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Watching James Blunt get “Cold” in North Wales
Monday, 09 September 2019
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Watching James Blunt get “Cold” in North Wales
Behind The Scenes on James Blunts’ new music video
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Although Original Outdoors is primarily a training and adventure business, we get asked to help out with all sorts of projects that require our unique combination of skills, experience and connections. A recurring theme is helping out with location scouting, location safety and consultancy for media projects in North Wales.We took a call from a producer working with international music video and film production company Great Guns to help out with finding locations for their new production – the music video for James Blunt’s new song “Cold”. We launched straight into recommending, shortlisting and then recce-ing locations for them along the coastline of North Wales on Anglesey and the Llyn Peninsula.
We were also asked to come up with a plan and a team to keep everybody on the production safe – and as it involved thrashing around in the a (cold, obviously) sea, climbing on a sheer rockface (where bits kept falling off it) and working with a helicopter on a rocky headland – the team had to be good.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”10854″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”10855″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”10856″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”10867″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]
We had two days of production to cover at multiple locations, landowners to liaise with and some very Welsh weather to deal with and I relied on the skills of Chris Jackson, Luca Celano, Gav Emmerson and Dilwyn Sanderson-Jones to keep everything running smoothly from our side.
We watched ex-Army songster James Blunt battle through waves, scramble over granite boulders and through dense vegetation and literally sing through a storm on the side of a mountain for the first day, then set up ropes and dislodged some unsafe rocks from a quarry above the beach for the climbing segments.
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There is always a lot to keep an eye on for jobs like this – the on-camera star who will happily put himself in harm’s way for the shot, the team immediately behind the camera ( DoP Max, Director Calum, 1st AD George and Producer Dale) plus the rest of the production crew (Sally, James, Tom, Gareth, Zac, Hannah, Sam, Ben, Luke and anyone else I have forgotten) who need to be kept informed about the likely hazards of the non-studio environment we are shooting in.
There is also a balance between keeping everyone safe and making sure that the shoot actually goes ahead – this means working closely with the Director and Assistant Director to ensure they get the shots we needed whilst managing their expectations about what we can do, where we can do it and how we can do it. When the cameras are rolling, the drone is in the air and the international music star is hanging around on a rope on a wet and loose rockface everything needs to happen quickly, smoothly and in a controlled manner.
For the first day Chris and Luca ran things whilst I led a foraging course and then attended a photo shoot for an upcoming collaboration with a brand. For the second day we split the roles between Chris keeping an eye on everyone for the last mountain shots whilst Dilwyn, Luca and Gav setup the quarry face with ropes, anchors and established safe zones for themselves, the crew and anyone else who needed to be there. [/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”10851″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”10852″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”10853″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]
For the climbing sequences James needed to be lowered down to a ledge, then climb back up via a greasy traverse and up onto a rib and corner. He was roped on and belayed by Luca and Gav with Dilwyn acting as coordinator between the rope team and myself as we worked with the director to get James into exactly the right place for the cameras and the drone (piloted by our friends Off The Ground). This took several takes, including a sequence where a sizeable chunk of granite detaches from the rockface and crashes down past James’ feet to the rocks below.
Next we needed to get Director of Photography Max Witting down onto the adjacent face to get shots of James climbing on the exposed rib, which was no easy task considering that he would also be holding an incredibly expensive RED camera with the associated lense, filters, monitor and everything else that shouldn’t really be dangled off a rope over a sheer drop. Max did a fantastic job though, and didn’t seemed to be fazed at all by the edge transition over onto a vertical face. Sideways….[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”10858″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]
So did James Blunt do all of his own stunts? He certainly did – and without even the hint of a raised eyebrow or question about what we asked him to do. You would have had to pay me a substantial sum to clamber around on a loose quarry face in wet, floppy trainers and a pair of tatty old jeans, especially after day and a half of standing around in the rain or lying in the Irish Sea. He is also a thoroughly nice, polite and friendly guy to work with. He took time for a cliff-top photo with us all, listened attentively to all safety briefings and did exactly what Dilwyn, Luca and Gav asked him to when we needed him to.
And then it was all done, and the circus rolled on to their next production and we all went back to living in possibly the finest place in the world – North Wales.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/xU4wN8WbTfE” align=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Company News, Mountain General, Videos
UK Wild Camping Laws Explained
Thursday, 22 November 2018
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UK Wild Camping Laws Explained
The laws and rules about where you ‘can’ and where you ‘cannot’ camp in the hills, mountains, forests and countryside of the United Kingdom always provokes a little debate when discussed. It’s something we talk about on our wild camping course and other campcraft courses, and if you have been following our blog for the last few years you might remember this post where I argued AGAINST the signing of a petition that wanted to legalise wild camping in England and Wales. In that post I wanted to point out that although wild camping is legally difficult, it is possible.
This post explains the laws and rules around wild camping in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as to the best of my understanding as an outdoor professional. I’ve also tried to include some other legal issues that may be worth considering when heading out to camp in the mountains and forests.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]
Can I Wild Camp in the U.K?
Good question. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘can’.
If you mean ‘is it physically possible to find somewhere to camp?‘ then of course the answer is ‘yes’. I wild camp somewhere in the UK about once per month and have a decent success rate. I have been camping in the mountains and forests and on the coastline of the UK since I was about 18 – a time that seems to be getting further away at an alarming rate!
If however you mean ‘am I legally entitled to wild camp where I want to in the U.K?‘ then the answer is probably going to involve a sucking of teeth and a ‘well, it depends…’
The problem is that for most of the U.K. we do not have a ‘wild camping law’. The legal rules pertaining to camping on somebody else’s land aren’t clear and are bound up in historic assertions of property and personal rights dating back centuries. Current legislation for most of the U.K. focuses more on the actions of travellers, gypsies and other migratory groups that may park on land with vehicles and caravans – as you can see in this PDF.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJPOA, particularly sections 61-80) conveyed powers onto the Police and created offences relating to various forms of trespass – but again the focus is away from the hiking and camping community and more towards other groups – the examples often cited are ‘hunt saboteurs’ or those participating in a free parties or raves. Quoting the CJPOA in the case of ‘true’ wild camping in the mountains doesn’t really help though, as in the vast majority of cases the trespass on the land would be a civil matter rather than a criminal one.
But that’s about as clear as a mud smoothie, so let’s look at the individual cases for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9958″ img_size=”medium”][vc_single_image image=”9031″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Wild Camping Laws for England and Wales
Almost all of the land you can walk across in England and Wales is owned by somebody. It may be an individual, a company/commercial organisation (including The Crown Estate), a charity (National Trust etc) or even the government or similar authority. These are almost always referred to as the ‘landowner’ and I will do the same throughout this post.
In England and Wales you do not have the right to pitch a tent, tarp, hammock or bivvy bag on the land belonging to somebody else without the permission of that landowner. To do so without the permission of that landowner means that you are committing trespass – which is a civil offence (i.e. non-arrestable). However, if you do not immediately leave when directed to do so by the landowner or somebody acting on their behalf (such as a gamekeeper or land agent, or security guard) then you may be committing a criminal offence (Aggravated Trespass) – something that a Police officer can arrest you for. There are also a few places where you will be immediately committing criminal trespass as soon as you cross onto that land – such as railway lines, some education establishments and of course sites vital for national defence and security.
This all still applies if you are in the middle of nowhere, stood on top of a mountain in Snowdonia or the Lake District, and cannot see another human or even a road. In the vast majority of cases it still belongs to a landowner, and legally speaking you would still need the permission of the landowner.
The Countryside Rights of Way Act (CROW Act 2000)
This was a landmark piece of legislation that opened up huge swathes of the English and Welsh countryside to the general public, creating what is often referred to as the Right to Roam. This means that within certain, designated areas (often upland and large areas of forest or heathland) the general public can walk over the land, away from Public Rights of Way. This opens up most of the mountainous and remote areas of England and Wales for recreation and exploration on foot and effectively ended disputed access over certain areas, such as Chrome Hill in the Peak District.
One thing that wasn’t included in the Right to Roam was the ‘Right to Camp’ – it did not change the fact that camping on land without permission of the landowner is civil trespass, and in fact says quite clearly that camping is not permitted under the CROW Act:
1. Section 2(1) does not entitle a person to be on any land if, in or on that
land, he:
…
(s) engages in any organised games, or in camping, hang-gliding or paragliding,
That’s pretty clear – the CROW Act changed a lot about where we could walk, but not about where we were legally allowed to camp.
Hang on, what about Dartmoor?
Right Dartmoor. That is a different case.
16th Century English poet John Leland said that “Dartmore is muche a wilde Morish and forest Ground“. He wasn’t wrong, although there is a bit less forest now than there was in his day.
This fairly wild and expanse tract of moor in the South West of England abounds with myths and literary associations (watch out for The Hound of the Baskervilles), and is also home to various Ministry of Defence (MOD) training sites and a few other places of interest. It’s also pretty much the only place where you can legally wild camp in England without first checking with the landowner.
There are local byelaws that permit camping within certain areas of the Dartmoor National Park (see interactive map below) as long as you do so within the following rules:
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No person shall knowingly use any vehicle, including a caravan or any structure other than a tent for the purpose of camping on the access land or land set out for the use or parking of vehicles except on any area which may be set apart and indicated by notice as a place where such camping is permitted.
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No person shall knowingly erect a tent on the access land for the purpose of camping:(a) in any area listed in Schedule 2 to these byelaws;(b)within 100 metres of any public road or in any enclosure.
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No person shall camp in a tent on the same site on the access land for more than two consecutive nights, except on any area which may be set apart and indicated by notice as a place where such camping is permitted.
Wild Camping Laws for Scotland
In Scotland the situation is a lot simpler. The Land Reform Act (Scotland) was enacted by the Scottish Parliament in 2003 and took the idea of the CROW Act and developed it even further. It created, amongst other things, a legal framework for land access in Scotland and included the development of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code.
One of the guiding principles of the Land Reform Act was that everyone has the right of access to the land and inland water of Scotland for recreation so long as they do so responsibly and without impinging on the the rights and freedoms of others. The ways in which responsible access can be exercised is laid out in the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, and quite clearly says that wild camping is permitted under the Scottish Outdoor Access Code and that as long as you:
- are not camping in enclosed areas (i.e. fields with crops or animals) or close to buildings and historic monuments
- are camping away from roads
- leave no trace (including good guidance on campfires)
There are some byelaw restrictions on camping in certain areas, most notably and controversially the restrictions on camping around parts of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park.
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Wild Camping Laws for Northern Ireland
In some cases you find that the laws for Northern Ireland are slightly different from those of England, Scotland and Wales for one reason or another. However, in the case of Northern Ireland wild camping rules it is pretty much the same situation that existed in England and Wales prior to the introduction of the CROW Act in England and Wales:
- There are Public Rights of Way but no ‘Right to Roam’ as such
- There is no right to ‘wild camp’, and to do so without the permission of the landowner would be considered trespass, as it is in England and Wales (mostly)
Wild Camping and Campfires
The association between a roaring (or even quietly burning) campfire is about as strong as you can get, but the issue of lighting fires on somebody else’s land is as complex as that of trespass and wild camping.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland
Here you would need the permission of the landowner to light a fire and you do not have the right to do so. This also includes Dartmoor, where wild camping is legal in certain areas (see map and description above).
Anybody lighting a fire on somebody else’s property without their permission needs to consider how it can be construed in a legal sense – trespass is a civil offence and you simply being there without permission and leaving immediately once asked to do so is a civil, not criminal matter. However – would lighting a fire (and presumably, gathering firewood from the immediate area and burning it) be considered criminal damage? There are so many variables to consider that it is impossible to give a clear answer – but it is wrong to assume that you ‘have the right’ to light a fire, just because you saw somebody on YouTube do it… For further reading take a look at the Criminal Damage Act 1971.
Scotland
As outlined above, camp fires are technically permitted under the Land Reform Act, but all (legal) access to land under the Land Reform Act needs to be done whilst adhering to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. There is a strong recommendation that you use a stove, not an open fire, to cook over – and with good reason. See the tweet below from Ben Dolphin, AKA Countryside Ben:[/vc_column_text][vc_raw_html]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[/vc_raw_html][vc_column_text]
Wild Camping with a Knife or an Axe
This is an often overlooked problem, but in the bushcraft, survival and forest wild camping world you will find an endless range of photos and videos of people using axes and other cutting tools to fell trees, make shelters, process firewood and so on. It’s natural for somebody to assume that if they are wild camping then they can bring along a camping tool such as a knife, or a hatchet – right?
Welllllllll……
Consider this – in England, Wales and Northern Ireland you will need the permission of landowner to camp on their land. If you camp and do not have that permission then you are trespassing – a civil offence in most cases. But what if you have a very sharp, well-maintained and lovingly sharpened Gransfors Bruks hatchet or axe strapped to the side of your pack? Or a fixed-blade knife (or locking blade, or folding blade of longer than 3″ etc etc)? Is it still JUST trespass, or is it now armed trespass? Or possession of a bladed article without lawful reason to do so? In UK law the onus is generally on the person carrying the axe/fixed-blade/locking blade knife to justify WHY they are carrying in that place, at that time. If you do not have a lawful excuse for being in that forest (i.e. you are illegally wild camping without landowner permission), then does your reason for carrying a ‘camping tool’ no longer stand?
Again, there are many variables to consider here and I have no clear answers. The Police officers I work with as clients, the ones I have as friends and others working in the legal professions in the UK I have asked about it all have slightly different interpretations of what “they would do in that situation”.
It’s down to the individual to make their own decisions about how they carry a knife or axe when wild camping in the U.K.- and if they actually NEED to do so.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Wild Camping in the U.K. – my own experiences
I have wild camped in countless locations around the British Isles. I have yet (fingers crossed) come across a landowner or been asked to leave. There is a generally-accepted tolerance to wild camping in the more mountainous areas of England and Wales – if you arrive late, leave early and camp above the highest fenceline or wall then you are unlikely to come into conflict with a landowner or their representatives.
I try to be careful with where I select a spot to pitch a tent or lay my bivvy bag if wild camping in England and Wales – I go for spots that are set back from the edge of a slope where possible, and far away from roads and houses. I also try and move away from busy footpaths or popular areas – the middle of Cwm Idwal or next to Glaslyn on Snowdon might seem like a perfect place for an ‘epic’ mountain camp but you’re going to cause visual pollution for the tens, if not hundreds, of people who are going to spot you if you are a little bit late in striking camp.
There is also the issue of your ‘impact’ – what trace are you leaving by camping there? Ideally it will be a small patch of temporarily flattened grass and some easily-missed tent peg holes. But what about your toilet arrangements? The excess noodles that welded themselves to the bottom of the pan? The scrap of plastic that escaped from the tent when you unzipped the flap in the morning?
Worrying about being ‘caught’ by a landowner is just a small part of wild camping in the mountains of England, Wales and Northern Ireland – your environmental and ecological impact needs to be considered just as much – if not more.
Did you really need to fell that dead-standing birch and have a fire for 6 hours? Would a gas or meths stove have boiled your water just as well?
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A Wild Camping Code of Practice
The below is a code of practice I try to adhere to when wild camping ANYWHERE in the U.K.:
- Arrive late and leave early, and move on every day
- Avoid visual disturbance where possible – don’t be the big, orange shining beacon visible for miles around
- Be considerate of others – be them landowners, fellow campers or other people who seek solace in the wild places of the UK
- Leave No Trace other than footprints wherever possible, and go to great lengths to hide any trace you might have to leave
- You are going to need to poo at some point – do it at least 50m away from paths, water sources and other common features. Further if possible (other rules apply for other countries)
- If you carried it in, you carry it out. Banana skins, orange peel, tissues. The lot.
- Use a stove where possible. Campfires use resources and leave a lot of residual evidence if not managed correctly.
A Wild Camping Video
[/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/DZsFUK-8tOI” align=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]UK Wild Camping and Campcraft Courses
[/vc_column_text][product_category per_page=”12″ columns=”4″ orderby=”menu_order title” order=”ASC” category=”campcraft-bushcraft-courses-uk”][/vc_column][/vc_row]- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Camping, Law and Ethics, Skills
Course report – Wild Camping Weekend June 2018
Monday, 18 June 2018
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Course Report – Wild Camping Weekend
Photos and notes from our June 2018 Snowdonia Wild Camping Weekend
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Last weekend I was joined by Richard, Allan and Amy for our 2018 Mountain Wild Camping course in the hills of Snowdonia. This course has two learning outcomes – planning and preparing for a wild camping trip in the British mountains and going through one or more iterations of the essential skills of this part of mountaincraft – finding a camping site, sourcing clean water, dealing with weather, dealing with toilet issues and everything else.We keep the group ratios fairly low on this course to make sure that we don’t have too much of an impact on the mountain environment, and to ensure a better experience for the course participants.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9011″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9016″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9031″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Day One
We met up at one of our favourite North Wales eateries- the excellent and friendly Moel Siabod Cafe and sat down with the maps to discuss our options. This is an intrinsic part of the course, and route planning and the logistics of plotting a circular or linear route needed to be looked over. We went through the options of walking from the cafe itself, of catching a bus to a different valley or even some convoluted system involving shuttling cars back and forth to walk between two points. In the end we settled on a circular route, starting from a little further down the road. The combination of time available and a mixed forecast (rain/wind and poor visibility at either end of the trip with a relatively dry and settled overnight period) led us to choosing a route that kept us at a fairly low altitude for the first part of the day before climbing up to somewhere a little more remote later on.
After going through our respective kit choices – and a shake-down of my own kit to show how I could remove 300g or so of unnecessary weight (my pack weight as a leader was around 13kg ‘dry’, and about 16kg ‘wet’/including food and water) – we set off into the hills.
The first section followed the track (Sarn yr Offeiriad) over the hill from Capel Tan-y-Garth to Dolwyddelan, climbing up through oak woodland and skirting the remains of slate quarries before descending back down amidst deep, dark forests and mossy boulders. We diverted off into some overhanging trees for lunch, hiding from the rain and going through a ‘Hudsons Bay Start’ by testing out stoves, filters and a few other key bits of kit before we traveled too far from civilisation and the option to fix/solve any problems caused by faulty or missing kit.
As we arrived at the edge of the village of Dolwyddelan the skies cleared, the sun came out and we took the opportunity to dry our bags and waterproofs out for half an hour in the beer garden of Y Gwydyr. Years of walking in wet places have taught me that if you have the opportunity to ‘reset’ and dry off equipment you should always take it – you’ll be glad of it when you’re sorting through your kit inside an otherwise dry tent later that evening!
The next section of path took us up behind Castell Dolwyddelan and into the woods under the southern flank of Moel Siabod. We dodged fallen trees, performed a river crossing or two and started to discuss the plans for the evening – camp low alongside a lake and risk the midges but avoid the wind, or go high and hope to find a flat, sheltered spot? We chose the latter option and strode on into the bogs and tussocks of Cwm Edno.
We headed out for a small stand of trees partway along the cwm, hoping to find a flat spot in the lee of the pines. In the end we found a near-perfect spot; close-cropped grass, relatively flat and with a decent water source not too far away. Crucially we were also well out of sight of roads and habitation where we could practice a true leave-no-trace ethic and leave only some flattened grass as signs of our overnight stay.
With a few hours left until sunset we pitched the tents, cooked dinner and watched the clouds scud by over the Moelwyns and Moel Siabod.
Our camping spot was about 1 km short of the crash site of Douglas Dakota EI-AFL at Bwlch Y Rhediad. This airliner crashed into the side of the mountain here in 1952, killing all 23 passengers and crew on board.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9039″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9036″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9015″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Day Two
The night passed peacefully, with some gentle rain at around 5am finally forcing me to close the tent porch. The weather was deteriorating though, with the forecast rain and stronger winds looking almost certain. The visibility had also dropped down to a few hundred metres and the low clouds scraped over the top of Carnedd y Cribau just to our north – time for a quick breakfast and careful packing of kit to make sure everything important stayed dry!
After striking camp, and making sure that we had left nothing behind, we set off once again into the marsh and tussocky grass on the floor of the cwm, heading for the sanctuary of the sides of Carnedd y Cribau – dry ground, shorter grass and easier walking with heavy packs.
Next up was a gentle rollercoaster of rocks, small ponds and handrailing a fenceline over to Bwlch Rhiw’r Ychen in slowly worsening weather and visibility down a dozen metres or so. This continued as we climbed up to the summit of Moel Siabod, strong winds buffeting us from the south-west and turning this section of the trip into something verging on Type-2 fun.
We topped out on the 872m summit, hanging around long enough to touch the top of the cairn and grab a photo before starting the descent back to Capel Curig, dropping below the clouds and enjoying the views down over Plas y Brenin and the rest of the valley.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9042″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9013″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”9043″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Mountain Wild Camping Course is slightly unusual in our range of skills courses in that most of the content is not taught in the abstract – it’s done for real. We’re not discussing key subjects with theoretical scenarios, we’re doing things in the same environments that the course participants will be visiting and working in. We’re plotting a route into the mountains of Snowdonia, responding to the conditions that are presented to us and practicing good mountaincraft to keep ourselves safe.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]- Published in All Blog Posts, Course Reports, Mountain General
Why tracking doesn’t work for misper SAR in the UK
Wednesday, 13 June 2018
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Why tracking doesn’t work for Misper SAR in the UK
(And why every SAR team member needs to learn basic tracking skills)
Here we go… this post will attract a minimum of two types of response:
1. “you don’t know what you’re talking about, if your skills were as good as mine you could follow a flea across a glacier”
2. “tracking is too slow/doesn’t work/is overrated”
Well, quite.
Both views have some validity, and that’s the point of this post.
Tracking, within the context of SAR/non-combat scenarios, is often represented by evangelists who want to present tracking as a panacea to locating any human OR by those who have sworn off it having tried the techniques (sold to them on a course) on a live operation and found that it just slows everything down and eats up resources. Each side will defend their own hilltop to the last man – neither attitude being actually that helpful to achieving the end goal.
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Looking for Jim
Let’s consider Jim. Jim wasn’t actually called Jim, wasn’t necessarily a him and didn’t necessarily have this motivation – but Jim is roughly based on a real person and a real job.
******
Jim knows this forest well and runs here regularly. He likes to drive into the forest, park at one of the secluded public car parks and head off into the woods for a 5-10km run along the paths and forest roads.
It’s 06:44 and he has just locked the car and has set off on the trail leading to the lake. It’s a last-minute decision but it’s a trail he knows well.
At 08:44 Jim’s wife is wondering what time he will be back. At 11:30 she is really starting to get worried and at 12:37 she tentatively rings 999 and asks for the Police.
By 14:00 a police officer has contacted her to see if Jim has made contact yet. By 15:00 a PolSA (Police Search Advisor) has started to co-ordinate the early response to this incident, and by 17:00 a police officer in a vehicle has discovered Jim’s car in the secluded car park. It’s sat safely amongst the slamming of car doors and shouts of dog walkers, families with kids on bikes and mountain bikers returning or leaving their vehicles at the beginning or end of their forest adventures.
At 17:32 a message is sent through SARCALL to the local volunteer search and rescue team and the incident moves to the next level of response.
******
It’s a fairly standard missing person callout – someone without any previous indications of despondency, medical distress or other factor goes out into a relatively remote area for a short activity and just doesn’t return to their vehicle, and a steady but measured response unfurls from the emergency services – allowing for various scenarios but also not assuming immediately that Jim is dying in a ditch, and it’s most likely to be a miscommunication between Jim and his wife, and Jim is happily doing something blissfully unaware of the multi-agency search developing in the forest.
The volunteer Search and Rescue (volSAR) team will follow their own protocol for calling the team members together, establishing a search control/staging area and gathering other assets – dogs, helicopters, even drones. A Search Manager will speak with the PolSA, Jim‘s wife and possibly anyone else involved in the response thus far. This will lead the Search Manager to come up with a variety of scenarios in the following categories:
- Jim is in the area, but stationary and possibly in medical distress (or worse)
- Jim is in the area but mobile (either in a good cognitive state or otherwise)
- Jim is somewhere completely different (Rest of World)
Search Managers may be good but they are not omniscient so they must focus on the first two categories – Jim is somewhere out there in an area they can search with the resources they have now, and the resources they are likely to have in the future.
So they work out a search area, based on a combination of barriers to travel, previous search incident data for profiles similar to Jim, his own patterns of behaviour and fitness and what can be accomplished in the next few hours and days. They have a Last Known Point (LKP) – Jim‘s car, as he HAD to be there in order to park it and run off somewhere. He did this unseen by anyone else (as far as the Search Manager can know) but it gives them an Initial Planning Point (IPP) to set a radius around and begin the process of planning search areas, calculating probability and the other wizardry and dark arts of Search Theory.
The next steps are a combination of good personal skills exercised by both SAR team members on the ground and their party leaders and data gathering/handling. Search parties are deployed to an area or areas with a brief of what Search Control expects them to do – it might be a ‘hasty’ (fast search along trails and tracks to ensure that the misper isn’t lying in plain sight) or an area search of a section of woodland or open ground marked out on the map. They perform their search brief, return to control and pass on the information they gathered. This feeds back into the search plan and a new tasking might be generated.
Rinse, and repeat. Until either Jim is found or a decision is made to stop searching for Jim.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8781″ img_size=”300×300″ alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8973″ img_size=”300×300″ add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”8972″ img_size=”300×300″ add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Deploying the trackers
The above is probably familiar to anyone involved in misper SAR around the world. A person leaves their car in a busy parking area, heads off into increasingly ‘wild’ terrain and doesn’t return. They had to leave SOME sign of their passage surely, so couldn’t trained trackers be deployed to go out, find those signs of passage and link them together into SOME kind of narrative?
When it comes to looking for humans and the physical signs they leave behind on the ground (training humans to search by scent has been largely unsuccessful and unpleasant for all involved) there are two things a tracker will hope to find:
- Prints (foot or occasionally hand, often referred to as a subject-print) – including partial prints, vague smears on muddy banks and impressions left in soft surfaces
- Physical sign – everything from vegetation bent at unnatural angles and broken off in unusual ways, foliage turned over the wrong way by a trailing foot or hand and even broken cobwebs and a thousand other clues
Finding signs of some human passage through an area isn’t that hard – in a few hours you can train somebody to look for the obvious signs of a track in most terrain. It’s the noise-to-signal ratio that matters – which of these dozen prints or physical signs belong to your misper and which are just the dogwalkers and hikers?
In the above scenario any SAR tracker deployed as part of the search would either hope to find a print or series of prints that they could, with good certainty, assign to Jim and use for tracking further down the trail.
In an ideal world they would be able to find out exactly what brand, model and size of running shoe Jim wore that day, if they had any unique wear patterns and even what clothing he was wearing, which snacks/gels he carried and anything else he might discard by the trailside. They might even be able to get a calibrated photograph of a print from somewhere at Jim‘s home.
It isn’t an ideal world though – and Jim‘s wife doesn’t know what shoes he wore other than “the blue ones”. He’s a size 11, but sometimes 10. He probably took a water bottle but maybe not. She can’t find his expensive GPS watch she bought for him last Christmas though… And so it goes. Information dribbles in over time and analysis is made as to how accurate or useful it is.
On the ground
The gravel area around the car has been heavily trod since Jim was declared missing. Several members of the public parked close by and walked either side of the car, the police poked around the vehicle when they first found it and again when they forced entry to see if there was any clue inside to Jim‘s whereabouts. The volSAR team members had a good poke around too. Any hope of discovering a sterile print is probably lost – but what about further out?
As the laid surface of the car park ends it turns back to mud and soil and there is a chance of finding a print at the start of the various trails that radius out from the parking area. There are plenty of partial prints – from the public, police and volSAR. They are layered down into the damp soil and the most recent start to obscure the previous ones. There is a bottleneck at the start of most trails and the prints cluster together. It takes time and careful examination to find a few candidates that match the vague criteria for a Jim-print: running shoe, roughly UK size 10-11 and laid roughly twelve hours previously. With several possible trails and a limited number of trackers they must make a decision about where to move to next.
Meanwhile the search parties move along the trails, sweep through open areas at a regular spacing and gradually reduce the Probability of Area (POA, the likelihood that Jim is in that bit of woodland or open ground) for their tasked areas. They trample and crush, make new trails through vegetation and turn untouched wilderness into a footpath – but move far ahead and faster than the tracker teams.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”8974″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Limited Resources
The enemy for Search Managers is not nature herself or the elements – it’s depletion of limited resources:
Time and Daylight
Jim could be lying somewhere in a poor medical condition and getting worse by the second. Eventually he will reach a point where his recovery is unlikely and then expire. All searches run the possibility of becoming a recovery rather than a rescue if too much time passes before the search subject is located. A slow and methodical search would probably find that misper EVENTUALLY, but the whole point of SAR is to try and locate that person and help them.
The sun is also setting over in the west and it’s not unusual for volSAR to not be called on until the end of the day – to allow enough time for the misper to be located by the initial response, or just wander home under their own steam. As soon as darkness falls the whole job has become harder – reducing the effectiveness of the searchers and potentially compromising their safety.
Personnel Availability
Voluntary SAR teams all suffer the issue of availability of their team members. You don’t join unless you are able to help and attend callouts, but the 24/7 nature of volSAR means that not everybody will be able to attend every callout. Work, family, health and even finances can keep a team member away for part or all of a search and a volSAR team that boasts 50 members might be only able to field 15-25 at one time. Those team members on the ground also have a limited time they can search for – whether due to fatigue/operational effectiveness or just the demands of their ‘real’ lives. Eventually every volSAR team member will need to return home and a Search Manager cannot guarantee how long they will have that team member for. A good Search Manager will start to stack up potential reinforcement and replacements from neighbouring teams as soon as it looks like a search will run for that long.
Skills
Specialist search teams are a boon for any Search Manager, but use of them can pull resources away from other parts of the operation. The moment the search moves to near-water (T6 or T7 terrain) then a decision needs to be made about whether that area is left unsearched or to redploy part of the search teams for water search – something that cannot be done without several team members plus specialist equipment and PPE.
Dogs are another exhaustable resource – they can only work for so long, and although they can cover a large acreage quickly they can still only ‘search’ part of the area at once.
So with the above resources dwindling, does a dedicated tracking cell within a volSAR team actually work? Where and when would they deploy – prior to the hasty teams and when the minimal amount of damage had been done to what trail remains? Are trackers a specialist search asset to be deployed from the SAR toolkit like Swiftwater Rescue Technicians and dogs?
You’re burning daylight and with a limited number of searchers available for the next few hours is it appropriate to separate out a few tracking-trained team members to faff around on the fringes with elastic bands and sticks?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”8975″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”8976″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
The cohesive approach
Although we teach tracking as a distinct skill from search techniques as part of the EST Framework courses I do not think the two can be completely separated. By the very nature of the skills required a good searcher can be a good tracker, and vice versa. The skills of Land-SAR search (searching the cube, staying in formation, personal safety) are all essential skills for a SAR-tracker, but an understanding of the importance of certain patterns (or indeed, breaks in those patterns) can highlight certain things to a tracking-trained searcher.
When a tracker is either looking for a specific print or any relevant sign of passage then she or he can pick them out from the background scenery and analyse them – if they are also searching then they can do that in-context and feedback information to their Party Leader of Search Control.
Basic tracking skills and an understanding of both the benefits and limitations of those skills within a SAR context should be seen as an essential skill for any volSAR ground team member (and indeed, understood by Search Managers and Search Coordinators).
Any sign of Jim?
What if every team member on the ground in this search had been given some basic training in tracking (e.g. how to extrapolate an entire print from several partial prints, or to spot the signs of passage by an adult human through dense vegetation etc) and had been deployed by a Search Manager who also understood this?
What if those initial hasty parties had been on the lookout not only for an adult male runner somewhere within their search radius, but also slowing down to check likely track-traps such as the edges of puddles or choke points between trees? Or if they had performed their first search around the edges of the car park, looking for candidates for a Jim-print?
This is how it SHOULD be done, but rarely is. Tracking is often seen as a separate skill or occasionally an afterthought when previous efforts are proving fruitless – but it should be part of the mindset of any volSAR deployment where the misper could possibly leave sign of their passage. Too much emphasis is often put on looking for the body of the misper, not a 20% partial print that could become the next LKP and shift the whole search in a positive direction.
How to deploy tracking in a SAR operation
This is part of the guidance that we give to candidates on the Level 3 Search Operations Management Course but is relevant for anyone involved in planning search operations and deployment of SAR assets for missing person search:
- Tracking awareness should be seen as a vital skill for all trained searchers deployed on the ground and training should reflect this, challenging team members and preventing skill-fade whilst promoting personal skill development.
- Search teams should be equipped and prepared for tracking re-deployment in the field.
- Acquiring information for tracking-trained search teams should be a vital part of witness and family interview techniques and efforts made to isolate footwear type and shape – social media photos, prints at home and so on.
- Tasking of search parties should reflect the potential usefulness of tracking, and time allowed for an initial search around the IPP for potential print candidates.
- Be ready to re-deploy search teams to another area/track if they discover a potential trail on the ground – this highlights the need for Search Managers to have a good awareness of the limitations of tracking and the relative importance of the information being fed back in to Search Control.
For most applications tracking should be seen as a vital SAR skill, not a specialism and subset of strange folk with feathers sticking out of their gear and castration rings on a trekking pole. Of course training contact time is limited for volSAR teams, but once those skills have been gained they can be maintained fairly easily.
SAR Tracking isn’t THAT hard
Unlike some of my clients, nobody is going to be shooting at you whilst you are tracking within a SAR context. Your search subject is unlikely to be actively trying obscure their tracks or slow pursuers down with traps and IEDs, and they aren’t a small and fast mammal scurrying across a forest floor without even turning over a dead leaf.
Humans (well, ones not trying to avoid capture) are pretty lazy and bumbling. We step into soft mud, scrape our feet across mossy logs and boulders and trample over leaves and twigs crushing them into the floor under our bulk. We wade through long grass and vegetation turning the leaves and blades of grass over to flag our passage and even discard plastic and paper objects from our pockets as we walk.
It’s why our Level 1 Tracking Technician course is run over only 3 days, and that also includes crossover with navigation skills and interoperability with other organisations and a final exercise – tracking shouldn’t be seen as a mysterious and ethereal skill, but nor should it be dismissed out of hand because your deployment plan doesn’t allow for it.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
TL;DR
Tracking is good and useful within a misper SAR context in the UK, but is often misrepresented by poor deployment and inflexibility of existing deployment procedures. There is also a lack of understanding by Search Managers who see it as an ineffective delay in the search operation and don’t ask pertinent questions when speaking to informants and witnesses. Tracking-awareness should be a vital part of any SAR search party members and be an intrinsic part of the training programme.
Tracking also has many limitations, and more so in the densely-populated UK where volSAR teams have to try and identify a potential subject-print early on in the search rather than hoping to the find the ‘sign of passage’ in the wilderness and following the resultant trail.
It’s also not that hard, and with a bit of training most competent SAR party members can become effective trackers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, EST Framework, Mountain, SAR, Skills, Tracking
The mystery of the Cwm Tryfan ice axe
Monday, 15 January 2018
The Mystery of the Cwm Tryfan Ice Axe
We found something long-forgotten on the slopes of Tryfan…
So, New Year’s Day 2018… chasing the last of that patch of snowy weather we decided to welcome in the new year with a gentle scramble to the summit of Tryfan (917m) via the Heather Terrace and then the South Ridge. This is a familiar route and we started late, quickly gaining height and feeling the force of the first storm of January.
Rather than Three Men in a Boat we were three men and an ecologist (who is also a girl called Rhian). We didn’t have a dog called Montmorency but we did make do with a cocker spaniel called Darcy.
The trip to the summit and back was uneventful (apart from my stirring rendition of Auld Lang Syne on the South summit), but as we descended the path out of Cwm Tryfan alongside the stream leading to Gwern Gof Uchaf something strange occurred…
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The Discovery
The exact moment of discovery wasn’t quite captured on camera (although it was faithfully recreated for the GoPro in the video below), but it went something like this:
Tom, also known as Dr. Tom (mostly because he claims to be a doctor, but we rarely see evidence of it) ventured a short distance from the well-worn path to relieve himself in the heather. As the rest of the group reached his general location he finished and strode back up to the track. About a metre before reaching the track he spotted something sticking out of the heather and bilberry:
It turned out to be a Grivel ice axe, showing some considerable signs of weathering. It was buried, shaft downwards, in the vegetation and there is nothing to suggest that it had been placed there recently.
So, had Tom just discovered a vintage axe in the vegetation right next to a fairly busy Snowdonia footpath?
After a bit of examination on site Tom shoved it in his pack and we continued our descent – hastened onwards by the promise of hot chocolate at the Siabod Cafe.
Later that evening we examined the axe (aided by beer). It is definitely a Grivel axe, and the wooden shaft showed some significant aging and was consistent with a few decades in the elements (albeit protected by a screen of mountain vegetation). Some very gentle research (aka asking Alex Roddie) suggests that it’s a 1960s model but modified for a slightly dropped pick to suit the changing style of winter climbing in the last half of the 20th century. The surface corrosion wasn’t total so I don’t THINK it can have been left out there longer than a couple of decades, but my knowledge of the corrosion rate of mountaineering gear alloys is sadly lacking.
Tom is claiming stewardship of the axe – as he found it, and he is now armed with a vintage ice axe so probably shouldn’t be argued with…
So if you’re reading this and have any information on either this particular axe (which hundreds of thousands of mountaineers have walked within inches of and not noticed) or just the model or anything else we will happily pass it on to Tom. Please get in touch through the comments below or via email.
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Location
I was too distracted by the thought of warm sugar and milk served by a grumpy landscape photographer to remember to grab an accurate grid reference, but it was approximately SH 669 595 (although I am happy to be corrected on that).
This is the general area – not far above the fenceline that is crossed near Tryfan Bach:
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Dramatic re-enactment of the discovery of the axe
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Gallery
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Behind The Scenes, Personal, Skills
Outdoor Fashion Shoots in Snowdonia
Wednesday, 13 December 2017
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Outdoor Fashion Shoot in Snowdonia
Location Scouting and Location Safety in the mountains of North Wales
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It seems like 2017 was the summer of location work for Original Outdoors. We have been putting our experience of working in the world of outdoor adventure in North Wales to use as consultants and location scouts for several years, but this was a busy summer for us.We were contacted by Claudia from German production company Natural Born Explorers for a project they were working on for a European outdoor clothing and equipment retailer. They had already chosen Snowdonia as a general area for their shoot but wanted some help finding locations, gaining permissions and just the logistics of shooting in a different country. After several Skype conversations and emails we narrowed it down to some key areas in the mountains and forests of Northern Snowdonia.
Then it was down to the usual pre-shoot planning – working with landowners to gain permissions for commercial photography on their land, timelines to make sure we had enough time on location to get what the client needed and be in the right place for the ‘golden hour’ at sunset. We also needed to keep an eye on the weather and make sure that the entire crew were equipped for several days in the mountains.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7885″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7900″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7890″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Any plan that relies on the weather behaving itself or natural light falling in a certain way cannot be too rigid, especially in the mountains. In a few hours we can go from 5 metre visibility, to blue skies then back to heavy cloud and rain. If you only have a few days to get the shots required then you need to be flexible and respond to the challenges thrown up. So that’s what we did – we bounced back and forth between locations, chasing the best of the light and hiding from the weather when it came in and making the most of the sun when it showed itself.
The photographer, Lars Schneider, and the rest of the Natural Born Explorers team all showed that they were not only comfortable in the mountains but they were competent outdoorspeople. The locations chosen were not just footpaths and flat ground easily accessible from the roadside, they included rocky scrambles and ridges requiring a walk-in of 2hrs or more.
The Original Outdoors team was also there as a safety backup in case anything went wrong (or to spot the calamity before it occurred) but the only medical or rescue assistance we had to give was to a member of the public who had suffered a lower-leg injury after a rockfall nearby. They literally hobbled down to the middle of our group, where I offered and delivered some first aid and called in mountain rescue to meet them. Other than that the safety kit stayed in the bags and we spent the days eating biscuits and occasionally looking out for incoming clouds![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7908″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7911″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7902″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Snowdonia and North Wales as a whole is a smart choice for outdoor adventure brands looking for locations to promote their clothing and equipment. 30 minutes drive from a central point like Betws y Coed could take you to a raging river, rocky mountain top or deep and mossy forest. The diversity of locations, good access and landscapes that look a lot wilder than they might actually be works well for international brands too. If you frame a shot just right, or make sure the background is neutral then that rocky ledge or forest trail could be in Oregon, Patagonia or New Zealand. We have a few days doing similar work lined up for 2018 already, and I suspect that we will be seeing more in the next few months.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7887″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7907″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7910″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_media_grid element_width=”3″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1513168937192-fc2cda18-8608-8″ include=”7911,7910,7909,7908,7906,7905,7904,7903,7902,7901,7900,7899,7897,7896,7895,7894,7893,7892,7891,7890,7888,7885,7884,7886″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Behind The Scenes, Company News, Mountain, Mountain General, Skills
Location Work – 4WDs and Photoshoots in Snowdonia
Sunday, 29 October 2017
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Location Work – 4WDs and Photoshoots in Snowdonia
Behind the scenes on a commercial automotive photoshoot in North Wales
At the beginning of the summer we were contacted by renowned automotive photographer Nigel Harniman for a client project of theirs. The brief was simple – help find some locations in North Wales that matched their client brief, and then help with the unique logistical challenges of shooting commercial photography in the middle of nowhere!
After a couple of days of driving around North Wales and Snowdonia looking at dozens of potential locations they settled on two key sites – one below the Carneddau massif and one across the valley from Snowdon. After negotiation with landowners and relevant stakeholders we formulated a plan – and returned a few weeks later for the shoot itself.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7731″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7734″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7737″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][vc_column_text]This is not the first location shoot we have been involved with – but it is the first involving cars and access by vehicle, not on foot. It adds a veneer of problems that I hadn’t considered before… the first being access. Obviously permission was gained from the landowners – but we still had to get the cars up there! Lots of careful planning and route-finding was needed to make sure that the ‘star’ cars and the logistics vehicles (including our very battered but rugged Trooper) could get to the locations.
The next issue was ecological. These were brand-new factory-fresh vehicles so it’s unlikely that there would be any leaks from cars themselves, but still precautions had to be taken to make sure the vehicles were as clean as possible before heading off the track. I also spent a long time wandering about making sure that we wouldn’t damage any plants or head into terrain where we would leave ruts or damage the ground.
Then there are the problems of weather and lighting. The coastal location of Snowdonia makes for lots of cloud and dramatic skies – but not for stable weather conditions! The first couple of days saw us basking in bright sunshine, but by the end of the week we were dodging thunderstorms and at one point fleeing back down to the valley after an epic downpour.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7728″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7729″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”7732″ img_size=”medium” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][vc_column_text]As anyone who has been involved with any kind of TV, film or big media production knows – it isn’t necessarily the most glamorous of events off-camera, and there is a lot of hanging about. However it’s always fascinating to see how things are put together. The sheer amount of preparation and creativity that Nigel and his team puts into the shots is staggering, and as you can see from the Instagram posts below the end-result is worth it.
It’s also a little odd to see the end results in print in magazines ‘in the wild’ with the usual small print and banner titles overlaid on top. There is normally a professional understanding that we won’t really talk about the commercial TV and media projects we’re involved with until the finished product is broadcast or shared with the public. This is usually several months after the work itself, so occasionally they do take us by surprise when we find them in magazines or online in ads.
This wasn’t the only media project we helped out with in North Wales this summer – keep an eye out for more blog posts in the coming weeks as we get the all-clear to publish the behind-the-scenes shots.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text css_animation=”fadeIn”]
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A post shared by Nigel Harniman (@harnimanphoto) on
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Behind The Scenes, Company News, Skills
How to put together a first aid kit for the outdoors
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
How to put together a first aid kit outdoors
Wilderness personal medical kits
How do you put a first aid kit together for the outdoors? Or a bushcraft first aid kit? Are first aid kits for mountain biking different to ones for kayaking?
Carrying a first aid kit in your rucksack or in your personal kit is pretty difficult to argue against. The problem is – how much do you carry, and what exactly do you carry? Once you start going down the road of visualising every possible emergency medical scenario and wanting to ‘be prepared’ for it. Before long you end up carrying several kilograms of equipment that in all likelihood you will never use – but you somehow feel that you need to.
The reality is actually a lot simpler. There are two important points to remember for outdoor emergency first aid:
- Training is the absolute most important thing you can put your time and money into. Knowledge weighs nothing and the most important lifesaving techniques require good personal skills but little to no equipment.
- If you are on your own in the middle of nowhere then the options open to you self-treatment are actually very limited.
With that mildly-sobering thought in mind – how do you put together a first aid kit for the outdoors?
The answer is dependent on several factors:
- The environment you are travelling too/through and specific hazards it may contain
- The length of trip
- Distance/time to evacuation and medical care in case of emergency
- The number of people (and animals) in the party
- The existing medical conditions of those in the party
- The training and skill level of those in the party
- The activities you are performing
- Your carrying capacity (rucksack, canoe, vehicle, porters etc)
For example – the medical kit for a 5-week sailing voyage to the Lofoten islands would be different to that of a solo lightweight backpacker on a 3-day summer trip in the Cairngorms. For the former a Bag Valve Mask (BVM) and full suture kit would be appropriate but would a little ridiculous for the solo hiker.
I have used various medical kits in my work over the years. In my time in a Mountain Rescue team I carried a small personal first aid kit that contained a minimal number of items and drugs – but it was designed to be pooled with the other kits carried by fellow rescuers to form a larger and more comprehensive kit. I supplemented this with items purchased myself such as Tuffcut shears and nitrile gloves. When working as a remote-area medic as support on long-distance races and outdoor challenges I was either carrying a very comprehensive kit issued by the company employing me, or I was given a budget to supply my own equipment at my own specification. I have also put together my own for various trips, plus also kits for Original Outdoors staff and freelance contractors to use when working with our own clients. Each case has been slightly different…
The easy answer to “what’s the best outdoor first aid kit?” is – they all are. The real skill is choosing or building one that suits where you are going, what you are doing and what you’re doing when you get there. To that end I’ve put together a video on the decision-making process that I go through for any trip or scenario, and the items I carry in one of my personal kits:
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First Aid Kit Contents
The list below is based on the items shown in the video, with links to buy them directly from Amazon. Some of the brands or sizes are slightly different or only a few representations of what I carry. The items are not listed in order of importance, just to roughly match the order from the video.
I’ve also put a link to the Lifesystems first aid kit which is a very similar off-the-shelf kit that I can personally recommend – even if it’s used as a base to add other items to.
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Nitrile Gloves
Get them in any colour other than red or black – you need to be able to see if blood suddenly appears on them when giving a primary or secondary survey as it will steer you towards a major bleed you may have missed.
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Resus Face Shield
An item of personal safety that should be somewhere easy to reach but can also make your CPR technique more effective.
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Anti Bacterial Wipes
Great for cleaning up after dealing with a minor wound and preventing your kit contaminating everything it touches.
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Alcohol Hand Gel
Be aware that carrying alcohol in your first aid kit may cause issues when travelling to countries where alcohol is banned or severely restricted
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Normasol Sachets
Sterile topical solution in sachets for careful application over wider areas.
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Sterile Eye Wash Pods
Sterile topical solution in pods for washing foreign bodies from eyes.
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Fabric Adhesive Dressing Strip
Adhesive dressing strip on a roll for making custom plasters/band-aids for tricky areas like between fingers.
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SteriStrips
Temporary adhesive suture strips for wound closure.
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Blister Plasters
Being able to treat or manage a blister can make the difference between carrying on or turning around to go home
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Non-Adherent Dressings
General use dressings without any adhesive.
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Triangular Bandage
I have yet to use one of these as a sling, but they are quite useful for holding other dressings on or wrapping over wide areas.
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Wound dressings (Various sizes)
Absorbent wound dressings in various sizes
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Travel Mirror
Great for reaching places that the eyeball can’t!
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Glucose Gel
Glucose gel for hypoglycemic emergencies.
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Round-Tip Scissors
Small scissors with rounded ends for safety
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TuffCut Shears
Tough shears for emergency clothing removal
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Tweezers
For removal of small foreign bodies
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Microlance Needles
Tiny sterile needles for making small holes to drain blisters etc
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Disposable Thermometer
Of limited use in a first aid environment but helpful for long-term monitoring of a patient
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Tick Removal Card
For safe removal of ticks
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CAT Tourniquet
Not for general carry and must be trained in use
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SAM Splint
Useful but heavy and other items can be improvised to replace it.
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Lifesystems Mountain Leader First Aid Kit
A comprehensive and well-designed outdoor first aid kit.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, First Aid, Mountain General, Personal, Skills, Tools and Equipment, Videos
UKH Review – MSR TrailShot Microfilter
Friday, 02 June 2017
MSR TrailShot MicroFilter Review
Compact pump microfilter for fast-and-light travel
It looks like a medical appliance and promises impressive performance – how does it hold up in the field?
I reviewed it for UKHillwalking.com, and you can read the full review here.
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- Published in Bushcraft General, Mountain General, Videos
Crib Goch – a realistic view!
Sunday, 30 April 2017
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Crib Goch – A realistic view
Scrambling on Crib Goch with a GoPro
The knife-edge ridge of Crib Goch is a legendary route in the mountains of Snowdonia – and for good reason. In parts it really is less than a metre wide and with a drop on either side long enough to really make you regret falling off.
The thing is, most videos showing a traverse of Crib Goch make it out to be steeper, narrower and longer than it really is. Fisheye lenses and shaky camera placements will always give videos a certain look, and it gives an unrealistic view of what walking along Crib Goch is actually like.
A few weeks ago I strapped a GoPro Hero4 to my rucksack shoulder strap and set off across the ridge with a group of clients. In the video below I have sped through the boring sections and focused on the areas of the ridge that need more attention…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/2ve03WrLXjo” align=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Behind The Scenes, Mountain, Skills, Videos
The role of Mountain Rescue
Saturday, 05 November 2016
The role of Mountain Rescue?
What job should UK mountain rescue teams be doing?
Below is a quote from the wife of a UK Mountain Rescue team member, posted on the Facebook page of a regional newspaper on a story about Police pay:
[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]They farm more and more of the “unpleasant” work out to organisations such as mountain rescue teams who have to pick up the dead bodies from farm and road accidents. If they are not happy, leave and become self employed and find out how hard the real world is.[/pullquote]It’s an interesting one. Should MR teams be retrieving bodies from farm accidents? Are police forces ‘farming out’ work to unpaid civilian volunteer teams?
The history of UK mountain rescue teams is usually rooted in a community response to incidents happening in their area. The first teams came about following the rise in popularity of mountaineering without a system of rescue and medical care being in place that could deal with the inevitable accidents. Mountaineering clubs gradually improved the skills and equipment they held through the early 20th Century, formalising first with the First Aid Committee of Mountaineering Clubs, which later became the Mountain Rescue Committee. The efforts of groups of mountaineers and clubs, often working alongside the RAF Mountain Rescue teams set up to deal with the rescue and recovery of downed aircrew, became the MR teams that are busy in the hills and mountains of the UK still. The underlying principle that linked them all is that they are “saving lives in wild and remote places” – the mission statement of Mountain Rescue England and Wales (although now missing from their website).
The role many of the teams under the Mountain Rescue England and Wales banner today is varied. The busiest teams in the U.K., such as Llanberis MRT work almost solely on callouts involving lost, missing or injured walkers, climbers and other mountain-goers. Occasionally they deal with other incidents in their are where their technical expertise is crucial in accessing those areas. The gradual rise in callouts over the last decade have been attributed to many things, from the increased popularity and success of tourism promotion or the new possibilities for finding hiking friends and groups that social media has allowed. Mobile phones, cheaper outdoor equipment or just more people wanting to experience the mountains for themselves have also been blamed. Whatever the reason, the busiest teams are generally getting busier.
The quieter teams tend to be away from the popular mountain and outdoor recreation areas. They may have hundreds or thousands of square miles of wild and remote terrain in their ‘patch’, but the operational tempo is a lot lower, numbering in single figures for some teams. However these teams still work to a professional standard, with the same equipment and the same unpaid volunteers trained to a level unmatched anywhere by a salaried job in the U.K.
UK rescue teams have become involved in high and low-profile incidents away from the mountains for many years now. Missing person searches in rural and urban areas, flooding and severe weather events, murder inquiries, technical rope and water rescues, crashed aircraft and a lot more besides that isn’t always public knowledge. A quick read through the newsfeed of Mountain Rescue England and Wales shows a number of non-mountain incidents peppered amongst the usual lost or injured walkers and climbers. Like the fire service, UK mountain rescue has evolved into a set of teams that perform a role the other emergency services cannot. Where this started is difficult to unpick though – how and why did mountain rescue drift away from the mountains and onto the streets and fields?
I think for most teams they could see something happening in their community, and they knew they had the skills and personnel to help. It may be a missing child or vulnerable person, or somebody in a situation that could be resolved using techniques honed in the wilderness. In the first instances at least. For some teams (and I must stress the ‘some’) the potential diversity in their role was a way of improving their awareness and getting some publicity for their relatively quiet teams. It’s all a question of cash…
Like all modern charities each mountain rescue teams have to run like a business, even if everybody involved is an unpaid volunteer giving dozens of hours each month (or week!). Their customer is the general public, whom they rescue without charge and (normally) without criticism. The customer pays for this service through fundraising and donations. Not everybody pays, but those who do drop a pound coin into the collection tin or bequeath hundreds of thousands of pounds to rescue teams essentially fund their operations. A small amount is now given to teams by various government funds, but the vast majority of rescue teams in England and Wales does comes from the general public. The problem is – who are you giving money to? Is it the team that you see fundraising in the local town centre but have otherwise never heard of, or the one you saw on the evening news the night before as the reports came in of a daring rescue of a family in terrible weather? I bet it’s the latter. If you live somewhere decidedly flat and travel to climb, hike or otherwise play in the mountains then you may donate to a team that covers the are you visit more often, but generally speaking the teams that receive the most donations are the ones with the highest profiles.
Some teams are quite literally millionaires, or very close. The operational costs of a rescue team can be from £50,000 to over £100,000 depending on what that team needs and what they buy for team members, and that is usually without the hidden costs that are absorbed by team members and their families. Fuel, personal equipment, lost work time and so on. All teams need those donations and you can donate to a more central fund, but this is a relatively new concept still and you can still see the differences in the funds each team raises on the Charity Comission website. It must be said however that the busiest team is not necessarily the richest – Llanberis Mountain Rescue team and Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation share a border and have a similar number of incidents when averaged out over a number of years – but OVMRO are decidedly better off than LMRT. So is it public profile or incident frequency that leads to more donations? Or is the type of incidents responded to that tips the balance?
And does it matter? No. A team isn’t raising money to buy a yacht or to give back to shareholders – a team raises money to buy equipment, train personnel, maintain buildings and do something that nobody else can do.
I have some (limited, and gradually becoming less relevant) experience of this. I was a team member, then Training Officer then Deputy Team Leader of a North Wales Mountain Rescue team, and briefly Operations Officer for the regional association. During the time I was there the team evolved from mainly performing missing person searches in rural and semi-rural areas with the occasional rescue or recovery of a hiker, climber or other person in the mountains. The team actually covered the biggest area of any team in England and Wales, and also responded to requests for assistance from police forces in neighbouring English counties. A quick calculation gives me an area of approximately 8,000km² at the time I joined – later shrunk by the formation of lowland SAR teams in those counties. During my time there the team developed and improved it’s technical rope and water rescue skills and got involved in some ‘interesting’ incidents as a result – flooding and water incidents, rope rescues in quarries and steep slopes on the edge of town centres, major missing person searches that dominated the headlines for months and sever weather incidents like heavy snow. For a couple of evenings one winter the North Wales Mountain Rescue teams were effectively the only ambulance response available for most areas – the local ambulance trust just didn’t have vehicles that could respond. Another evening I sat for hours (snowed in) in the farmhouse, an Airwave radio set in one hand, a couple of phones in another and a laptop on my knee and coordinated the response of several teams in North Wales as they were rescuing stranded motorists from cars on lonely mountain passes, evacuating residents from remote houses and generally being selfless and saving lives. Other colleagues spent days in the North Wales Police control room acting as a point of contact and giving expert advice to all other agencies and performing a role nobody else there could do.
And that’s the answer – Mountain Rescue teams (and their Lowland equivalents) do work that the other emergency services just cannot. If every MRT in the UK decided to close up tomorrow there would be hole in the provision of care, rescue and emergency response that the other services cannot fill. By proving time and again they cannot be matched and by doing what they do well, with professionalism and with virtually no cost to the taxpayer they are bound to be called on to work away from the mountains – and they will respond because that’s what they do, and it helps them continue to do it. You cannot blame emergency services for calling on a resource that is professional, trustworthy, versatile and, crucially, free to fill in the gaps of what they can do. You cannot also blame teams for capitalising on the increased and diverse range of callouts to raise their profile and get more donations. It’s a symbiotic relationship that both parties created – if mountain rescue teams hadn’t continually offered their services and proven that they could do what others could not then they wouldn’t be called to do those things now.
To close, to be critical of frontline emergency services officers because they have expressed concerns over the way they are being used is missing every point. Their disquiet with the role they perform has little to do with the role that UK Mountain Rescue teams have come to perform. Responding to events away from the traditional theatre of mountains, crags and moorland IS the modern face of Mountain Rescue in the UK, it just varies from team to team. To tell them to “leave and become self employed and find out how hard the real world is” ignores the fact that nobody is forcing MRT members to be part of their team – just as nobody forces you to run your own business.
Mountain Rescue teams do something incredible, and so do police officers. If you attack either because of your (voluntary situation), you’re an idiot.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Mountain General
VIDEO: The new Paramo Velez Jacket
Tuesday, 01 November 2016
Paramo Velez Jacket
Having a closer look at OTS 2016
Last year I spent a bit of time speaking with Helen from Paramo at their stand at OTS 2016 about their Alta 3 jacket, and we were drawn back over their for this year. The new Paramo Velez Jacket looks like a good heir to the legacy of the tried and tested Velez Adventure Smock that I’ve used for years (to the point where it’s faded from UV damage on mountains and torn from climbing but still going strong).
As well as a full-length zip and different pump-liner there are a few other refinements that bring it in line with the recent changes we’ve seen to the Paramo range.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Mountain General, Outdoor Gear News and Reviews, Videos
Diary 1 – Mountains, photos, TV work and MTBs on Snowdon
Friday, 14 October 2016
Diary 1 – Mountains, photos, TV work and MTBs on Snowdon
The start of a new project – regular vlogs and video diaries showing what we get up to week to week.
In this first episode I talk about working with clients on Ben Nevis, landscape photography in the Highlands, meeting up with friends, working with clients on Snowdon, mountain bikes on Snowdon, litter on Snowdon, the Real 3 Peaks Challenge, working with TV companies and a few other things.
Links:
Real 3 Peaks: https://www.facebook.com/Real3Peaks/
Ben Nevis Charity: http://rsbc.org.uk/
Snowdon MTB Voluntary agreement: http://www.cyclingnorthwales.co.uk/pages/snowdn_volunt.htm
Snowdon Charity: http://www.gosh.org/
The Unexplainers: https://www.facebook.com/theunexplainers/
Z Team: https://www.olympicchannel.com/en/playback/the-z-team/
Snugpak: http://www.snugpak.com/
Helko Axeworks: https://helko.co.uk/
Nick Livesey: https://nickliveseymountainimages.wordpress.com
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Company News, Mountain General, Original Outdoors Diary, Videos
Snugpak Torrent Jacket and Travelpak Sleeping Bags
Monday, 26 September 2016
Snugpak Torrent Jacket and Travelpak Sleeping Bags
We went back to the Outdoor trade Show at Stoneleigh Park to chat with a few of our favorite brands – and the first we bumped into were Snugpak.
Snugpak are known for their sleeping bags and insulated clothing but their venture into waterproof layering with the Torrent jacket looks quite impressive, and we might get tot try one out in the UK winter walking and climbing season in a few months time.
The Snugpak Travelpak sleeping bag range has been around for a little while now, but the 2016 addition of mosquito netting at the head end adds some genuine functionality to a product that already had a light weight and small packed size.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Outdoor Gear News and Reviews, Videos
Visiting Fortis Clothing
Friday, 12 August 2016
Visiting Fortis Clothing
Last month I was down in Cornwall and Devon doing some promotional work and foraging around on the beaches of the south coast – and I couldn’t resist diverting to Axminster on the way home to drop in on Fortis Clothing, a family-owned and British-made outdoor clothing and equipment brand. I’ve used their kit (under their old brand, Country Covers) for a couple of years and I kept promising to come and visit their home base. On the phone the directions couldn’t be clearer – “we’re almost across the road from River Cottage HQ and there is huge carved bear outside the gate”.
Right. Can’t miss it then…
I met Oliver Massy-Birch who gave up some of his time to go through the range, show us around their factory and go into detail about the history of the company, the Fortis brand and who their customers are.
I went there just to visit and make a couple of short films, but in the end I couldn’t resist and parted with cash for one of their waterproof S.A.S. smocks – look out for the review in the coming weeks. Most people who know me know that the last thing I need is more kit, but the Fortis quality and design standards impressed me, especially after speaking to their designer and realising the research and development behind this gear. Seeing the showroom and factory in their old family sheep barn reminded me a lot of our own roots in a family business, and in a few minutes I could meet everybody involved in the process of designing, building and marketing this equipment which is now used around the globe.
You can only buy their kit through their website, at their showroom and at one of the many country shows and fairs they visit throughout the year. It’s well worth seeking them out to decide for yourself if their kit is up to scratch – but based on a few weeks of use of this new smock in the woods and on the mountains I think you’ll be satisfied.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Foraging, Mountain General, Outdoor Gear News and Reviews, Videos
REVIEW: Grisport Keeper Boot
Friday, 10 June 2016
Grisport Keeper Boot Review
2 years of use – the best boot for bushcraft?
I need most of my kit to just ‘work’. If I am aware of how my footwear feels on my feet then they’re probably demanding too much of my attention.
I purchased these boots two years ago (from a local retailer), and despite my best efforts they have refused to die. They are battered and the leather has some deep creases, but they are still comfortable and waterproof. They’ve performed well in forests, rivers and mountainous terrain and still see weekly use. They’re the first pair of Grisports I’ve tried, and they’ve impressed me – so here is my long-term review.
First Thoughts
I’ve probably bought a dozen or so ‘work’ boots in my time as an outdoor instructor, from general-use boots like these to B3 winter mountaineering boots. The ones that fit very comfortably from the start tend to be the ones that fall apart the quickest, so I didn’t expect too much from these Grisport Keepers as they felt like a pair of trainers from the start. They’re a little higher than I am used to, but with a flexibility that wasn’t restrictive. The whole boot is quite flexible along the length of the sole, and the lacing system is well-designed. Out of the box they are a dark olive colour, with decent laces and a Vibram sole with a deep tread pattern.
Real World Testing
These boots have been used for pretty much every outdoor activity that I participate in, from tramping around woodlands to scrambling up rock faces and along the strandline on the beach. Like all leather boots they need some maintenance (something which I tend to be a bit rubbish at), and I chose Altberg Leder-Gris for reproofing. This gradually changed the colour of the boots from their original olive to a deep brown after about a year or so – a clear version is also available. This also gradually softened the already supple leather – I was a little worried that this would make it more susceptible to scratches and gouges but it seems not.
The sole plate is also quite bendy, with noticeable flex just behind the toes. Around 6 months ago I noticed the leather starting to wear into deep creases here and the rubber of the rand JUST beginning to separate from the leather – but so far they remain waterproof enough to be confidently used when crossing shallow rivers.
The sole itself has kept me upright on muddy slopes and scrambling over boulders and rocks. They are definitely B0, although I have used them with MSR snowshoes on forest tracks and rolling terrain. The tread depth could be a little deeper, but I have never really felt unsure of my footing.
High-legged boots can sometimes be a little restrictive, but I have not found that to be the case with the Grisport Keepers. The heel cup keep my foot planted and give me freedom of movement, but without losing security or stability. It was easy enough to sit on the floor, tuck my feet under a canoe seat or tackle a short technical section on a mountain walk.
The best way I can demonstrate my approval for these boots is by comparing them to a pair of Meindls that I bought around a year ago and have used and abused in a similar way. The Grisports are still holding themselves together and the Meindls have begun to fall apart at the seams, as well as beginning to sag and soften at the sides, reducing their security of fit. You can see this in the video below.
There are of course a few drawbacks – being tall leather boots with a heavy sole they are a little heavy, they need regular reproofing in order to survive and they could be a little stiffer. If you want something for mountaineering it would be worth looking at something with a higher ‘B’ (stiffness) rating but the Grisport Keepers would be fine for bushcraft, hunting and general 3-season use.
I have done around 2,000 miles in these boots over the last 2 years, and I think I would get around another 1,000 miles out of them. The tread is beginning to wear away under the forefoot and the leather is showing signs of age, but I would happily put them on and head out on a multi-day walk tomorrow with them.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Mountain General, Reviews, Videos
Hunting for the Welsh Bigfoot
Friday, 15 April 2016
Hunting for the Welsh Bigfoot with The Unexplainers
About a year ago we were contacted by a production company producing a show for BBC Radio Wales to provide some training in tracking for the two presenters on a show called The Unexplainers. This isn’t too unusual for us – we provide assistance to radio and TV productions most years for foraging, bushcraft, survival and so on. The subject of that episode was a bit outside the average requests – to train them to hunt big cats in the UK. Zoocryptology isn’t part of my skillset, but I could easily teach the two presenters (Mike Bubbins and John Rutledge) a few simple tips and the sort of things we are looking for when tracking a subject.
Fast-forward to early April 2016 and I found myself out with them again, this time to escort them into the mountains of Northern Snowdonia (specifically the the Carneddau) to hunt for the Brenin Llwyd, which is pretty much the Welsh Bigfoot. There is a similar story of a grey ape-like creature stalking the mountains of Scotland in the ‘Grey Man of Ben Macdui’, AKA Am Fear Liath Mor. Compelling stuff.
We were tasked with safely escorting Mike and John to Dulyn Bothy in the next valley, a secluded mountain hut maintained by volunteers from the Mountain Bothies Association. In my bag I had the usual clothes, sleeping kit, stoves and safety kit expected of someone escorting clients for an overnight trip – and 10kg of coal for the stove in the bothy to keep us warm – and hopefully keep any large, grey and hairy visitors away.
We gradually made our way along the access track, pausing along the way for the usual delays in recording a show that involves setting up microphones and cameras. As darkness approached we descended the final slope to Llyn Dulyn, picked up some lake water for our needs and approached the bothy, alone in our corner of wilderness, with nobody else for miles around.
Apart from the Paul Poole and some candidates on their final days of their Mountain Leader Assessment, about to head out on a night-navigation session. Bugger.
And they had brought a massive bag of coal already. Bugger.
After a few salutaions and explanations we settled in for the evening, cooking and warming ourselves by the industrial-grade multifuel stove that Dulyn Bothy boasts.
As midnight approached we went back out amongst the rocks and scrubby grass to continue our search, armed with a few ‘specialist’ tools tactics that John had prepared.
So did we find our quarry? Did they all make it out alive? Were we silenced by government agents for what we had learned?
To find out you’ll have to listen live on BBC Radio Wales, download the podcast on iTunes or come find us in an undisclosed location, doing undisclosed things…
NOTE: We didn’t set fire to the bothy, we swept the place out afterwards, removed some rubbish left by others, made a few running repairs to the door and left a massive bag of coal behind! The production company also made a donation to the MBA.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Company News, Mountain General, Top Ten Tips
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
Friday, 11 March 2016
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
we’ve been working witht he team of volunteers at the Brymbo Heritage Project near Wrexham for over 6 months on a few projects, but the one that has really inspired us has been the pilot of a new outdoor qualification and training scheme that we are going to be able to announce in the next few weeks. The very tail-end of that scheme was training in Outdoor First Aid for the volunteers – and we brought in the talented and lovely Teresa from event and remote-area medical specialists Ultramedix.
Here is the video of the course, with testimonials from some of the course delegates and clips from the training scenarios they were put through.
If you want to book your own private Outdoor First Aid Course in North Wales please get in touch.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Course Reports, First Aid, Mountain General, Videos
Beware the GWR… The rise of the Facebook guides
Sunday, 06 March 2016
Beware the Guy With Rucksack (GWR)
We’ve seen a troubling rise in online groups taking people into the mountains without training, experience or any of the necessary skills over the last couple of years.
There is a term in commercial photography, particularly the type involving models – G.W.C., or ‘Guy With Camera’. The best description I can find is from the ‘enlightening’ website urbandictionary.com (beware, possible NSFW wording on there!):
Guy With Camera
Commonly used in the modelling/photographer biz, ‘GWC’ is any poser/creep with a digital camera pretending to be a pro/semi-pro photographer. With the introduction of digital cameras, GWC’s have appeared like an explosion in a toy store.
GWC’s typically steal the work of others and don’t have any references.
It’s something that I had been aware of, mainly through professional photographer friends, but it wasn’t something I expected to see in the ‘outdoors’ world…
Over the past 2 years or so there has been an upswell in the popularity and membership of Facebook ‘community’ groups. Following on the back of Meetup.com and other dedicated ‘group’ sites, the Facebook groups are a good way of bringing people together in a forum-style conversation that has all of the extra functionality of the Facebook behemoth. We have one for our clients and fans, and there are hundreds of thousands of others out there for every activity and hobby.
Of particular relevance to the work we do are the UK-centric outdoor groups. There are dozens of really very useful sites (Ground Conditions in UK Mountain Areas, Wild Camping and Bothying in Snowdonia etc) that we regularly visit to either get information quickly, or to post it and share useful information ourselves.
But then there are the other type…
There has also been a rise in groups set up as ‘communities’, whereas in fact they are actually commercial enterprises operating on morally, ethically and legally dodgy ground. It takes only a few minutes to set up a Facebook group, and clever marketing to gain members. Facebook would charge reduced rates for advertising of those groups because they were not openly trading as businesses. Often these pages are set up by keen amateurs who want a change in lifestyle and fancy the idea of running an outdoor activities business. Many of these groups run trips into the mountains as guided walks or activity weekends, in a similar way to mountaineering clubs, but without the hive-mind of experience that those older and more responsible organisations have.
So what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is that being able to gather a huge following of ‘Likes’ and fans is definitely a skill (although you can buy followers from online services – around £8-£10 for 500-800 Facebook likes seems to be the average), that does not translate into being able to competently or legally run trips into the mountains or give advice to clients. A complete novice looking to take their first steps into the mountains may look to join a group or other organisation to show them the way (literally and figuratively), and one of these free-to-join pages is a good place to start. By deciding to come along on one of the organised trips they would naturally assume that they would be in safe hands… but their actions seem to be anything but.
Some of the things we have witnessed from these groups:
- Group ratios of 1:20, or even 1:50 (1:3-1:10 is the norm for professional leaders)
- Stealing images from professional photographers and other providers to publicise their own sites
- Covertly contacting legitimate providers to gain route advice, weather forecasts and even ground condition reports so they can then use them for their own trips (as happened to us twice last week)
- Asking qualified professionals to work for free on commercial trips as ‘exposure’
- Running trips regardless of the conditions because they have advertised it and booked accommodation
We met one of these groups yesterday on Moel Siabod – the big lump to the south of the A5 in Capel Curig. It was under full winter conditions above the 600m contour – deep snow, windscoured icy patches and cornices over the eastern slopes. Despite the reasonable forecasts the visibility was down to around 5-10m at times and a hasty descent from the summit was necessary mid-afternoon. We had full winter kit (axes, crampons, goggles, the usual safety items) and were happily within our comfort zones – but it was still tough enough to require some careful route choice. We also met around 30-40 other people (busy day!) on the mountain during the 4 hrs we were out. The one group (around a dozen members) that we spoke to led to this slightly ranty blog post – they were being ‘led’ by one of the admins from a Facebook group. They had organised the trip months before and had planned to climb Moel Siabod, so they were going to do it no matter what the conditions. They were very under-equipped for even this normally ‘friendly’ hill (no axes, mostly wearing light waterproofs and carrying tiny rucksacks and summer-season boots) and walking on terrain that an experienced walker would know to avoid (right over the corniced eastern slope).
This isn’t the first time we’ve met groups like this – online groups led by slightly wannabe (but well-intentioned) unqualified leaders, taking groups of novices into dangerous terrain. There is no legal requirement for qualifications for leading adults in the mountains (if there were I would never have discovered my love of the hills in my late teens!) but there is a duty of care that rests on anybody introducing somebody to activities like this. Some of the best ‘guides’ I have met have been un-qualified but very experienced and intuitive mountaineers and walkers who took a careful approach to leading people in the outdoors.
This isn’t a pitch for our guided walks and trips, or to advertise our own group – just a plea to anybody putting their trust in one of these Facebook group trips or leaders. Beware.
In all likelihood you will get somebody who is keen to become a leader (or ‘guide’) in the mountains but without wanting to become suitably trained or qualified to do the job. It may be they want to run a side-business, it might be just that they want to have the prestige of being the head of a group on their way to a summit… If they are unwilling to go through the established process of getting training and consolidating experience, getting insurance and building up a good reputation then you can also wonder how they will react if somebody becomes injured. Or is separated from the group. Or one of the hundreds of other eventualities a qualified and/or experienced leader has taken into account and is planning for.
Do your research. Gain the skills you need. Push yourself, but be aware of where you will end up if you push too far. Enjoy yourself. Don’t have your early experiences ruined by a Guy (or Girl) With Rucksack.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Emergency and Safety, Mountain, Skills
10 Books you need for your Summer Mountain Leader Award
Thursday, 04 February 2016
Ten books for your Summer Mountain Leader Award
The Mountain Leader award is often seen as the gateway into a career in outdoor instruction in the UK. The effort required to gather enough Quality Mountain Days, to go through the registration, training and assessment process and to ensure that you are presenting yourself as an outdoor professional should not be underestimated. No matter how skilled a navigator, mountaineer, communicator or coach you are there is always room for improvement.
We’ve pulled together a list of 10 books that helped Richard through his ML years ago, or that we think will help anybody going through the same process today.
If you have more suggestions then please post them in the comments section below!
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Hillwalking: The Official Handbook of the Mountain Training Walking Schemes (Steve Long)
This should be the obvious starting point for anybody looking to register and train as part of the Mountain Training schemes. It is clearly and logically laid out with helpful diagrams and updated photos. The book covers everything that a Mountain Leader would be expected to demonstrate, but it is also extremely useful for anybody who wants to upskill and become a more competent hillwalker or hiker.
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Mountaincraft and Leadership (Eric Langmuir)
First published in 1969 and now in its fourth edition. This is the first comprehensive handbook of hillwalking leadership skills published in the UK, and the updated editions have been rewritten to update the techniques discussed. As with Steve Long’s Hillwalking, Mountaincraft and Leadership covers all aspects of safely spending time in the mountainous areas of the UK; from day walks and navigation to campcraft, safety and incident management.
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Outdoor First Aid (Katherine Wills)
This is a practical manual on first aid, but heavily focused on the unique challenges and opportunities that come from managing a first aid incident in the outdoors. Written by an experienced first aid instructor and member of Llanberis Mountain Rescue team. The images are very helpful, the advice and instruction given is relevant and practical and it covers areas that are often omitted from other first aid manuals.
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Nature of Snowdonia (Mike Raine)
Ecology and knowledge of the natural upland environment is a big part of the Mountain Leader award, and often an area where candidates struggle. Mike Raine’s Nature of Snowdonia is the first field guide for the upland environment of Snowdonia, but the information contained within can be applied to the Lake District and other mountainous areas of the UK. Plants, lichens, fungi and geology are all covered in detail, along with broader information on the ecosystems within the Snowdonia National PArk.
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Rock Trails Snowdonia : A Hillwalker’s Guide to the Geology & Scenery (Paul Gannon)
Another Snowdonia-specific book with information that can be applied to other upland areas of the UK and a partner to Mike Raine’s Nature of Snowdonia. There are similar volumes from Paul Gannon for the Lake District, Peak District and Scottish Highlands. If you understand how geology has shaped the landscape of the UK then you can communicate it to your clients and gain a closer connection to the mountains, valleys, rivers and rocks all around you.
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The Geology of Britain (Peter Toghill)
This book provides an overview of the past 2,000 million years of geological history in the UK, helping place our current landscape in a wider and older context. It is written for the lay person, covering basic geological principles and terminology in a way that all readers should find accessible without patronising.
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Food For Free (Richard Mabey)
This Collins Gem pocket-sized version of Richard Mabey’s classic on wild food is perfect for throwing in the top of a rucksack to help identify some of the more common edible plants, lichens and fungi that you will find in the fields, hedgerows and waysides of the UK. Whilst not exhaustive and difficult to use as a standalone field guide it is useful to either confirm an identification of a plant, or to supply further information that a wild flower key or guide might not.
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The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs (Tristan Gooley)
Whilst not a true navigation manual in its own right, this book is one of several from ‘Natural Navigator’ Tristan Gooley that is a worthwhile accompaniment to traditional navigation guides. It covers some of the basics of navigating using natural clues and signs, but also delves much deeper into the landscape and how we interact with it. I promise that you will find something in here that you will want to pass on to your future clients, even if it is just about navigating via the colours of certain lichens!
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Safety, Risk and Adventure in Outdoor Activities (Bob Barton)
This book covers an area that is also dealt with by other books in this list, but in a way that cannot be done in just a chapter or two. The balance between managing risk and inspiring others in the outdoor education of children and adults can be a delicate one, particularly in activities that can appear very dangerous from the outside. Bob Barton is safety advisor to the Outward Bound Trust. He draws upon years of experience as a safety consultant to the outdoor industry to outline how we can lead, educate and nurture the outdoor experiences of others whilst also protecting ourselves as outdoor professionals.
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Outdoor Leadership: Technique, Common Sense and Self-confidence (John Graham)
The leadership element of the Mountain Leader award can be biased towards safeguarding your clients and colleagues from the potential hazards of the mountain environment, and the associated roles and responsibilities. What cannot be ignored are the wider aspects of leadership, particularly if you move on to expedition leadership, team building or running your own business. Whilst not the only book on leadership skills and coaching, this American guide demonstrates techniques that are of direct relevance to the outdoors and learning development in the mountains of the UK.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Books, Bushcraft General, Mountain, Mountain General, Skills, Top Ten Tips
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