance outright, and nearly all of them recommend it, which tells you how often they see it used.

Finally: weather. Once a trip starts, almost nobody refunds for weather. You are buying the attempt, not the summit, and the contract is explicit about that at every company we have read.

Public land agencies cap who may guide commercially, and the caps are tight. Only seven companies hold a National Park Service concession for Denali. Only three hold the contracts on Rainier. Only two may guide Hood, and the Forest Service is not accepting applications for more. Only two may guide the Grand Teton.

This matters in two directions. If a company is selling you a guided climb of one of those peaks and is not on the list, something is wrong. And where the list is short, competition does not discipline the refund terms — which is exactly where you find the companies that keep everything.

Permits you pay for yourself are separate again, and they are not always included: a Denali mountaineering fee, a Shasta summit pass, a Whitney lottery entry, a Goûter hut bed on Mont Blanc. Ask what is inside the price.

Expedition objectives run roughly a year ahead: Denali teams for May fill through the previous summer and autumn, and the Park Service closes registration 60 days out with a rule it says it enforces strictly. Alpine summer objectives — Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn — are gated by hut beds as much as by guides, and those sell out before the guides do.

Avalanche courses sell out by December in a normal season, and the cheap ones go first. Cascade and Sierra summer courses fill from February.

One quiet trick: several companies price the same program differently by date. On this site there are programs where moving a week saves $100, and others where the following season’s price is already $100 higher than the current one. If your dates are flexible, ask for the cheapest week rather than the first available.

Once you know what you are looking for, the full table of all 739 programs lets you filter by objective, region, length and price — and every row links to the operator page the figures came from.