Navigation & planning

If nobody knows where you went or when you are due back, nobody is coming. A trip plan plus one person who has agreed to act on silence is the cheapest safety system there is.

Contour lines are a drawing of three-dimensional ground. Once you can read five shapes, terrain decisions get much faster.

Baseplate, bezel, magnetic needle — what the parts do, how to set declination once for the whole trip, and the three-step routine for staying on course.

Naismith's Rule for a time budget, four effort levels to sanity-check the day, and the seasonal multipliers that keep the plan honest.

A forecast is a probability with a time stamp, not a promise. Read the trend, define the window, and give both the summit and the retreat a way out.

Three questions before any overseas route: who can come for you, will the policy actually pay, and is there any signal. The answers are rarely the ones you assume at home.

Three tiers, and the order matters: official warnings first, local forecasts second, model apps third. Reverse that order and you are planning on someone's evening model run.

An app solves display, not judgement. The complete kit is an offline map, contour lines, and — when the phone dies — paper and a compass.