As a Course Provider and Director for the Mountain Leader award, I’m often asked by people who are in the early stages of thinking about tackling the award, just how to go about it. This blog will hopefully help you in those early stages, explaining the pathway to getting yourself ready to book on a Mountain Leader training course.

Go do some hillwalking. First of all, the Mountain Leader is a leadership award. It’s about you being responsible for the safety of other people in your group, out in a hostile environment. So, to make the most of any possible future training course, you’ll need to have some experience of hillwalking. Go enjoy days out on the high mountains of the Lake District, Snowdonia, or Scotland. You’re not expected to have climbed everything, but you do need to have done a bit of hillwalking. When the time comes to start your Mountain Leader training, we’d like you to have done around 20 days walking in the hills.

Register with Mountain Training. Mountain Training is the collection of awarding bodies for skills courses and qualifications in walking, climbing and mountaineering in the UK and Ireland. For you to do the Mountain Leader award, you first have to register with Mountain Training. But, to register with Mountain Training for an award, you also have to be a member of one of the national mountaineering councils, so that’s either the British Mountaineering Council, Mountaineering Scotland, or Mountaineering Ireland. You can join the Council of your choice, regardless of where you live, and there are benefits to each:

These two things are what you need to do first of all – join a Council, then register with Mountain Training:

Start a log book recording the days you’ve had out in the mountains. Going back to those days you’ve had hillwalking. Mountain Training, and ultimately, the Course Provider you choose to do your ML training course with, need to know what you’ve done in the mountains. When you registered for the ML with Mountain Training you gained access to their online log book, known as DLOG. In here you can record all the walks you’ve done, and this is what ML trainers and assessors use to get a measure of just how experienced you are. And you can use DLOG to log rock climbs, winter climbs, overseas trekking, skiing, fellrunning, and a whole host of other activities too! 

I’m often asked if you can put into your DLOG walks that you’ve done previously, prior to registering, and the answer is yes, of course! The 20 walks you need to have done before your training course can have been completed at any time, not just after registration, although ideally some of them should be recent. We want to know what walking you’ve enjoyed prior to coming on a training course, and that could be from ten year’s ago, or just the day before the training course starts. Put everything in there!

The key phase that you’ll come across over and over again as you work towards becoming a Mountain Leader is ‘Quality Mountain Day’. We want you to log all of your walks, but we also want you to identify the ones that were particularly special. How long where you out? Which mountains did you climb? What did you see along the way? Did you learn anything while you were out there? Did you plan the walk and do the navigation? Who were you with? What was the weather like? These are all the relevant points we’d like to know from you, as it helps us to build up a picture of the level of your experience.

Download the Handbook. This is the nitty-gritty of everything you need to know to work through the scheme, and to become a Mountain Leader. You will need to refer to the Handbook time and time again as you work towards achieving the award. Print it off, and leave it somewhere where you’ll pick it up and read it regularly.

Book on a Mountain Leader training course. Once you’ve done all of the above, and have logged 20 Quality Mountain Days, it’s time to do a Mountain Leader training course. Mountain Training don’t run the courses themselves. They have chosen and trained a number of Course Providers and Course Directors to deliver their courses. You can choose whichever Course Provider you wish. For details of the Mountain Leader courses I am offering, go to Graham Uney Mountaineering – Mountain Leader. When you book, you pay your course fees to the provider, and they’ll want to know your candidate number, which you will have got from Mountain Training when you register. This number enables the Course Provider to log you onto that particular course, so that it will show on your DLOG once the course is over. You’ll need this when you come to go for assessment, so make sure you give the provider your candidate number!

Turn up and enjoy six days of hillwalking. The Mountain Leader training course is run over six days, regardless of which provider you choose to do the course with. Some providers do it over a couple of split weekends, but most prefer to run the training course in a single 6-day block. Lots of people worry that they’re not ready for the training course. Remember, it is just that. A training course. You’re not expected to turn up ready to be assessed. You’ll learn loads during the week, and hopefully you’ll continue to learn throughout the whole process of becoming a Mountain Leader and beyond.

So, that’s all you need to do to start on the road to becoming a Mountain Leader. To recap, in a nutshell, you need to:

I’ll be writing further blogs on what to expect on the assessment course, and other aspects of being a Mountain leader, so keep checking back! You might also find my pages on Quality Mountain Days useful.

I'll hopefully see you soon on your Mountain Leader training course, but in the meantime, don’t hesitate to drop me an email if you want to discuss any aspect of becoming a Mountain Leader.

Email me at info@grahamuneymountaineering.co.uk, or call on 01931 713351 or 07498 058912