In July 2023, a man died at as temperatures hit 121 degrees. Less than three weeks prior, another hiker became the second in two months to while trying to hike the arduous rim-to-rim trail in . Tragic stories like these abound in the world of hiking, and they’re not just limited to summer months – as early as April this year, we reported on due to the heat.
With temperatures now on the rise everywhere, you might start to see red flags in the weather forecast, alerting you to dangerous conditions and encouraging you to stay indoors during certain advisories like excessive heat warnings. But what is excessive heat? What are the dangers of hiking in the heat? And when is it too hot to pull on those ? To know what an excessive heat warning means, you first need to understand the term heat index, which is used by the National Weather Service to explain the effect of air temperature on the human body when combined with humidity, which is more taxing on your system. If you look at this , you’ll see that when the air temperature is 90 degrees but the humidity is at 60 percent, your body will behave as though it’s actually 100 degrees out.
This helps explain why hot weather in dry climates like Colorado will seem less oppressive than the same air temperature in the sweaty Midwest. In general, when daytime highs are expected to be 100 degrees or higher for at least two days and the nighttime lows won’t drop between 75 degrees, the NWS will issue a heat advisory. If daytime hi.
