July 18, 2026

Why We Publish Our Turnaround Rate, Not Just Our Summit Rate

Most expedition companies lead with their summit success percentage, for obvious marketing reasons. We track it too, but we’ve started publishing turnaround rate alongside it — the percentage of attempts where a guide called off a summit push for safety reasons short of the top.

A rising turnaround rate isn’t a sign the program is getting worse. On K2 in particular, we’d rather that number go up than watch a marginal weather call turn into an incident report.