I remember the exact moment I should have turned around, which is the problem. I was on a track climbing out of a valley, the surface had gone from compacted dirt to loose stone about a kilometre back, and I had just checked the time and done the arithmetic. The arithmetic said no. I kept going for another forty minutes anyway. Nothing bad happened. I got where I was going, in poor light, with my heart rate up for reasons that had nothing to do with the climb, and I have thought about that forty minutes more than about anything I saw that day.
The reason I kept walking was sunk cost
I had spent two days getting to the start of that track. Two long vehicle journeys, a night in a place I had not enjoyed, and a morning of asking people whether the track existed. All of that was spent and gone regardless of what I did next, and none of it was information about whether the next hour was a good idea.
I knew this. I have known this since a first year economics class. It made no difference at all standing on the stones, because the feeling of having come a long way does not present itself as a bias. It presents itself as a reason.
The other thing pushing me was that turning around felt like it would make the whole two days meaningless, which is a strange piece of accounting. Two days of travel plus a good decision is a fine outcome. My brain was scoring it as a failure because there was no photograph at the end.
The three questions I ask now
I have reduced it to three, because on a slope, tired, I am not capable of anything more complicated.
The first: how much daylight is left, and how long back. Not how long forward. Forward is a guess about terrain I have not seen; back is a measurement of terrain I have just walked. If the honest return time is longer than the honest daylight, that is the end of the discussion.
The second: is the ground getting harder or easier. Deteriorating conditions almost never stop deteriorating. When a path goes from clear to faint, my experience is that it goes to gone shortly afterward, and I no longer treat “it will probably improve” as anything but hope.
The third, and this is the one I actually rely on: how do I feel about doing this stretch again in reverse, right now, immediately. If the answer involves any hesitation, I am already past my limit, because I will be doing it in reverse later, tireder, in worse light, whatever I decide.
Set a time, not a destination
The single change that has done the most for me is switching my goal from a place to a clock.
If my aim is “reach the ridge,” then every decision on the way is measured against reaching the ridge, and turning around is failure by definition. If my aim is “walk until two o’clock and then turn around,” then turning around at two is success. I have not made myself more disciplined. I have just stopped setting up a target that punishes the correct decision.
I set the time in the morning, before I have any emotional investment, and I say it out loud or write it on my hand. Deciding at seven in the morning what the tired person at two in the afternoon is allowed to do works far better than trusting the tired person, because the tired person is not a reliable narrator. She wants this to have been worth it.
When I miss the time slightly, which happens, I treat overrunning by ten minutes as a signal in itself. It means I am in the mode where I bargain, and the bargaining does not stop at ten.
What turning around actually costs
Less than I keep expecting, and I want to say this concretely because the imagined cost is the whole reason I do not do it.
I have turned back six or seven times now. In every single case what I lost was a few hours and an idea I had about the day. I did not lose the trip. Usually I got back down with light to spare, ate properly, slept, and either went again the next morning with a better start, or did something else entirely and mostly forgot about it within a week.
What has stayed with me is not the places I did not reach. I genuinely cannot picture most of them, because I never saw them. What has stayed is that forty minutes on the stones, and one other afternoon where I got somewhere I should not have been and had to sit down for a while before I could think properly. The bad memories all come from continuing.
The times I did not turn around and it was fine
I should be honest that pushing on has often worked out, because otherwise this reads as a tidy morality tale and it is not one.
Several of my best days involved carrying on past the point where I was comfortable, and comfort is not the criterion. Being tired is not a reason to stop. Being bored, cold, or uncertain about whether the effort is justified are not reasons either, and if I turned back every time I felt those things I would never get anywhere at all.
The line I try to hold is between discomfort and shrinking margin. Discomfort is a feeling and I can push through it. Margin is arithmetic: daylight, water, distance back, whether anyone knows where I am. I am allowed to spend discomfort freely. I am not allowed to spend margin, because margin is what covers the thing I did not anticipate.
The forty minutes on the stones was not a discomfort decision. I had checked the numbers and overruled them, which is different from pushing through feeling bad.
Telling somebody the plan makes it real
The last thing, and it is the cheapest. When I tell somebody where I am going and when I expect to be back, I turn around more reliably.
Partly this is straightforward: if a household knows I said I would be back before dark, being late has consequences for people who have been kind to me, and I do not want to be the traveller who caused a fuss. But partly it is that saying a plan out loud fixes it. A plan held only in my own head is infinitely renegotiable, and I renegotiate constantly.
So I say it, even when the person only half understands, even when I am gesturing at a slope and pointing at the sky. It commits me. Standing on the stones, what eventually turned me back was not any of my careful reasoning. It was remembering that I had told a woman at a shop I would be back by evening, and being unable to explain to myself why that had stopped mattering.