You don’t happen to do a lot of mountaineering in New England, do you?

Climb High Sleep Low: It’s basically a motto to ensure you get good sleep and are protected against unnecessary weather exposure. Basically, on easy 14ers, this doesn’t really apply. On larger or more difficult mountains, such as Rainier, it definitely holds true.

Say you are making Camp 1 at 8,000 ft. You break camp and spend the night. The next day, you want to push for a new camp but know it’ll take you most of the day to climb 4,000 ft at altitude. So, you get an early start and head up to 12,000 where you make your advance camp. After you set camp 2, you head back to camp 1 to get some much needed rest after a hard day. For every 1000 ft of altitude you go down, you sleep that much better. The next day, you climb to 12,000 where you camp. It’s easy work since it’s already there, and it’s not too bad of a day. The last day, you make your summit push, then grab your gear on the way down.

This is just a theoretical example though, as ultralight alpinists often just bivy their way up. They take a bivy sack or possibly a small ultralight shelter, and set up camp when it gets dark for a couple hours of sleep and continue on for the summit. Some alpinists won’t even bring a tent, and will either crawl into a gore-tex bag or just sit under a ledge.

It’s a lot of seemingly contradictory into, but mountaineering is a very case-specific sport. For mountain A you may need 4 days to climb because it’s so technical or you’re relatively new to the sport. For mountain B, it may be 16,000 FT but it may only be 6,000 FT of vertical from camp and you can spearhead it in one long day. Always plan your climb and climb your plan. Allow for bad turns, such as getting benighted or struck by incliment weather, but plan to avoid such things to the best of your ability and stay well rested, hydrated, and nourished.