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Survivor bias in hiking is a safety issue. So is optimism bias. Understanding both can help you make better decisions in the mountains.
Survivor bias happens when we pay attention to the people or things that made it through some process while overlooking the ones that didn’t. The survivors are visible. The failures mostly aren’t.
Here’s a wonderful ancient example of survivor bias.
Where are the people who drowned?
Diagoras of Melos was a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century BCE and became famous in antiquity for his atheism. Centuries later, Cicero told a story about him.
Diagoras was shown votive pictures of people who had survived dangerous storms at sea. The pictures were offered as evidence that the gods listened to prayers and saved people from shipwreck.
Diagoras essentially asked: Where are the pictures of the people who prayed and drowned anyway?
Those people, of course, weren’t around to commission paintings celebrating their rescue.
That’s survivor bias in a nutshell. We see the successes because the successes are available for us to see. Failures usually disappear from evidence entirely.
Success teaches you the wrong lesson
Most hikes go fine. You take on a difficult trail. You get through the sketchy section. The weather doesn’t turn as bad as predicted. You forget something important but manage without it. You push past your turnaround time and still get back to the car before dark.
All good. Nothing bad happens.
The problem is that “nothing bad happened” is not the same thing as “I made a good decision.”
Sometimes you made a perfectly reasonable decision. Sometimes you took a stupid risk and got away with it. If the outcome is all you examine, it can be difficult to tell the difference.
Do that often enough and success itself can make you less safe. You start thinking: I’ve done this plenty of times. I know what I’m doing. I got this.
That confidence may be justified. But it can also be the product of a string of favorable outcomes.
Then optimism bias joins the party
There’s a related problem called optimism bias: our tendency to underestimate the likelihood that something bad will happen to us.
We hear about another hiker breaking an ankle and think, consciously or otherwise, Sure, but I’m careful.
Someone gets lost. I know how to navigate.
Someone experienced gets into serious trouble. There must have been something else going on.
Sometimes there was. But experienced, well-prepared hikers also fall, get injured, become hypothermic, make navigation errors and get caught by rapidly changing conditions.
- British actor Julian Sands was an experienced lifelong hiker and mountaineer. He disappeared while hiking in California’s Mount Baldy area during severe winter conditions in January 2023. His remains were found several months later.
- On an easy hike in 2025 with very experienced hiker friends, one of us slipped and fell down a small ledge and broke every bone in her ankle. It does happen!
Experience changes risk. It ever abolishes it.
The summit makes survivor bias in hiking worse
Peakbagging adds one more psychological wrinkle.
If you’re working through the Catskill 3500 list, the Adirondack 46-ers or any other peak list, it’s easy to start treating the summit as the point of the hike.
You’ve driven to the trailhead. You’ve been climbing for hours. You’re tired. You’re cold. Maybe you’re 20 minutes below the summit.
Then you encounter something sketchy. Or you hear thunder.
This is precisely when you need your clearest judgment. Instead, your brain starts reminding you how much you’ve already invested in getting there.
I’m so close.
I came all this way.
I don’t want to do this hike again.
It’ll probably be fine.
Notice what has happened. None of those thoughts tells you anything about whether the next move is safe.
Worse, near the summit you may be close to the farthest point of your hike from the trailhead. If something goes badly wrong, getting help may be extremely difficult.
Keep in mind: the mountain doesn’t care you’re almost there.
Learn to separate the decision from the outcome
One of the best ways to counter survivor bias in hiking is to judge your decisions by the information you had when you made them, rather than solely by what happened afterward.
- If you crossed an icy ledge without traction and didn’t fall, that doesn’t prove crossing it was smart.
- If you continued into deteriorating weather and made the summit, that doesn’t prove continuing was smart.
- If you left important gear at home and didn’t need it, that doesn’t prove you were right not to carry it.
A good outcome can follow a bad decision. A bad outcome can sometimes follow a perfectly reasonable decision. Risk doesn’t take your risk assessment into consideration.
Keep your ego out of the risk assessment
Our psychology is slippery, especially when we’re tired.
There’s a touch of ego in hiking. There’s pride in being experienced, fit, competent and capable. There’s satisfaction in finishing difficult routes and checking summits off a list. None of that is inherently bad.
We need to catch ourselves when those things have snuck into a decision that should really be purely about risk.
When you feel yourself pushing on, ask different questions:
- If I knew I was going to turn around 20 minutes from now anyway, would I still take this risk?
- If another hiker described this situation to me, what would I tell them to do?
Creating that little bit of psychological distance can expose reasoning that sounded perfectly convincing when it was happening inside your own head.
Survivor bias tells us that because we’ve gotten away with something before, it must be reasonably safe. Optimism bias tells us that the bad outcome probably won’t happen to us.
Neither belongs in hiking risk assessment.
The goal isn’t to become frightened of the mountains. It’s to become better at distinguishing “I’ve done this before” from “this is a good decision now.”
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