Welsh Winter Skills

Overview

On this Welsh Winter Skills course, you’ll gain confidence with a wide range of winter-specific mountaineering concerns, including how to choose and use winter equipment, basic winter navigation, and safety.

Our friendly, highly experienced instructors will cover what you need to know to make navigating winter landscapes safer for you. This course will set you up to explore the countryside with greater freedom year-round.

The Objectives

• You’ll gain the confidence to go hillwalking in Wales and England in winter.
• You’ll know how to keep yourself safe and comfortable in changeable conditions out on the hill, and you will be able to kit yourself out and fit winter-specific kit such as crampons properly.
• You’ll have a basic knowledge of winter-specific concerns, including avalanche awareness, navigation in poor visibility, and self-arrest.

What To Expect

You’ll cover what to wear, what to carry, and how to respond to a weather forecast, with a practical session on selecting, fitting, and carrying in a classroom session before heading out onto the hills. We’ll also cover winter navigation, avalanche, and what to do in an emergency. You’ll learn crampon and ice axe techniques, and have guidance on winter clothing and personal comfort. You’ll get time to develop your new skills in the mountains, taking in the stunning Snowdonia winter scenery.

The Welsh winter can be fickle, and snow and ice conditions cannot be guaranteed. Throughout the course we’ll take a flexible approach to the programme to make the best possible use of the prevailing conditions. If there is no snow, the course will still run.

Experience Required

You should have some summer hillwalking experience, but no previous winter walking experience is needed.

How Should I Prepare?

• We encourage you to do as much regular exercise as possible, preferably outdoors, but that’s more about you gaining from the generic benefits it has for your health and wellbeing.
• You don’t need to be a superhero to take on this course. Just make sure you’re prepared by doing some summer hillwalking as a minimum.
• Use the equipment list to help get ready.
• If you don’t already have them, purchase personal items like sun block, lip salve to provide protection from UV radiation and the wind.
• Decide how you want to protect and make waterproof items like your camera and mobile phone.
• Check and pack basic clothing requirements which you’ll be comfortable to walk, stretch and climb in. Remember layers for warmth.
• If you have your own winter boots, make sure they are worn in and comfortable.