Cairngorms 2011

So I fly to America in 4 days and I've decided that I'm going to attempt to keep a blog from my time there. However to start it off I think I need to include the Cairngorms, Finland and Wales from 2011 so far. Here goes...

As part of my course Ádventure and Media'we went on a winter skills trip in the Cairngorms. The trip was 5 days longs and the weather was imense!

The week began by walking out into the mountains away from the skieers. The snow was really deep at this point and we had to walk through a boulder field without all falling inbetween the rocks. When we arrived at an ideal spot we had an introduction to crampons. I did not feel safe using them at, our instructor was trying to make us walk up really steep bits of ice but I felt soo unstable. The afternoon went on and we got used to them. However after lunch we started doing ice axe arrests, and this resulted in a friend breaking their ankle as they slipped with crapons. And after this we didnt use the crampons anymore that trip.

Over the next few days we covered more ground in the area and walked to where there were deep parts of snow to build snow holes. We also learnt all about the rescue equipment in case of an avalanche which was really interesting and played around with that.
Making bucket seats to belay from was a fun day as we were meant to summit a mountain however a team member was ill and we had to descend back down. And this resulted in learning new ways to belay and make sterdy seats.

Over all this trip comes 2nd, Caving comes first!!

Cheese press, Yorkshire cave