my first taste of leadership

Ok, so I've been to Snowdonia for a week and had my first taste of leading! Super exciting. Although I only spent two of the days I spent there leading I also got some vital experience doing an over night expedition that required walking over some challenging terrain, including steep ground, scree work and scrambling which I learnt a great deal from and came away from the two days feeling confident about my abilities to cope with crossing almost any mountainous terrain with a heavy pack on containing all the equipment needed to do an over night camp, this will be required when I go to to my Mountain Leader training and assessment.

Days 3 and 5 brought with them them the greatly anticipated days of leading, the open door to my hopeful long career ahead doing what I love most and sharing it with people who will almost definitely also develop a passion for the mountains. Day 3 tackled a long demanding route that first climbed more than 600metres up steep ground with slight scree and technical walking, I felt that both myself and the other group leader dealt with this well reminding the group about how to manage their pacing to not only cater for all abilities within the group but to stop themselves from wearing themselves out on the first leg of their walk! We also had to make a decision regarding a member of the group who was not feeling very well that day, they had agreed to start the walk and see how they felt, but after 10 minutes of walking they had started to feel week. As the walk planned would not have many good escape routes we decided that it would not be a wise decision to encourage them to carry on, so walked them back to the start point to be picked up by transport to spend the day recuperating for the next walk planned. The rest of the day went smoothly, the weather conditions were great so navigation was fairly easy which left us to concentrate on our leading skills. After a long day group moral was high and I thought that it was great success, both myself and the other group leader had a fairly straight forward introduction to leading, and the group had a long mountain day with varied terrain and experiences. If I could of lead the day again I would of got the group to navigate a bit more to make the day more interesting for them as well as expanding their knowledge of navigation in the mountains.

Day 5 was planned to be a shorter route due to bad weather and we wanted to get the group doing more navigating. Due to it being the end of the week some members of the group were starting to feel tired and moral had dropped, I know that personally my moral was low due to feeling under the weather and tired, I tried not to let this show but am sure it must of shown through a little! Most of the day myself and the other group leader set navigational legs for the group and had them locating themselves regularly in the effort to get them really thinking about where they were, how they got there and what the lay of the land looked like when it was printed on a piece of paper in an artists impression. As predicted the weather on top was not great with howling winds up to 50mph and low visibility, at this point we decided that it would be best to get the group going and navigate ourselves until we dropped back down into better conditions, other wise the group were going to get cold moral would drop. Whilst walking in these terrible conditions in became clear that some members were struggling and becoming cold, so I sought out somewhere that would be sheltered enough to get the bothy out to create a warm sheltered environment to get some food down, get warm and layer up. This was a great experience as it showed just how useful a bothy was not only to us as group leaders but also to the group who had never used one before.

Overall the two days went well and we had some good feed back from our group. I have gained a lot of experience from this trip and am looking forward to many more leading days.

So.... this is the start I guess

The start of year 2 mountain leadership modules, and I guess my main aim is to have fun! I figure if I'm having fun then it means that everyone else is more likely to be having having fun... right? Which I think is a key quality to have as an instructor. If you’re miserable then it’s more than likely that everyone else will be, so keep the spirits up and say goodbye to Hyde and hello to Jekyll who will be your instructor for today.

So some more aims and objectives:
I know that however skilled or experienced I am there will always be plenty more to learn! and there’s going to be plenty of new stuff being crammed into my cranium this year, just need to focus and make sure
I’m soaking it up and remembering it, and putting it to practice regularly so that these new skills don’t become rusty and forgotten, and let’s face it it’s not hard to forget stuff when your brain cells are fighting a losing battle against alcohol, maybe this should be another aim don’t drink so much this year, especially on ML trips.
Right so let’s get down to the critical stuff, the skills I need to brush up on, I have spent some time in the mountains this summer, but have mainly chosen bright sunny clear days where navigating has been fairly straight forward and easy, so I need to get the compass out and bare the dark, dingey, damp weather to put my navigating to the test and challenge myself.
Something I don’t know much about is aspect of slope, so I aim to learn about this as it could be a useful skill for leading on the mountains.
Something else I could do with improving is estimating distance by sight, instead of “it’s over there a bit, will be there dreckly”.
Most of all I will be learning a lot about leading groups this year, it won’t be easy sometimes but it’s all part of learning and I need to remember that and carry on regardless to how much I might just want to shout at my group and run off into the wilderness and live in a cave.