page_title: Ranger School
section_title: Mountain phase
hierarchical_section_title: Ranger School / Training / Mountain phase
caption_attribution_description: Ranger Training Class 4-11 begins the Mountain Phase by learning lower mountaineering skills including rappelling (30' tower and 60' rock face) and various knot tying. Camp Merrill, Dahlonega, GA. Photo by John D. Helms
context_page_description: The United States Army Ranger School is a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership course that develops functional skills directly related to units whose mission is to engage the enemy in close combat and direct fire battles. It is open to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in the U.S. Armed Forces, as well as select allied military students.
  Ranger training had begun in 1950 and has undergone multiple changes to its training regimen. A Desert Phase was employed for about a decade between the 1980s and 1990s. Its removal left the three phases used in the 21st century: Darby, Mountains, and Florida.
context_section_description: The second phase of Ranger School is conducted at the remote Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia by the 5th Ranger Training Battalion. Here, "students receive instruction on military mountaineering tasks, mobility training, as well as techniques for employing a platoon for continuous combat patrol operations in a mountainous environment". Adding to the physical hardships endured in the Benning phase, in this phase "the stamina and commitment of the Ranger student is stressed to the maximum. At any time, he or she may be selected to lead tired, hungry, physically expended students to accomplish yet another combat patrol mission". The Ranger student continues learning how to sustain themselves and their subordinates in the mountains. The rugged terrain, severe weather, hunger, mental and physical fatigue, and the psychological stress the student encounters allow them to measure their capabilities and limitations and those of their fellow soldiers.
  In addition to combat operations, the student receives four days of military mountaineering training. The sequence of training has changed in past decades. As of 2010, the training sequence is as follows. In the first two days students learn knots, belays, anchor points, rope management, mobility evacuation, and the fundamentals of climbing and abseiling. The training ends in a two-day Upper mountaineering exercise at Yonah Mountain, to apply the skills learned during Lower mountaineering. Each student must make all prescribed climbs at Mt. Yonah to continue in the course. During the field training exercise (FTX), students execute a mission requiring mountaineering skills.
  Combat missions are against a conventionally equipped threat force in a Mid-Intensity Conflict. These missions are both day and night in a two part, four and five-day FTX, and include moving cross country over mountains, vehicle ambushes, raiding communications and mortar sites, river crossing, and scaling steeply sloped mountainous terrain.
  The Ranger student reaches his objective in several ways: cross-country movement, parachuting into small drop zones, air assaults into small, mountain-side landing zones, or a 10-mile march across the Tennessee Valley Divide. The student's commitment and physical-mental stamina are tested to the maximum. At the end of the Mountain Phase, the students travel by bus to a nearby airfield and conduct an airborne operation, parachuting into Florida Phase. Non-airborne are bused to Eglin Air Force Base for the Florida Phase.
caption: A student receives instructions on rappelling from Cadre during the Mountain Phase of Ranger School (February 2011).
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