> No one's 'huffing and puffing'. If 'punters' see signs at the foot of one mountain they will expect them at the foot of others. It wouldn't take long before someone is looking for someone to blame because there wasn't any warning of conditions on some other popular mountain.
> Should the same be on Great Gable, Scafell, Coniston old man etc and if so who is going to trudge up and down every day. Even then conditions at 5pm could be very different from 9am when some such notice was posted.
I don't think there's a need for daily updated conditions reports - if there's a need for anything at all (and it might turn out that the people getting into trouble are all experienced mountaineers who looked at the forecast but were lazy about when to put crampons on at all) then it'd probably just be a "warning, it can get cold and windy at 900m and cloud and wind can blow in quickly" sort of thing. Maybe there would be a case for them at a few other popular locations too - a few signs in car parks is hardly expensive or intrusive (compared to, say, the car parks themselves).
Sure it won't stop all the muppets, but it's a very small investment of effort and very low impact, so if it saves a life or two or a few mountain rescue callouts then it's probably worth it. This is the sort of thing that should be fairly easy to decide based on readily available evidence (ie mountain rescue logs) - is there a genuine issue with significant numbers of people underestimating the conditions in this particular location?
You worry that if people see a sign by one hill, they'll "expect them at the foot of others". But if they've seen a sign by one hill, they'll presumably already know a bit more than they used to about what conditions on the hills can be like. Have you heard of anyone getting into trouble in Arrochar and explaining that there was a sign by the Ben but not by the Cobbler, so they assumed that the weather on the Cobbler was always balmy and clear? Or complaining that they needed rescuing because there's a forecast posted at the Aviemore Ski Centre so they expected one at Linn of Dee too?
Post edited at 14:33