Hiking on Pluto would bear similarities to hiking in the Himalaya on Earth. The tallest peaks on Pluto are even named after the first climbers to reach Mount Everest – Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. The highest peak, at 6200 meters, is also comparable to Mount Everest if we consider this height base-to-top. It is an ice mountain, made of mostly water ice. The peak may even look frost white, though most of the ice would be russet colored.
In many ways, however, hiking on Pluto would be strikingly different from the Himalaya. Pluto is a small world, much smaller than Earth’s Moon, so gravity is much weaker. You would weigh only approx. 6% of your weight on Earth. Carrying less than 5 kilogram using your current muscles would make the hiking experience a breeze compared to Earth. A good hop would send you more than 7 meters in the air, and your descent would take 9-10 seconds – just careful not to slip on the ice when you land. Indeed, you may consider using extra weights to keep you from bouncing.
Just like most Everest climbers, you would need to carry oxygen – not to fight altitude sickness, though, but for the simple fact that Pluto has no oxygen in its flimsy atmosphere. You would actually need a full space suit to cope with the low pressure and temperatures. Pluto is significantly colder than any place on Earth. Temperatures remain below minus 220 Celsius all Pluto-year round, with little difference between day and night. Heating your camp and suit would require a serious power source, possibly a small nuclear reactor.
So you emerged from your habitat on a fine Pluto morning. A day here is more than 6 Earth days long, so no rush in getting ready. It is not completely dark outside, but quite dim: on its brightest day, Pluto would resemble a very cloudy Earth day, but most of the time, it would rather feel like night. The Sun is only one of the stars, though a very bright one, much brighter than our Moon at full moon: still, only a diamond-like point in the sky. Depending on where you are, you would see several of Pluto’s moons. From the base of Tenzing Montes, you would not be able to enjoy the largest moon, Charon, as is it constantly locked on the other side of Pluto, but you could get a glimpse of the 4 smaller ones.
It is hard to estimate how much time it would take you to reach the summit from base camp. You would enjoy a sprightly step, and the slope is mostly moderate. At the same time, ice-climbing is a hard proposition even on Earth, with a risk of slips, deep fissures and avalanches. On Pluto, you can add any number of more exotic hazards: nitrogen-ice glaciers, active geysers and weirdest of all, cryovolcanoes. Cryovolcanoes are volcanoes that instead of molten rock, spit cold, slushy ice lava – avoid to be buried by the slop!
A large advantage compared to Mount Everest would be the lack of crowd – no risk of mass tourism in the Pluto mountains. Nevertheless, when back from your hiking adventure, you may be interested in looking for life on Pluto. The dwarf planet, which had always been considered just another dead, frozen rock, was shown to have astounding new potential after the 2015 New Horizon flyby. There may be a vast, liquid water ocean beneath Pluto’s surface, making it a candidate for “ocean world” on par with Europa. Should Pluto really prove to carry liquid water, it would much expand the number of potentially habitable places in the Solar System – even to the icy depths of the Kuiper Belt.
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