Preparing for advanced training.

By the time you read this post I will be coming to the end of a trip to the Dolomites for some mountain rescue training.  Cheap flights mean that we can now travel easily to more extreme environments to extend our skills and in previous years we have trained in Zermatt, Chamonix and Canada.  There’s no guarantee of good weather but we can guarantee big mountains.

So it has been a busy time for me and a couple of other team members as we have organised a sizeable trip.  Spread over two weeks, twenty four rescue team members from five different teams will spend a week working on advanced skills so there has been a lot of organising to be done. 

Before we left, I also ran some extra rope skills sessions to prepare for the advanced work we were expecting to do in the Dolomites.

While we are there, our training will be overseen by Kirk Mauthner (a Canadian and one of the best mountain rescue trainers in the world) and an Italian guide he recommended.  The great advantage of training like this in terms of both altitude and intensity is that, when we return to the Lake District, our crags are small in comparison.  The primary aim of the training is that our teams can perform rescues more safely for themselves but of course that also means safer for those being rescued.

So my next post should have lots of good photographs of big mountains and of rescuers practising their techniques.

Hi, Daisy here.

I’ve been helping Roy train all year.  I check at the top of the crag and then I go and check at the bottom of the crag.