Advanced Nav Course 12-13th October

Thanks to the participants on the recent Advanced Navigation Course for a great weekend.

The course began with a briefing and a cuppa in the great Bilbos cafe in Ambleside before we headed into Langdale and up to Stickle Tarn, our campsite for the night. The walk in was used to recap many of the skills from the Standard course.

Having established our camp we headed out for a challenging micro nav session nearby. Some of the terrain was complex to say the least and there were some impressive feats of relocation before we completed the session and made our way back to the tents.

The night nav session later that evening was for me the highlight of the course. Our route took us up above Pavey Arc where the group were set a variety of points to find their way to or relocate at. The stars were out and the standard of nav was again impressive. Thanks to Daryl for his top tip on gaining maximum info from the land around you when relocating: Try switching off your headtorch for a while in order to get a better view of the skyline and therefore the shape of the land around you.

The next day we walked out via the Pike of Stickle, concentrating on  accurate and efficient route finding and planning of legs, with regular stops to challenge ourselves on contour interpretation and relocation.

The weekend finished with a ‘debrief’ in the hard-to-walk-past Old Dungeon Ghyll!