With no paid work in the diary for the day, it was a great opportunity to spend some time on some personal development. I’d invited my technical advisor over for the day to have a look at a few things together. Huw Gilbert is an MIC (Mountain Instructor Certificate) which qualifies him pretty much to do anything in the mountain environment all year round. I’ve known Huw for many years, worked alongside him on a number of occasions during the last 7 years and greatly appreciate his experience and advice.

My main agenda for the day was to look at the abseil at Nesscliffe Country Park, which is both impressive in its size and convenient due to it’s location. We spent an hour or so looking at different ways of setting the abseil up and considering the pros and cons of each method before putting it to the test. We also considered the various rescue scenarios that could theoretically arise and different ways of dealing with them. I certainly found it time well spent and am very grateful for Huw’s input.

Having done as much as we could at Nesscliffe, we headed over to Llanymynech for a spot of personal climbing. Although I have used cul-de-sac quarry at Llanymynech for group work quite often, I have never actually climbed there myself and Huw had never visited the site before, so it was a first for us both. Much of the climbing at Llanymynech is beyond my conservative abilities, so there wasn’t that much available to us. However, we did find a couple of bolted routes that looked inviting and decided to gave them a blast. Both climbs we opted for had some interesting moves on them which gave us (particularly me!) a challenge, but what surprised us most was the unusual positioning of the lowering off points which didn’t seem to quite make sense.

However, it was great to get some personal climbing in again and even better to be able to share it with Huw.