Reducing your rope length on Alpine tours: instructions from a mountain guide

Alpine tours are undertaken as a roped party, but the distances between the members of this party will vary depending on the terrain. On a glacier, where crevasses are hard to spot, you need to leave enough space so the others can slam on the brakes if someone falls. Conversely, a steep ascent calls for shorter distances. In other words, you need to shorten the rope, with the unused portion ideally tied to the mountain guide as a shank.

The right rope length for your terrain

In a perfect world, a roped party would comprise three to five people. If there’s just two of you, there’s a substantial risk of being dragged down if the other person falls. And if more than five people are roped together, this impacts their walking rhythm: for those at the back, in particular, it’s exhausting to have to wait all the time.

A party of four people should be eight to ten metres apart from each other, while a group of three should be ten to twelve metres apart, and a duo should be around eighteen metres apart. It’s important that you learn the correct safety techniques on a course. This tutorial was created in collaboration with our partner Höhenfieber, a mountain school that offers various tours and training courses.

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