Saturday 29 September 2012

The £3,000,000 mountain


So today I wandered up and down the Ben for West Coast Mountaineering.  The clients were raising money to get an electric wheelchair for one of their sons, Tom, who is suffering from Muscular Dystrophy.  The effort they put in today really impressed me and then they mentioned how much they managed to raise: a whopping £17,000.
Working on the walk you sometimes forget what it's about for the clients and the amount of effort they have put in just to get to the actual day of the walk.  So it got me thinking, as you do when you're plodding along in your own wee world.  My guesstimate would put a 1,000+ people on the Ben today, most of which were raising money for various charities.  If each person managed to raise the same as my party, a staggering £3,000,000 could have been raised for charity today from one great mountain.
An incredible achievement by all those involved today.  Special mention to my company for the day: Andrea, Jason, John, Gethin and other John

Friday 28 September 2012

The start of something...

So after putting this off for a long time I'm finally jumping on to the band wagon and blogging.
As I look at friends blogs I've always thought how useful they are and also how burdensome they can be.  But now as I am planning a wider range of work and fun for myself I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

So over the next few months I've accidentally left myself unemployed for a period of time due to being let down by a potential employer.  This has made me look at bit closer at why I got into this industry, where I am now and where I want to get to.

It was a trip to Spain 7 years ago that that fired up my passion for climbing and I decided then to change what I was doing and now 7 years later  I am planning my first working trip to Spain to see if I can make a success of guiding out there.

The next few weeks will be both exciting and very scary but having taught students to push themselves and try very hard, it is about time I walked the talk....