On Taiwan’s alpine hiking trails, mountain shelters and designated camping areas are set up to provide hikers with safe places to rest at night. These shelters vary in capacity, size, location, and management methods, and most require hikers to apply for a bed and a Mountain Entry Permit online in advance. Hikers aim to reach shelters before dark to avoid accidents, typically sleeping around 8 PM and starting their hike between 3 and 5 AM. Most high-altitude shelters in Taiwan are communal and offer little or no privacy. Early-morning jarring sounds, such as packing and talking, can disturb others, especially when hikers bring their everyday habits into this shared space. This disruption not only creates fraction but also lead to insufficient rest, increasing the risk of altitude sickness or hiking-related accidents and ultimately raising serious safety concerns for alpine activities.

In this case, drawing on the conceptual tools of listening positionality by Dylan Robinson and Jennifer Hsieh’s sono-sociality, I argue that jarring interactions as forming the shelter etiquette and along trails are not merely acoustic disturbances, but serve as moments of attunement—negotiated experiences shaped by hikers’ auditory orientations, cultural assumptions, and differing perceptions of risk. These sound practices show how urban hikers’ listening is registered by embedded ideas of shelter etiquette, care, and bodily vulnerability in alpine environments. Through jarring as a form of attunement, hikers recalibrate their bodily rhythms and perceptual modes, a process of acculturation into a survival-oriented praxis that regulates acceptable sonic events within these liminal, risk-sensitive spaces.