Wild Camping Safety

A wild camp is a walk with a sleep in the middle, and most of what keeps it safe happens before I leave the house. None of what follows is complicated. It is mostly the same short list of habits, done every time, including the times the forecast is perfect and the route is one I have walked before. The habits matter because they are habits: the night something goes wrong is never the night you expected it to.

Tell someone where you are going

Before every overnighter, my wife gets a copy of the route. Not a vague "I'll be on the Black Mountain", but the actual line on the map: where I am starting, where I intend to finish, which direction I am walking it, and the area I am likely to stop for the night. If plans change on the hill, and they often do, I text an update with my location whenever there is enough signal to get one out.

The other half of the arrangement is just as important: an agreed point at which she raises the alarm. If I have not checked in by a set time, she knows the route I was on, the direction I was moving, and roughly where I meant to sleep. That turns a search area of half a national park into a few kilometres of hillside. It is the cheapest piece of safety kit there is.

If you carry a satellite messenger, all the better. Away from the road most UK hill ground has patchy signal at best, and a device that can send your position, or an SOS, without a phone mast changes the game. I treat one as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, but if you camp alone in remote country regularly, it earns its place.

Let the forecast make the decisions

The calendar says when I would like to camp. The forecast says whether I do. I check the Met Office mountain area forecasts and MWIS in the days before, and again the morning I leave, and I read past the rain symbol: wind speed at height, gusts, freezing level, cloud base. Wind is the one that ruins camps. A tent that shrugs off rain all night is a miserable, flapping, sleepless thing in a gale, and pitching in one is how poles get broken.

The forecast is allowed to change the plan. Camp lower, camp in the lee of the hill rather than on the top, swap the route, or stay home and watch someone else's video instead. There is no version of this hobby where you beat the weather. There are only versions where you work around it.

Paper map, real compass

My phone does most of my day-to-day navigating, and it is very good at it. It is also a single point of failure that runs on a battery, in a climate that eats batteries. So the paper map and the compass come on every walk, and not as ballast: I practise with them on easy days, when getting it wrong costs nothing, so that on the day the cloud drops to fifty metres they are familiar tools rather than souvenirs.

The skill worth having is not marching on a bearing across a featureless plateau, though it is worth knowing. It is the boring version: always roughly knowing where you are, noticing when the ground stops matching the map, and being able to find the safe line off the hill from wherever you happen to be standing.

Phone discipline

The phone earns its keep in an emergency, so I treat its battery as emergency kit. It leaves the house full. It goes into airplane mode when the signal gets thin, because a phone hunting for a mast drains itself remarkably fast. It sleeps inside the bag with me on cold nights, because cold kills charge. And a power bank rides along, sized for the trip.

One thing worth doing today, from your sofa: register for the emergencySMS service by texting the word "register" to 999 and following the reply. Once registered you can contact 999 by text, which matters in the hills because a text will often squeeze through on a whisper of signal that will not carry a call. You must register before you need it: Mountain Rescue's safety page covers it, and the whole process takes under a minute.

Know your ways off

Before I set off I look at the map and ask one question: if this stops being fun at any point, which way do I go? Valleys, bothies, roads, the col that drops out of the wind. Escape routes are decided at the kitchen table, when I am warm and thinking clearly, not improvised at dusk in sideways rain. On the hill they sit in the back of my mind as a standing option, and knowing they are there makes every other decision calmer.

The judgement calls

Kit gets all the attention, but the decisions are what keep you safe. Turning back is a skill, and like the compass it needs practising, because the first time is the hardest. The hill does not go anywhere. The summit was never the point anyway; on this channel it usually is not even the destination. Tired, cold and behind schedule at dusk is exactly when I stop pushing forward and start choosing between the escape routes I picked out at home.

If it does go wrong

In the UK hills the call is 999 (or 112), ask for the police, then ask for mountain rescue. If a call will not connect, that is what the registered emergencySMS is for. Then the job is to stay put unless staying put is the danger, get warm, get visible, and preserve the phone battery for talking to the people coming to find you.

The people worth listening to

This page is what I do, not a qualification. The organisations below are the ones who train for this and carry people off hills for real, and their advice is free:

AdventureSmart UK for the questions to ask yourself before any trip. Mountain Rescue England and Wales for safety advice from the volunteers who respond when it goes wrong. OS GetOutside for navigation skills and mountain safety basics.

Nothing on this page is sponsored and there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site. This is personal experience, not professional instruction: for skills training, start with the organisations above.