Dear Anne and readers of your contribution I recently sent a note to Mike Austin, the author of a very interesting article that made the claim—cited in your contribution—that French Mountain Guides have a nearly identical fatality risk to U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The comparison is based on a (completely excusable) miscalculation. That said, there are also two additional reasons to avoid such comparisons. I reproduce an extended and slightly revised version of the note to Mike below. Best wishes,
 Philip Ebert There seems to be an issue in the comparison between French mountain guides and U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and for a couple of reasons the analogy may end up conveying something different from what the numbers actually support. You note that multiplying the annual fatality rate for French guides (about 0.33% per year) by eight gives a cumulative risk of around 2.65%, which you then compare to the 2.7% figure for U.S. soldiers. The challenge is that the 2.7% figure is already an average annual fatality rate per soldier, because a typical tour in Vietnam lasted one year. So to align the denominators, one should compare the annual rates directly: roughly 0.33% per year for guides vs. 2.7% per year for soldiers. On that basis, the fatality rate for an average soldier was around 8 times higher. There is also a psychological aspect that might make the comparison misleading for readers. French guides form a fairly homogeneous group in terms of risk exposure, whereas “U.S. soldier in Vietnam” refers to a very heterogeneous population. The overall 2.7% rate combines frontline infantry soldiers (whose annual fatality risk was closer to 5–10%) with support personnel whose risk was much lower. If a reader imagines the former—the typical depiction in films of a “U.S. soldier in Vietnam”—then the relative fatality risk of infantry soldiers compared to guides is even more stark: up to 30 times higher (!). Hence the claim that the two fatality risks are “almost identical” is not correct and is potentially misleading. That said, your main point still holds: an annual fatality rate of around 0.33% for guides is indeed very high, and highlighting it is valuable and should prompt change. I tried to find comparable data for French fishermen or firefighters but couldn’t locate anything reliable. However, one more note of caution: while I don’t have the details about the French Mountain Guide fatality statistic to hand, it is important to ask how many mountain guides died while pursuing their own passion (i.e. in their spare time pushing their own limits) and how many died while actually at work guiding clients. Ideally, we would want to separate this out: many guides will knowingly take huge personal risk on their own trips, while ensuring that when guiding they adopt a completely different risk profile. What this means is that we should not be focusing on fatality rates of mountain guides per se; rather, we should be looking at the fatality risk of guided groups vs. non-guided groups, and even more: we should best control for avalanche terrain exposure for each trip. That data, however, is not available, but if mountain guides were to start recording their guided trips on GPS and share them, we could compare it with other data from, non-guided end users (e.g. with that from Skitourenguru). Best,
 Philip Ebert

Very thought provoking article. My mentor was killed with his client on a very well travelled classic route that I had guided (working for him) the week before in similar conditions . I have thought very deeply about risk management and decision making ever since.

Great article! I am not a guide, but have been, and will be, a client of guides. I have mostly been a very cautious hiker and climber, I came to alpinism late, but I made my share of mistakes and poor decisions. I always find a "debrief" extremely useful, and also as a client I love to learn what we could have done better and where we (with hindsight) were incredibly lucky. Some guides take that time at the end of an outing, perhaps while on the cablecar down into the valley. I think making a debrief part of the client's experience not only ads to the overall experience, but also promotes the right way of assessing risk, reviewing decisions, and learning from errors. Frank