Mountiq

Every mountain app will tell you a trail exists. None will tell you whether you will be off it before dark. Salvamont, Romania’s mountain rescue service, gets around 8,900 calls a year from people asking only whether a route can be done.

Mountiq is the digital version of that phone call.

Describe the day in plain words — six hours, a ridge, exposed but not technical, back by seven — and get a single page: the route, the start time and the turnaround time. If the day does not fit, you get an argued “no” with a smaller version of the same day attached. Never a flat refusal.

Conditions are worked out for every segment of the route, at the hour you will actually be there, and the turnaround time accounts for daylight, the real horizon and your own measured pace.

Global forecasts flatten a 2,500 m peak on a 7 km grid. Temperature can be corrected for altitude; wind cannot. We paired 486,835 hours of observations from 17 Romanian mountain stations with archived forecasts from 2022 to 2025. In 1,659 hours of real wind at or above 15 m/s, the raw forecast stayed below that threshold every single time.

Terrain predicts the error: how far a point sits below its local crest explains the correction better than altitude does. Calibrated on the 90th percentile instead of the average, the model misses 12% of strong-wind hours with 9.5% false alarms, measured on stations kept out of training. That is why Mountiq shows a range, not a single number.

An analysis of 14 competitors and research on the Romanian market shaped the plan: winter is the real risk, not summer; the real competitor is the weather app, not the map; and pricing is set for Romania rather than copied from Western Europe. The map and everything that brings you home stay free.