Respect: the often unspoken rule of the outdoors

I was watching a video recently about the Matterhorn in Switzerland. It looked at the volume of people attempting the climb each year, the frequency of rescues, and the number of preventable deaths. What stayed with me most was a comment from the warden at the Hörnlihütte, who had held that role for several years. Asked what she wanted most from people, in a single word, her answer was respect: respect for the mountain, for themselves, for the people they were travelling with, for rescuers, and for the environment and the conditions they were choosing to walk into. It’s worth being clear that this is my own summary of the sense of what she said in that video, not a verbatim transcript, but the word she actually reached for was respect, and it’s a word that explains a great deal about what plays out across trails, campsites, and wild places everywhere.

When I shared a piece on Leave No Trace principles for hiking and camping, the responses were the familiar kind that anyone who spends time outdoors will recognise: a discussion about people shampooing their hair daily while walking the Overland Track, a story from Wilsons Prom about hikers washing pots and plates in a creek with detergent, and concerns about sunscreen washing off while people swam in natural waterways. None of these are examples of people deliberately trying to cause harm. They’re examples of people not stopping to think beyond themselves, operating inside behaviour that’s been normalised to the point where, if the impact isn’t immediately visible, it’s easy to assume it doesn’t exist. The soap bubbles disappear, the water looks clear again, and the problem feels solved even though it isn’t. Respect, in this context, is caring about the damage you can’t see.

There’s a fairly fundamental mindset difference sitting underneath moments like these. A consumer treats a trail as a product or a service, a backdrop for a photo, something already paid for through fees, permits or taxes and therefore owed to them in whatever form they expected. A steward treats the same trail as a privilege, something they are temporarily part of and responsible for protecting while they’re there. The practical difference between the two is really a difference in the question each person is unconsciously asking: what does this place offer me, against what do I owe this place. That difference quietly shapes everything that follows from it, from how someone washes their dishes to how they respond to a track closure.

I’ve written before about the psychology behind risky hiking decisions, including the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people with limited experience overestimate their own ability because they don’t yet have enough knowledge to recognise the limits of what they know. In the outdoors, that tends to show up as underestimating how quickly weather can turn, overestimating navigation skill in unfamiliar terrain, missing the early signs of hypothermia, heat stress or fatigue, dismissing advice from more experienced hikers, or pushing on past warning signs that would have turned back someone with more experience to compare them against. The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t just a skills gap. It’s a gap in humility, and respecting the mountain starts with acknowledging that the terrain doesn’t care about your fitness, your gear, or your intentions. Respect for weather is admitting you’re smaller than the storm. Respect for terrain is recognising that experience can’t always compensate for conditions. Humility, in that sense, is respect in action.

Mount Everest is a useful, if extreme, example of what happens when responsibility gets outsourced instead of carried. Nepal has reportedly scrapped its refundable waste deposit scheme in favour of a mandatory, non-refundable clean-up fee, a response to an estimated 50 tonnes of rubbish said to have accumulated on the mountain over the years. Whatever the intention behind it, the message the policy sends is a troubling one: by making waste management something you pay for rather than something you personally carry out, the mountain starts to resemble a hotel room where housekeeping is expected to follow behind you. There is no housekeeping in the wilderness. When responsibility for a place is outsourced like that, it undercuts the very thing that makes the wild what it is, its demand for self-reliance. That isn’t respect. It’s transactional access dressed up as environmental policy. Australia doesn’t have 8,000-metre peaks, but the same mindset turns up here in smaller forms, in treating environmental damage as someone else’s problem to clean up once you’ve left, or in ignoring a track closure because time was already invested in getting there and the inconvenience feels unjustified. Washing dishes in a creek, leaving rubbish behind, or walking past a closed sign all tend to trace back to the same underlying belief, that access is an entitlement and responsibility is something that can be handed off to somebody else.

Respect matters most, and is hardest to practise, in landscapes recovering from fire or flood. It isn’t about being perfect, since accidents happen and even experienced hikers get caught out, but in these situations respect means staying away even when the pull to go back is strong. Closed tracks and restricted areas after a fire or flood aren’t only about limiting access. They give land managers, firefighters and local communities the time and room they need to do their work, and they give a damaged environment the chance to recover without added pressure. Loving a place, in these moments, sometimes means giving it the space it needs to heal rather than the attention it usually gets.

Respect for the land looks like caring for ecosystems and waterways, protecting wildlife and habitat, following track closures and seasonal restrictions, and practising Leave No Trace even when nobody is watching. Respect for the community looks like sharing trails and campsites thoughtfully, being aware of the effect your behaviour has on the people around you, acknowledging the risk carried by search and rescue crews who might be called out because of a decision someone else made, and respecting Traditional Owners and the cultural significance of the landscapes being walked through. Respect for yourself looks like preparing properly, knowing your limits, listening to conditions rather than ambition, and having the humility to turn back when a situation calls for it. Where that kind of respect is genuinely present, behaviour tends to change without much need for a rule at all: people carry out what they carried in, they slow down, they listen, and they tend to make better decisions as a result.

Wild places aren’t playgrounds and they aren’t content backdrops. They’re ecosystems and ancient landscapes that happen to also be beautiful. Once they stop being seen as things to navigate or use and start being seen as places to honour, behaviour tends to change without needing a fine or a ranger to enforce it. None of this is really about one hike or one mistake. The pattern connecting preventable rescues, environmental damage, overcrowding and heavily commercialised outdoor experiences is the same pattern each time, a normalisation of convenience, entitlement, and the assumption that responsibility belongs to somebody else.

There are plenty of stated rules in the outdoors, but the one doing most of the work is rarely spoken aloud. If people genuinely respected the places they visited, the people they hiked with, and their own limitations, a good number of the problems covered here, rescues, damage, overcrowding, entitlement, would start resolving themselves, not through stricter enforcement or heavier penalties but through a shift in how people see themselves in relation to the place they’re standing in. The distinction that matters, each time someone packs a bag or steps onto a trailhead, isn’t really about gear or fitness. It’s about whether they’re there as a consumer or as a steward, and respect is what tells the difference.

This essay is part of the Human Factors in Hiking series, exploring behaviour, awareness and decision-making on the trail. Explore the series →