The mountain guide is not in any case a comprehensive insurance against the dangers. One must rather consider that his role is to manage uncertainty as well as possible, in this medium at the risk which is the mountain. For this reason, it has hundreds of decisions to take each day, and to even suppose that it is informed of all the parameters being able to influence its decisions (what is never the case), it would be humanly impossible for him (he number of decisions to be taken is much too important) to do one "without fault". It is there the ambiguity of its role: "to ensure" the safety, whereas it cannot guarantee it. One must be quite conscious of this situation before practising the alpinism with a mountain guide, in an arbitrary form (alpinism itself, alpine excursion, off-pist skiing, skitouring, etc). Within the frame of this management of uncertainty, the role of the mountain guide is to make sure, as far as possible, that the program envisaged is realizable under reasonable conditions of safety (difficulty, conditions of the mountain, training of the participants, etc). That means that the guide is always ready to change objective, according to circumstances'. Between the satisfaction of its clients and the renouncement because of a danger (or a difficulty) unforeseen or more important than envisaged, the margin is often narrow, and the very subjective appreciation. The people conscious of this situation will thus abstain from the least pressure, even friendly, on their mountain guide.

The principal characteristic of the countries in the process of development, country in which, generally, we travel, is that the rescue facilities are considerably less powerful than in our country, because of the difficulty of giving alarm, the limited means of intervention (primarily little or no helicopters available), and of the less effective means of transport. The possibilities of treatment of a wound or a disease are then summary, even non-existent, or inaccessible in a time that we consider in our country normal. The consequence is that a wound or a disease easy to treat in our country can have in certain withdrawn regions of the countries in the process of development a serious or fatal exit. One should not be registered with a voyage without being conscious of this problem.

Because of all that precedes, we estimate that our role of mountain guide consists in informing, as far as possible, the people who wish to accompany us of the dangers to which they can be exposed, so that they decide in all knowledge of cause.