Contents

Winter Skills Courses

Vegan and Vegetarian Walking Holidays for 2011

Sponsored / Challenge Events

New Members

Welcome

It has been a busy year for Lupine Adventure Co-op. Our Vegan Walking Holiday on the Isle of Skye was a roaring success. Our Duke of Edinburgh's Award work took us to Cumbria, Derbyshire, West and North Yorkshire and Northumberland. And we ran a number of sponsored mountain challenges, raising money for a variety of hospices, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, The Youth Cancer Trust and Viva to name a few. As well as all this we ran rock climbing sessions, winter skills courses and taught a lot of people navigation skills to help them help themselves around the mountains in the future.

But now, as we are entering our quiet period of the year until the winter skills courses kick off, I thought I'd take the opportunity to fire off the latest edition of our thrice-yearly mailing (I'm not even pretending to do it quarterly any more).

Winter Skills Courses

We're already taking bookings for this winter and hope to run our first winter skills course of the season in December in Snowdonia (snow depending). Throughout the winter we're available for winter skills courses in Snowdonia and the Glen Coe / Ben Nevis area of Scotland. Check the winter skills page on our website for details of when we will be at each location.

Between 10th-14th January we are running 5 days of winter skills training around Fort William in Scotland. You can book on for as many or as few days as you like. We'll be starting off with movement skills and ice axe breaking (sounds basic but there is quite a lot to it) and progress throughout the week to cover (in rough order of appearance) Ice axe use while walking, weather and avalanche forecasts, route choice, navigation, snow pack analysis, emergency shelter building, navigation, kit, snow belays, cornice approach and group management (for when out with your mates) and yet more navigation.  Again, take a look at the website for full details of what we are planning.

Vegan and Vegetarian Walking Holidays for 2011

We've decided to run 3 walking holidays in 2011. We're going back to Skye for a week on 14th May, we've booked accommodation in Keswick (in the North Lake District) for a week beginning 9th July and intend to go to Glen Coe in September. If you are interested in any of the 3 holidays please do get in touch. Bookings are open for the Skye and Lake District holidays and you can receive a £100 discount by booking before the end of December. We aren't currently taking formal bookings for Glen Coe but if you are interested please let us know and we'll be sure to tell you when bookings open.

The walking holidays we run are (if I do say so myself) fantastic, each year people come back for more and we've already taken bookings for 2011. Unlike many such holidays we hire a cottage for the week take at least 2 Mountain Leaders to supervise the walking. This means that while most days everyone does go out together we have the option of splitting the group if some people want to do something a bit more challenging that the rest of the group aren't really into.

"...the leaders were always careful to respond to the wishes of each guest - which meant that we could enjoy all the social benefits of a group holiday, but still feel like individuals. No mean feat, managing all that for a group of disparate strangers!"

Katherine Anderson

For a report of our 2010 Skye Holiday please take a look at our website. There is also a photo album here.

Sponsored / Challenge Events

2010 was our first year of dipping our toes in the water of running sponsored mountain challenges. It is an area that we are expanding on and are currently researching a more varied menu of such challenges to offer. In 2010 we ran Yorkshire 3 peaks and Welsh 3000's events and are well up for doing more of this in 2011. We have teamed up with the Nightingale House Hospice and continuing our relationship with the Youth Cancer Trust. If you know of any other charities who would like our help in running these sorts of events then please put us in touch with them. Additionally, if you fancy getting a team together to have a go at such a mountain challenge then you know were we are.

New Members

As the year drew to a close we decided that it was time to expand the membership. We invited freelancers who had worked over a certain number of sessions throughout the year to become full members of the Co-op. Ben, Giles and Katy decided to become full members at once and Cat (a founding member of the co-op) has taken on extra work for the co-op with a view to joining when she has the time. We will be adding their biogs to the About us page on the website in due course.

Katy Nelson	Ben Barnard	Giles Lane

So that's it for now and until the new year when we hope to have more information on various new areas of business. Namely, our new mountain challenges, walks tailored for school groups (geography field trips and the like) and we are going to develop our navigation training into a more rounded mountain skills course.

In the meantime if you have a better word than thrice-yearly that I can use in future mailings then please do let me know.

Andy Godfrey

Get in touch

Please take a look at our web site for more and fuller information on all our activities. If you would like to ask any questions  then please feel free to reply to this e-mail or give us a bell on 0845 217 8917 or 07963 324 399.

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