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Mountaineering (?)

2016/7/22 8:47:47


Question
I am writing a story and ran into a question that I cannot find an answer to.  At this part of the story, I have a character on top of a tall mountain, roughly the height of Mount Alburz (which I found out the tallest peak of is around 5600m).  I am wondering how long it would take the person to walk down the mountain.

Thanks in advance!

Answer
Unfortunatley, I do not have an abundance of experience in mountaineering.

However, I can tell you that the decent time would greatly very based upon terrain.  Is this a very steap mountain or is it a gentile slope?  It also depends on the ultimate destination.  Are you returning to a base camp or to civilization?

The Grand Teton in Wyoming is about 4200m and many people ascend and decend in one day.  This is because the mountain is abrupt in it's formation so access to the base is easy.  It is also reletively close to modern lodging and accomidations.  Mt McKinley however is about 6200m and if I remember correctly the decent takes about 1-2 days to the base with an additional hike back to civilization that takes another 1-2 days due to the mountains remote location in Alaska's wilderness.  Decent from Mt Everest's peak at 8850m to it's camp 4 at 7950 can take the better part of 6 hours due to the difficulty of the terrain and the effects of the altitude.  Further decending from camp 4 to base camp can be accomplished in one very long day (16 - 20 hours) for an experienced climber with suffitient energy.

Hope that helps.  You may want to consult books writen about Mt McKinley (Denali) and Mt Everest for more specific information as I am going on my own memory of reading these books years ago.  These books can be found at any book store and most outdoor retailers.

Thanks for the question,
Nick
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