Windy Tops

Category: courses

  • Learning and Instruction

    Today I attended an outdoor first aid refresher course, which is the regular course required every two years to retain an existing outdoor first aid certificate. This instance of the course was run by the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council, an organisation dedicated to encouraging safe practices outdoors. Members of the MSC help to design and to teach courses on a variety of topics, of which First Aid is only one.

    Anyone can sign up to an MSC course, as long as the course pre-requisites are met. For those generally interested in outdoor safety, however, the MSC encourages people to join as instructors. Presently throughout New Zealand the MSC has and handful of paid staff, but its main strength is in over 1000 volunteer instructors. Researching best practices, designing and running the courses and comprehensive training material helps to spread the knowledge further among the outdoor community, but encouraging people to train to be instructors also helps to reinforce and embed what skills are learned. It’s a really cool philosophy and culture in which people continue to use the skills by learning to teach the skills.
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  • Learning to slide down a mountain

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    Looking over Whakapapa Skifield,
    Mt Ruapehu.

    For two of the last three weekends I’ve been taking a snowcraft course with tongue and meats up at Mt Ruapehu. The course is basically a toned down alpine course, which includes things like ice-axe and crampon use, but doesn’t go as far as covering ropes. (I’ll leave that for later.) It’s been a lot of fun, even though the weather hasn’t been too co-operative.
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  • Outdoor First Aid was fun

    Last weekend I hopped onto a first aid course being run by the Mountain Safety Council, which I thoroughly recommend. Thanks to Bridget and Richard who ran the thing, as well as everyone else who would have been involved behind the scenes. Among other things, I reinforced my belief that I’m not a very good actor. My worst effort was when I was supposed to be playing a person with a broken leg. When asked about my age, I somehow accidentally pulled age 14 out of nowhere, momentarily forgetting that another aspect of my character was that he was supposed to be suffering from angina. Overall it was a good weekend, though. There was a lot to it and I’ll really only learn things properly with experience, but I’m hoping I’ve picked up some good ways to structure my thoughts rather than panic if and when bad things happen. (Acronyms like DRABCS, SAMPLE and WRAPT are good ones to remember.)

    In other news, I finally busted my relatively cheap altimeter a couple of weeks ago (during the Renata trip), which isn’t entirely unexpected given I haven’t been going to great lengths to look after it. That particular one was a bit unreliable on occasions in any case, including when compared with other altimeters on the same trips, and more of an interesting toy and something to practice with rather than something I’d want to rely on for an accurate reading. Now I finally have a good excuse to go shopping for something worthwhile.

    Anyway, we’re off to the Ruahine Range this weekend, to make another attempt at getting from Rangiwahia over to Sawtooth, and back around via Pourangaki. We first attempted this about 6 weeks ago in March, but it just rained and rained and a couple of things unfortunately went wrong.