A few years ago I booked a day walk described as moderate, suitable for reasonably fit walkers, no technical experience required.
It involved eleven hours, considerable exposure, and a descent I would not have started had I seen it in advance. I finished it and I was not in good shape by the end, and one person in the group had to be assisted down.
Nobody had lied. The rating meant something specific to the operator and something else to me.
Difficulty ratings are local
The core problem. Grading systems for walking and climbing are national, sometimes regional, and they do not translate.
What is graded moderate in a mountainous country with a strong walking culture assumes a baseline that a casual walker from a flat country does not have.
The same word covers a gentle path in one place and sustained steep ground with drops in another.
Operators generally use their local system, because that is the system they know, and the rating is honest within its own context.
The numbers that actually mean something
What I ask for now, instead of relying on a word.
Total ascent in metres. This is the single most informative figure and it is objective. Distance tells you much less — ten kilometres flat and ten kilometres with a thousand metres of climb are different days entirely.
Expected duration, and specifically whether that includes stops.
The nature of the ground. Path, rough path, scree, rock, snow. Whether hands are needed.
Exposure, stated directly. Are there sections where a fall would be serious. This is the question that changes the answer for a lot of people and it is rarely volunteered.
And the escape options. If somebody cannot continue at the halfway point, what happens.
The question that gets the honest answer
I have found one question more useful than any other.
How many people in a typical group do not finish, and what usually stops them.
Operators answer this honestly in my experience, and the answer is informative in both directions. "Almost nobody, occasionally someone with knee problems on the descent" is a different activity from "one or two most weeks, usually the altitude".
It also signals that you are asking seriously, which changes the quality of the rest of the conversation.
Fitness is not the only variable
Something I misjudged about myself.
I was reasonably fit and that was not the problem. The problem was that I had no experience of sustained descent on rough ground, which uses the legs completely differently and which is where most people struggle.
Other things that matter independently of fitness. Tolerance for heights, which you cannot train quickly and which some people discover in a bad place. Altitude, which affects people unpredictably regardless of condition. Heat. And confidence on uneven ground, which is largely a matter of practice.
Being able to run is not the same as being able to walk downhill for four hours on loose rock.
What a good operator does
Having done a reasonable amount since, the difference between operators is substantial and visible in advance.
Good ones ask about your experience before taking a booking, and will decline people they think are unsuited. That is a strong signal.
They provide a specific equipment list and check it.
They state group sizes and guide ratios, and the ratio matters enormously if somebody has a problem.
They have a stated turnaround time or weather policy and they apply it, which occasionally means a cancelled day and is exactly what you want.
Operators that take any booking, provide vague information and never cancel are selling something with a different risk profile than the one they describe.
The group problem
Something specific to guided activity that I had not considered.
A group moves at a pace set by its slowest member, and the pressure not to be that person is considerable. It leads people to push past the point where they should have stopped.
I watched this happen to somebody on that walk. They were struggling by the third hour, said nothing because everyone else was fine, and became a genuine problem later.
Saying early that you are finding it hard is the single most useful thing anybody can do in that situation, and it is socially the hardest.
What I do now
Ask for the ascent figure and the ground description in writing.
Do something comparable at home first, particularly involving descent.
Book with operators who ask me questions.
And treat the rating as a starting point for a conversation rather than as information, because a single word cannot carry what it is being asked to carry.
What I carry now
The kit questions are secondary to the planning ones and are worth stating anyway, because they came up on that day.
More water than seems necessary, and more food. Both ran short across the group and the operator had not specified quantities.
A warm layer and something waterproof regardless of the forecast, because conditions at height are not conditions at the car park.
A head torch, which sounds excessive for a day walk and which was needed on the last hour of that one.
And walking poles, which I had dismissed as unnecessary and which are the single biggest difference on a long descent.