Climbing and Mountaineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Two parties climb the same route in the same week. One reads the description as a pleasant afternoon and the other reads it as a serious undertaking, and both are reading the same four sentences. The grade is at the top. What is not there is the state of the fixed gear, how you get off if it rains at pitch four, and the fact that the last party to place the belay found it under a metre of loose block.

We edit what climbing guidebook authors, guiding companies and mountaineering organisations produce — route descriptions and topos, guidebook text and access notes, condition and hazard reports, guiding itineraries and briefing documents, instruction and course material, hut and expedition documentation, access and land-owner correspondence, and incident and near-miss reports. Our editors work on descriptions that people commit to in the dark.

The route description is the document climbers stake a day on, and its failure is a grade standing in for information. A grade describes the hardest move; it says nothing about how serious the route is. We work through these so the grade is accompanied by the things that make a route committing — the length, the retreat options, the quality and spacing of protection, and where the crux sits relative to the last gear; so the descent is described as fully as the ascent, since more accidents happen going down and descents are routinely given one clause; so any fixed gear is described with the date it was seen, because a bolt described in 1998 is not information about today; so objective hazards are stated with when they are worst — the hour the sun hits the face, the season the gully holds ice, the section that sheds after rain; so the approach is given with a time and its terrain rather than a distance; so escape points are named by pitch, as knowing you cannot retreat above pitch four changes the decision made at pitch three; so the description separates what the author climbed from what they were told; and so any access sensitivity or restriction is stated with its dates. Descriptions written this way keep people alive and welcome.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished guidebook material, incident reports and access correspondence. We are editors rather than climbers, guides or safety advisers, and we offer no view on grades, conditions, equipment or the safety of any route. What we can do is put the seriousness beside the difficulty.