Winter Mountaineering Skills

Hors d’oeuvres

(any of various foods usually serves as appetizers – literally ‘a taster session’)

Literally a chance for you to just ‘have a go’. An introduction to the winter mountaineering environment for complete beginners.

Starters

Introductory winter mountaineering days out for beginners. Perhaps you need to learn everything from the start or maybe you’ve tried it already and you want to brush up on a few skills.

We’ll cover kicking steps, cutting steps with the ice axe, use of the crampons, ice axe arrest, recognition of different snow conditions and avalanche awareness.

Main Course

A chance for us to cover some more advanced techniques for travelling safely in the winter mountain environment.

We can start looking at how to safeguard each other with the rope on steeper terrain, how to construct safe snow belays, how to place ice screws and constructing abolokov (yes it is a real word) belays.

It’s also a good time to look at the intricacies of winter navigation.