I recently spent a week with Jagged Globe in the Western Highlands on their winter mountaineering course. As a competent summer mountaineer and climber, who’s starting to get into winter climbing and mountaineering for the past few years, I felt that this course would teach me a lot, and get me ready to tackle winter mountains without a guide. This course was also a natural progression from the Intro course I completed.
Let’s get into the course and look at the good, and bad what I learned and my instructor…
Winter Mountaineering with Jagged Globe
Course Overview
This course is designed for mountaineers and climbers who have had a bit of winter, but are looking to build skills to be able to tackle those harder mountain routes and feel more comfortable in winter environments.
This course could go 1 of 2 ways for you, depending on personal goals. If you have the goal of being guided up harder routes and have no intentions of going out without a guide they can accommodate that. However, me and my climbing partner want to be competent summer and winter lead climbers so we told our guide that. He was able to tailor the course to our goals and taught us all the basics, along with how to use our summer skills on winter mountains and winter climbing routes.
My experience
I feel as though with guidance from Max, my summer Trad skills are extremely transferable. Other than snow anchors and using axes to climb and help set gear, all the safety aspects and gear placing are the same as summer trad.
Now with this knowledge and some extra tips and pieces of wisdom from our guide Max, I do feel a lot more competent in winter situations. I can’t wait to develop my summer skills further and head back to Scotland on our own to send some fun routes next season. I also have a trip to the Alps with Jagged Globe.
Skills developed
I came on this course with a few specific goals in mind. Let’s look at what I wanted and see if Jagged Globe could accommodate.
- I wanted to improve my multi-pitch ability along with being able to safely bail off of routes if required. I feel as though I achieved that. I learned a lot about multi-pitch winter (that can also be used in summer too) I was also able to get some great tips on anchor building and setting up for the next pitch to be more efficient in the mountains. Secondly, I now feel a lot more comfortable building retrievable abseils.
- Learn how to climb with crampons and axes. I’ve had a good amount of time in crampons and using axes before this course. I have done little in terms of mixed climbing using them. In this course we did Scottish mixed climbing, as much as it is different to summer climbing, there are a lot of similar aspects and I picked it up quite well. Being able to use body positioning and route reading in summer helped my transition into mixed climbing on rock and ice.
- Avalanche awareness and judging winter conditions for safe climbing I am a sucker for the weather and forecasts. As a mountaineer, I need to be able to read the weather so I know what to pack. However reading and understanding a forecast is all well and good, but when on the mountains it may not follow suit 100%. You also need to be able to understand and judge the conditions in real time. I think Max helped improve my real-time reading of conditions and judging if a route is safe to climb, or not.
The only bad part of this course was how wet it was on the Tuesday and Wednesday as we stayed at a lower level to develop skills. However, these two days were extremely valuable and I learned a lot.
The accommodation
You don’t spend an awful lot of time at the hotel, but I feel like I should talk a little bit about it.
You stay at the Ballechulish Hotel just outside of Glencoe. It’s a lovely little hotel. Your rooms are cleaned daily with tea coffee and shortbread restocked. You are also provided with all the food and drink you may need
Breakfast, lunch along with a 3-course meal every night. There seems to be a mixed consensus with the lunch about quantity, but if you eat a lot (I don’t) just grab a few extra bits from breakfast to take with you. There is also a decent drying room as you are bound to get wet. However, it is terrible for gloves so I suggest using the radiator in your room.
Conclusion
As you can see above, I pretty much got everything out of the course that I wanted. Being open with my instructor and telling him what I was after made it quite easy for him to provide a course with immense value to me. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Max Hunter to anyone wanting to develop any sort of climbing or mountaineering knowledge and skills.
Not only did I learn a lot, but I had great fun too. I love to be in the mountains snowy or not and climbing. I got 5 full days of it, I couldn’t have had a better week. While I was there I got to test out a lot of new pieces of gear so look out for those reviews coming soon. I have no plans to do the winter climbing course with Jagged as I want to go exploring without a guide.
If this course seems a bit above your skill level. They do an introductory course too. I wrote about that last year so see what Introduction to winter mountaineering is all about.
Disclaimer: This trip was fully funded by me, Jagged Globe didn’t pay for anything.
