I know its only October, but given we have already had a dusting of snow and a couple of years ago we had some amazing winter conditions in November. As such I thought I’d take the time to mention a few things about the winter skills courses I run and what they include.
Essentially my winter skills courses look at taking a summer hillwalker and turning them into a winter mountaineer. I use the term mountaineer as unlike summer mountain walking or scrambling, winter requires more complete skills. A simple slope you may walk up in summer can become a 1000ft death slide if you don’t know how to look after yourself.
As such we start by teaching you about ice axe and crampons and show you how to use them to keep yourself safe. Often this involves finding a nice area and essentially playing in the snow for a day. During which we teach you how to walk in different styles with crampons, as different angles and snow types make a big difference to how you try and get you feet to stick. We also show you how to use you ice axe to both pervent a fall through either cut stepping or axe placement.
With those basic skills established we then can go on an exploration of the mountains and get you to look at the added complexities of navigation and avoiding hazards like conices or avalanches. By the end of a two or five day course you will be ready to tackle your own challenges in winter conditions.
We run our courses to meet individual needs and as such we don’t have any fixed base and instead are happy to travel around either Scotland or Wales to either find conditions or help you tackle some of the best remote peaks in the UK in winter conditions. In the past we have been to the following areas on winter skills/guided peaks.
- Extensively across Snowdonia North Wales.
- Glencoe
- Fort William
- Cairngorms
- Torridon and the North West
In order to book on a course in Scotland you need to contact us to arrange a date and destination to suit your needs, especially if in Scotland. Sadly we can’t offer the conditons guarentee as we do in Wales.
Being based in Snowdonia it give us much more flexibility with our courses and we welcome you to provisionally book weekends or week days throughout November and December. Whilst we can’t guarentee good conditions what we will do is offer all of your 50% deposit back if the conditions aren’t suitable for a Winter Skills. Similarly we also suggest trying to contact us for last minute courses should the weather play ball and winter suddenly arrives.
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