When fear says stop, but your gut says go

Those were the last words my friend said before we set off along a ridge I had been looking at for two years. That was often from across the valley while guiding a different route through the Hohe Tauern National Park.

And there is plenty to look at here. The Hohe Tauern covers 1,856 km² making it not only Austria’s largest national park but the largest national park in the entire Alps. It is home to more than 300 peaks above 3,000 metres, hundreds of glaciers and mountain lakes, and Austria’s highest mountains, the Großglockner (3798 m) and Großvenediger (3657 m).

For two years, though, my eyes had kept returning to this particular ridge. And now we were standing at its beginning.

I have been guiding one Shanti Trek after another, and while I have had the occasional day out or multi day trek with my family since I started running Shanti Treks full time, this time felt different. I ventured out for six days on a hut trek with a friend. A friend who, in many ways, is braver than me and exactly the person I needed by my side to cross this ridge.

From a distance, it looks almost like a rainbow mountain. It starts with some fairly serious scrambling and eventually has you walking right along the top of the ridge, with very little room for error to the left or right.

At a time when mountain rescue teams are called out several times a day, increasingly to help people who have found themselves in terrain beyond their abilities, I spent quite a bit of time wondering whether we really needed to include this ridge at all. After all, the trek would have been amazing even if we had simply followed the normal route.

But I think doing things that scare us, when the risk is chosen and manageable, makes life feel bigger.

“Scary shit” takes us beyond what we already know we can do. It asks us to tolerate uncertainty, trust ourselves, and discover that discomfort does not necessarily mean to stop. Sometimes it means this matters to me.

And there is an important distinction: fear and danger are not the same thing. The goal is not to take reckless risks. It is to occasionally choose something that makes your heart beat faster while still being within a level of risk you can responsibly manage.

That might be climbing a mountain, but could also be travelling alone, starting something new, having a difficult conversation, or simply saying yes when your instinct is to stay somewhere comfortable.

Perhaps the best reason is that doing scary things expands the boundaries of what we believe we are capable of. And afterwards, even if it was not graceful or comfortable, we often come away knowing ourselves a little better.

So here we stood at the edge, and my gut feeling was good. My friend trusted me, so we went.

There is actually some science behind trusting your gut. What we call intuition is not necessarily something mysterious yet it can be our brain drawing on years of experience and recognising patterns before our conscious mind has had time to analyse them. Research on expert decision-making suggests that, in familiar situations, these rapid, intuitive judgements can be remarkably useful.

But it is important to remember that a gut feeling is most trustworthy when it is backed by experience. In the mountains, mine comes from years of hiking, observing terrain, weather and conditions, and making decisions along the way. It was not telling me there was no risk. It was telling me: I know this kind of situation. I assessed it. And this feels within what we can handle.

Sometimes, trusting your gut is not about being fearless. It is about having enough experience to know which fear to listen to and which one you can walk through.

I call it calculated risk, which is actually something I had meticulously practised in a much more analytical way in my previous life as an economist. Perhaps the setting has changed from spreadsheets to mountains, but the principle has not. It is to assess what you know, understand what you do not, weigh the possible consequences, and then decide whether the risk is worth taking.

During the whole ridge, I had this feeling of being fully present and highly alert. A few times, irrational fear tried to creep in, but I managed to push it aside. At some point, I was so full of adrenaline that a loud whoop of joy escaped me. We only crossed paths with one local along the way. He felt like a sign from the universe – where he comes from there must be a way. Unless you had looked at an actual paper map, you would not know the route existed, as it was not signposted. Perhaps that is for the better.

At the end of the ridge, we reached another peak, marked by a cross, where we ate our lunch as if it were our first meal in days. The euphoria of what we had just achieved started to kick in. From here, the path was still long, but considerably easier.

One of my fondest memories of the trip is arriving at the hut and sitting on the sunny terrace, enjoying snacks and drinks. We were mentally and physically exhausted yet filled with a deep sense of accomplishment and pride. We had faced our fears, pushed our limits, and expanded our horizons.

In hindsight, it was definitely a very exposed ridge, but one that matched our level of hiking experience almost perfectly. It somehow felt as though it had been made for us. And I wondered a little whether, after all this time, I had actually needed to push the boundaries of what felt possible again. Almost as if I had been craving it.

Over the next few days, we had the chance to climb a few more 3,000-metre peaks yet happily passed each of them from below. Reaching summits has never been the goal for me, and this time, the gut feeling simply was not there. There was no pull, no sense that we needed to go up just because we could.

Instead, we slept a little longer and joined breakfast a little later. We explored the lakes around the huts and started hiking after everyone else, enjoying the trails in solitude. We walked slowly, took plenty of breaks, had deep conversations about life’s big choices, and sometimes simply walked one behind the other in silence.

There was time to sort through thoughts, think things over and let go of things that no longer serve me. That is what the mountains do when you walk through them for days: they make you dirty on the outside – sweaty, dusty and tired – while somehow cleaning you from the inside.

And over those days, what I realised most clearly was that this is exactly the kind of experience I want to pass on to my guests. It is why I became a mountain leader and why I founded Shanti Treks.

I want to provide a safe space for people to step outside their comfort zone, push their limits and experience that fear is natural – and often helpful – but that we don’t always have to give in to it. Sometimes we can acknowledge it, listen to what it is telling us, assess the situation, and still choose to move forward.

Because when we push our limits and venture beyond what feels comfortable, we come home a little braver. We’ve experienced ourselves doing something that felt hard or intimidating – and realised that we could handle it.

And I think this matters especially for us women. We need experiences that remind us that we can do hard things too. That we can trust our judgement, take up space, make decisions and stand by them – even and especially when someone else doubts us.

And perhaps that confidence doesn’t stay in the mountains. Perhaps we come home with a little more courage to have the difficult conversation we’ve been avoiding, say no when something doesn’t feel right, or stand up for what we want and need. Because somewhere on a mountain, we’ve already proved to ourselves: I was scared. I did it anyway. And I can trust myself.

But I also want to create space for the other side of being in the mountains: slowing down, letting go and pressing the reset button. Walking for days has a way of stripping life back to the essentials. There is nowhere else you need to be and nothing much to decide beyond the next step. Thoughts have time to settle, things that seemed important become less so, and there is space for new perspectives to emerge.

For me, that combination is what makes a trek so powerful: the courage to push your boundaries when it feels right, and the freedom not to when it doesn’t. The mountains offer space for both.