The forecast turned on day two and I could not decide whether to carry on, how do people make that call?

The reason it was hard is that you were making the decision in the worst possible place: cold, tired, invested, and with the consequences of turning back immediately in front of you and the consequences of continuing still abstract.

Experienced people mostly do not make that decision on the hill. They make it at home and then execute it.

Write the turnaround conditions down before you leave, specifically:

• A time. If I am not at the col by two, I turn around.
• A weather threshold. If the wind is above a stated figure at the exposed section, I take the low route.
• A condition. If visibility drops below a certain point, I do not attempt the ridge.
• A personal one. If anyone is genuinely cold or not eating, we go down.

The value is that you decide while warm, unhurried and unbiased. On the hill you are not deciding, you are reading what you already decided, and that is a completely different cognitive task.

Plan the escape routes at the same time. Look at the map for the points where you can drop off the route and where they lead. Knowing the bail options in advance turns turning back from a defeat into one of several planned choices.

So the answer to whether you were right: you probably were, and the real fix is that you should not have had to work it out there.

The bias to name, because it is the one that gets people hurt: everything that makes turning back feel expensive is already spent.

The months of planning, the travel, the two days walked, the annual leave. None of it can be recovered by continuing. The only question available is what the next section costs and what it gives you, and the past is not on either side of that.

This is hard to feel and easy to state, which is exactly why writing conditions down in advance works - you make the call before the sunk cost exists.

Some things that help in the moment:

Ask what you would advise someone else in the same position. People are consistently better at this from the outside.

Ask whether you would start today, from here, into that forecast, if you had just arrived. If no, that is your answer.

Notice who is arguing. If you are constructing reasons to continue, that is a signal. Genuinely good conditions do not need an argument.

And on regret: turning back and being unsure is the normal outcome and it costs nothing. The alternative, continuing and being unsure, is the same uncertainty in a much worse place. You never get to find out what the other branch held, which is why the decision has to be made on the information you had, not on what happened afterwards.

One practical thing that would have made your twenty minutes shorter: learn to read the forecast rather than the summary.

A phone app showing a symbol and a temperature tells you almost nothing about whether a high exposed section is viable. What matters, in rough order:

Wind speed and direction at altitude, not at the valley. Mountain forecasts give this separately and the difference is large. Wind is what makes exposed ground dangerous rather than merely unpleasant, and there is a wind speed above which walking on a ridge is not a judgement call.

Cloud base. Whether you will be in cloud on the high section decides your navigation, and it is a number rather than a picture.

Precipitation type and freezing level, particularly in shoulder seasons where a few hundred metres decides between rain and ice.

The trend. Improving through the afternoon and deteriorating through the afternoon look identical on a single symbol.

A dedicated mountain forecast for your area gives all of these, and reading one takes two minutes once you know what you are looking for. It converts unsettled into numbers you can compare against the thresholds you wrote down at home, which is the whole point.

And get it before you lose signal. Ideally the evening before, with a note of what to expect and when.