Emergency Evacuation Carries and Night Navigation Practice

On Thursday night Ben and I enlisted Tom to help us with a bit of Continuing Professional Development. We decided to drill the various carries and emergency evacuation techniques that are listed in the Mountain Leader Training Handbook (Hillwalking) and get a bit of night Navigation practice in. We drove up to Wrynose Pass in the Lake District and spent a couple of hours going through various carries. Seeing how far we could carry each other on rough ground either on our own or in pairs using 4 or 5 different methods (answer: not far). We found the Rope carry shown to be the best but it did take a bit of fiddling to get the rope set up correctly to make it comfortable for the injured party.

By 11 o’clock we were all pretty tired out and decided to go onto the main event of night navigation practice. We took it in turns to set each other a leg to navigate. One person would decide where we were going, one would navigate and the other would try and follow where we had gone and relocate at the end of the leg.

At about 2am we had a break under a crag and decided that we could probably scramble up it before continuing on our navigation exercise. We thought it was a bit like trying drive anti-clockwise around Leeds centre (the loop road runs clockwise), it was fairly easy but as we performed each move we had no idea what the next move would be and a mistake would have taken us back to where we had started very quickly.

We then navigated together to the top of a hill which was about an hours walk from the car and were tucked up in our bivi bags by 4:30 am. It had started to rain and rained constantly until about 8:30am. By 9:30 we decided that we had enjoyed ourselves enough and that it was time to get up and go home.

It was a great whistle-stop tour of the lakes and thanks to Tom for coming along to give us a hand.