How to forge a career in the outdoor industry

Career in the Outdoor Industry – Part 2: Land

 

If you haven’t read the first part of this blog (How to forge a career in the outdoors part 1: Water) then it might be a good place to start as in this part, I won’t go into quite as much detail over my formative years in my outdoor career. This is in main down to the fact that my initiation into the world of Rock and Land qualifications came later on in my career. Its also because Ive already written that once and if you have read part 1, I’m sure you don’t want to read all that again!

I was a boater through a through, I liked going down. Going up was hard work and a lot of faff (which there obviously isn’t for boating….). In my early career I had worked on children’s camps, been a part of abseil sessions and helped run a mobile climbing wall whilst working my summer job in and around Taunton. There was even a session I remember helping run in Ireland, where the clients had abseiled off a bridge, I’d picked them up from a canoe and paddled them to shore, all whilst the rigging was tied off on a van. But that was about the limit of my “land experience” before I started my traineeship. As a family we had always been walking, and whilst at University I explored the mountains of Snowdonia with friends by foot, and had done a fair amount of walking and “wild” camping whilst traveling, but, a bit like paddling, had never thought I’d need a qualification in it as I’d never imagined this would become my career. This changed when I started my traineeship at Mendip Outdoor Pursuits. As part of the year long traineeship we did a lot of shadowing and A LOT of equipment checking, which meant a lot of time, coiling and uncoiling ropes, clicking carabiners and drinking tea. Being situated in the Mendip hills we also spent a fair amount of time underground, in what I can only describe as the best outdoor activity session ever devised; Caving.

 

Sarah and I found ourselves following bearded men over misty fields on a Friday night to go and dig in caves, not just explore them, but position yourself in a small hole, deep underground and either move mud with a spade, your hands, or something someone had invented in their shed, from one spot to another. It was amazingly addictive, especially as whilst we were just getting into Caving, “The Frozen Deep” in Resivoir hole was dug out in Cheddar. So with every strike of the hammer, or scoop of the spade, we thought we might discover the next big thing in the Mendip cave world. Sadly (unsurprisingly) we didn’t. There was a phrase in cave digging: “give it 5 years”. As in, if you dig for 5 years and you haven’t found anything, then give up, which is still quite a lot of digging. Caving allowed Sarah and I a respite from having to go back to our grotty flat, with no heating and mushrooms on the ceiling, to go underground, with no heating and spiders (big ones) on the ceiling. I say it’s the best outdoor activity session ever devised, because from an instructors point of view, there are very few sessions which require so little in put to challenge most people equally. With the variety of squeezes, peoples different perceptions of dark spaces and physicalness you could have a group ranging from 12 years old to 50 and challenge each individual appropriately and relatively easily. What it did require was a very in depth knowledge of the caves in which you operated, hence why, for the Level 1 Local Cave and Mine Leader Award (LCMLA 1), the entry level caving qualification, you are only qualified for specific caves. Caving also requires a fair amount of tying knots in muddy wet ropes, in the dark, perfect training for Scottish winter!

 

 

The reason I mention Caving is because it was the exposure too and hands on group management skills that I developed leading these sessions which I took forward into my career in the outdoors. The ability to quickly identify peoples abilities, goals and a certain amount of expectation management were all key to a successful Caving session. Judge a group too strong and/or over ambitious and it doesn’t take long to realise you’ve taken it too far in levels of challenge, but there’s also very little you can do. You can’t lower down and start again, you just have to ignore the crying and move on -not exactly a successful outcome, but pretty direct feedback! This skill was so crucial, that by the time I was leading groups on my own, I could pretty much tell you where I was going to go in the cave after walking 100m from the bus.

After Completing our LCMLA, the next step in our career was the Single Pitch Award (SPA), now the Rock Climbing Instructor. I had climbed indoors and done a handful of sport routes outside but the concept of trad gear and a staggeringly complicated (from the outside) grading system had never held much interest for me. Sarah and I did our first trad leads in Fairy Cave quarry, nearish Frome, and I loved it. It felt like exploring, a proper adventure where no one else had been before (despite the guide book and multiple ascents on UKC, along with the locked gate and access code….) complete exploration! We needed 20 leads to do our SPA training, which we completed in our trainee year and then 20 more at Severe or above for our assessment. We travelled to Dartmoor, climbing in the hail (an experience Sarah still remembers fondly), scared myself climbing loosely bonded sand on Brean Down (its only 4c, we climb way harder than that indoors…) and other trips to the Peak and North Wales, where we did our first multi-pitch – Pinnacle Rib Route on Tryfan, rebuilding each belay to take an upwards fall, because that’s what you do surely!? Gaining the pre-requisites for our SPA was a great adventure, we were surrounded by experienced people who would give us tips, sand bag us and laugh off our near misses as learning. It was great. We passed our assessment on Dartmoor and then were set loose onto real live sessions, with real live people. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so acutely aware that I potential held someones life in my hands as I did when rigging my first Abseil after assessment. No one to check it over, just my own judgement and knowledge to ensure everything was safe, a privilege that does not go un-noticed now, but the fear is gone, thankfully!

The big range of sessions we did at Mendip really helped cement all these processes and helped build a solid foundation for our careers. We could be running a birthday party the one day, and doing a charity abseil the next. This coupled with all the varying places we ran the sessions, lead to very varied practice, exactly what was needed.

If you have read the previous blog, you will know that, never mind how great caving and the folk at Mendip were, we wanted to move our careers to the mountains and a change. I had done some research and realised to work and live where I wanted to I was going to need my Mountain Leader. I had the pre-requisites for training, and Sarah wasn’t far off so we headed to the mountains, and built our log books, before completing our training in North Wales.

The training was a real eye-opener, before I had the of the impression that “mountain leading” was just guiding people on walks. I didn’t appreciate the depths and responsibility that a leader takes on. The training did an excellent job of showing us exactly what was needed, and how far we still had to go.

The consolidation period was again, a fantastic opportunity and excuse to explore the UK and all its amazing mountainous areas within it. We had many great adventures, got wet to our pants, stomped through bogs and started dreaming of contours but managed to both gain our Mountain Leaders shortly after moving to Wales and starting with The Outward Bound Trust. Outward Bound soon proved a great next step in our caeer, a place to hone our skills, and lead groups through Snowdonia and all over the Welsh mountains.

 

 

 

It was not long before we were pulled even further north and moved to Scotland. Scotland had held a certain allure to us ever since we went hunting for QMD’s (Quality Mountain Days) up there for our ML’s. Although we never imagined living up here, OB provided an opportunity to transfer to its Loch Eil centre, near Fort William which we snatched up. Leading groups in the Scottish Highlands was another exciting challenge, far different from North Wales or the Lakes; the openness and sheer expanse of nothingness is amazing and intimidating all at the same time. You are often miles from a road and signal with little discernible footpaths, but this gives you a great sense of wilderness and isolation which is hard to find any where else in the U.K. We bought our first home, two years after moving up to Scotland and haven’t looked back, we love it!

At the time of moving to Scotland, I had thought that it would be end of my climbing career, with stories of damp rock, horrendous midges and scary routes, I didn’t much fancy pursuing climbing too much. How wrong I was! What we found when we got here was a plethora of exploratory, adventurous routes, surrounded on all sides by majestic mountains and Lochs. Our climbing career, far from stopping, increased as we explored the varying mountain crags and scrambles, finding so much variety and adventure so close to home was fantastic. There’s multiple lifetimes of adventure to be had in the highlands, the hardest part of it all is deciding where to start and what to do!

 

 

 

How does this all apply to forging a career in the outdoors I hear you cry? Well, I for one have long wanted to be able to share my passion and knowledge for the mountains with as many people as possible. I have also wanted to be able to do this without worrying whether I was qualified enough or not, so I set myself a pathway, to become a Mountaineering and Climbing Instructor and to hold the Winter Mountain Leader award. This would allow me to take people up into the mountains throughout the year, and in the summer, to lead, guide and coach folk on all aspects of mountaineering across the U.K. I decided this is what I wanted to do when I was living in Weston-Super-Mare. In the South West of England. Along way from most mountainous areas and definitely along way from winter conditions. Without racking up considerable fuel and accommodation expenses, the only way forward for me was to try and move to one of the main mountainous areas within the U.K. ideally Scotland or the Lake District. Having this as an overriding caeer and life aim meant that when the opportunity to move to Fort William presented itself, it was an easy decision to say “yes” and get down to the task at hand. It was then, the not so easy task,of gaining the prerequisites for training, attending training courses, consolidating and presenting myself for assessment.

 

 

 

I mapped this all out on a timeline and tried to be as reasonable as possible whilst also pushing myself to try and make sure these qualifications didn’t hang over me for too long and completely control my life. For me, this worked really well and I was able to complete both awards in 2020.

Throughout my career in the Outdoors, I have been lucky to lead, guide, instruct, coach and teach a whole host of different people, across the world, and have my own adventures, develop knowledge and experience and am now in a place where I can confidently carry on that journey. Below are a couple of points that I found particularly useful through out this time, hopefully they are useful for you too!