Top Tips On Making A Really Useful Route Card

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Top Tips On Making A Really Useful Route Card

As part of the Mountain Leader award training and assessment we cover remote supervision and route planning, and look at lots of different ways that this can be done. I ask the candidates to consider this: what is the point of doing a route card? I think there are two crucial points when considering how to draw up a route card: it must be useful as a risk assessment document, and it has to make sense to the person who will be using it. The traditional route card with rows and columns doesn’t make sense to everyone, particularly to someone who struggles with numbers. So what should you include on a route card, and how should it be presented?

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A Family Alpine Adventure

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A Family Alpine Adventure

[GUEST POST] In October 2019 I was walking off the top of snow-capped Scafell with my daughter Annabelle, aged 11 at that time. We were feeling elated at having climbed England’s ten highest mountains over the preceding year. What to choose as the next challenge? We were still discussing this in Spring 2020, after our plans to climb Ben Nevis and Snowdon were scuppered by the pandemic. How about something a bit bigger?

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Walk And Talk Therapy: What It Is And How It Works

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Walk And Talk Therapy: What It Is And How It Works

[GUEST POST] Walk & Talk? What’s that all about then… This is one of the questions I get asked most often by friends, and existing and prospective clients. I do A LOT of walking – and sometimes I’ll do a lot of talking if I’m leading an engagement or training session. But increasingly over the last few years I’ve started to notice the days where I wasn’t the one talking, where perhaps often no-one was, where listening was my most used skill. I noticed those days as they were the ones where clients had the biggest smiles, where they told me they’d really benefited on a psychological & emotional level.

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The Conscious Competence Model and Learning New Movement Skills

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The Conscious Competence Model and Learning New Movement Skills

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or you’ve been on one of our courses, you’ll know that movement coaching is one of my passions. I try to incorporate it in every mountain day that I do with clients, whatever the main focus of the day. So you might book a place on a Contour Masterclass, and you will definitely finish the day with lots of skills relating to contour interpretation, but you will also go away with all the basics about efficient movement. So why do I think it is so important?

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Why You Need To Invest Time In Learning To Walk

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Why You Need To Invest Time In Learning To Walk

Walking for most people is an unconscious competence – we do it without any thought. It is almost as automatic as breathing, so why does it need to be taught? Can’t any able-bodied person walk without thinking about it? Well, yes, but moving effectively over uneven ground is far from automatic, particularly when there is any danger, real or perceived. Many walkers don’t understand what it is that helps them to move effectively, so when something goes wrong they don’t have the tools to sort out the problem.

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