The Most Dangerous Place to Cook on the Mountain

(This post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the channel and allows us to continue to make videos like this. Thank you for the support!)

The entire sport of climbing is a game of risk. We seek the routes that are hard enough to make the outcome unknown, meaning that we could fail to top out, but we also don’t choose a route so hard that it is nearing certainty that we don’t make the top. That type of customizing of route selection often goes for sport climbs, trad climbs, ice climbs, and summit attempts… you name it.

For certain climbs, the downside risks we might be facing could be limited to not sending. But for other climbs, runout trad climbs, big alpine peaks, and the like, the downside risks could be injury or even death. So, the downside risk starts to factor in more heavily and we might feel we need to be more prepared (physically, technically, psychologically, emotionally) to take on the challenge. This reduces the likelihood of a very costly mistake, but it also increases the likelihood that we succeed on the climb. So, as the negative consequences go up, we are probably less likely to accept higher probabilities of failure because “failure” now includes injury, disability, and death not just failing to send.

Still, despite higher downside risk, we typically don’t find fulfillment in the climbs that are close to “sure things.” Those aren’t the climbs we tell stories about (to ourselves or others).

So, why all this talk about “big picture” risk and its role in climbing when I’m typing under a video about camp cooking? Well, the major benefit of being able to cook inside our tent is that this skill opens up terrain. How does it open terrain? In two ways. First, we can literally camp in more places, like narrow ridge backs and cliff-side perches. Second, we can be out on more committing, multi-day or even multi-week routes (which increases the likelihood of being caught in storm) because we can still get the hydration and nutrition we need even if tent bound for multiple days on end.

This is why I think about cooking in a tent as just another set of hazards we can choose to manage or can choose to avoid based on our objectives and goals. I don’t have to climb beneath or around seracs on every climb I do. Far from it. But I may need to be willing to accept and then mitigate that risk (through things like alpine starts before the sun warms the mountain) if I want to take on a high, glaciated objective. Well, if certain objectives demand these precarious camps or demand many, many days, then having this skill and knowing how to mitigate the potential bad outcomes of in-tent cooking become part of the risk calculations that go into the planning and execution of the climb.

It need not be taboo to cook inside of a tent. We need to know the potential downsides (and they can be severe). We need to know the likely failure mechanisms that can bring about those downsides (bad ventilation, open flames, cooking too close to the tent walls or gear, etc.). We need to have systems in place to reduce the likelihood of those failure mechanisms coming to pass.

Like all the other risks we manage in climbing, this is another set of risks that we may choose to manage if it opens up the objectives we are passionate about pursuing.