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I have spent the last three days work for a local business called Boulder Adventures, they have a centre in the heart of Llanberis, and formerly was run by Mountain Ventures. Before they sold the building on I have to say that they pretty much ran the building to its end. Several years ago now when Boulder took over they gutted all the building and started from scratch.
What they achieve was nothing short of a miracle, the centre is now a superb facility that offers a wide range of courses to a even wider range of clients. Everytime I work there the centre seems to have grown, and the latest addition is a new wood cabin classroom in the grounds of Bryn Du there main base.
I find it hard to believe that its the same centre to what I used to hang out around back in the late 1990’s. Whilst MV might have run the centre into the ground, it was a starting block for many instructors in the outdoor in the days before you could do a BSc in Outdoor Activities, they even ran the first ever fast track instructor scheme.
What was also great was I ran into Sam an old employee of Boulder who left to start a business further south called Totem that specialises in team building and corperate development programmes. Several years ago Sam got me off my arse after I did a couple of days work at Boulder and we drove up and climbed the Old Man of Hoy and Old Man of Stoer and back in three days.
This week I was doing a big abseil and rock climbing on tuesday, using a great crag up the Pass with amazing views, and the Pont y Cromlech slabs. The next day I went up Snowdon, the first time since the Summit Cafe had re-opened. SO often I am on Snowdon with teh team, but I rarely reach the summit. We had lunch below the Zigzags on the PYG track, as I was expecting that the Cafe would ban packed lunches. SOmething that I was going to have a rant about.
However the Cafe is open for people with packed lunches, which is good, as I would hate to point out that public money had built the £9 million building. My taxes well spent?
Today I went coasteering, which is a funny activity, a cross between scrambling, swimming and jumping, basically all the things that most kids would be told not ot do, but we take them along the coast on what can only be described as an amazing adventure.
As we headed along we progressive increase the size of jumps, and it is amzing to see kids that hesitate to make a first leap from sea level build up to confidently leap of higher and higher platforms. The last of which some 8 metres, had me thinking twice before I leapt into the abyss. I am a firm believer though in not asking anybody to do something that I would not.
Anyway I hope the group had a nicer week as I did.