Ascents
The profession gets safer
one near-miss at a time.
There's a faster way.
Ascents gives every guide on your team access to what your most experienced guide knows — before they need to learn it the hard way.
Trip planning, risk management, and institutional knowledge — built with IFMGA guides, for the profession that cannot afford to learn slowly.
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The problem
Four ways the current model
is failing the profession.
People die from avoidable incidents
Not because guides lack skill. Because the profession lacks the systems to transfer what its most experienced guides know before an incident makes the lesson necessary.
Risk management lives in people's heads
No structured process. No repeatable framework. No record. The decision that kept everyone safe today exists nowhere other than the guide's memory.
Experience, not systems, drives safety
The best guide companies are safe because of who their senior guide is. When that person isn't on the trip, the quality of risk management varies in ways the owner cannot see.
Institutional knowledge doesn't transfer
The guide who has survived the most near-misses is the best risk manager on your team. When they retire, that knowledge retires with them. The next guide starts from scratch.
The faster way
The feedback loop mountain guiding
has never had.
Aviation used to get safer the same way guiding does — pilots got better by surviving incidents. Then they built a near-miss reporting system, and within a generation the accident rate dropped further than any training programme had achieved. Not because pilots got better individually. Because the profession's collective knowledge started travelling faster than incidents could generate it.
Ascents is that system for mountain guiding. Every trip documented. Every near-miss recorded. Every lesson made searchable by the next guide who needs it — before they need to learn it themselves.
Three products. Two user groups. One platform.
Trip planning and risk assessment
The same framework your guide uses to plan a trip — available to you, free, permanently. Pre-trip hazard identification, personal logbook, field observation log, risk assessment framework.
For mountaineers
Risk management and Safe System of Guiding
Full 9-step trip lifecycle. Client Technical Competency assessment. Go/no-go decision record. ISO 31000 legal export. Contingency planning. The record that exists when an investigation asks what you knew and when.
For mountain guides
Institutional knowledge at scale
Owner dashboard. Near-miss register. Guide experience profiles. Institutional knowledge library. Season review. SSoG dashboard. What your senior guide knows — in a system every guide on your team can reach.
For guide companies
Built with the profession
Ascents is built with IFMGA-certified guides, Special Operations risk management practitioners, and High Reliability Organisation methodology. Not for the profession. With it.
We are currently working with a small group of certified guide companies as design partners. If you want to shape what this becomes — and be first to use it when it does — we want to hear from you.
Join the design partner programmeThe one thing we will never do
AI never makes the call.
That's not a preference — it's the architecture.
The go/no-go decision is made by the guide. Recorded by the platform. Never generated, suggested, or influenced by an algorithm.
A guide using Ascents still needs thirty years of pattern recognition, field judgment, and professional experience. The platform is only as good as the person using it. That will not change.