First session
- Revision of climbing calls and communication.
- Revision of how to belay lead climbers and bring up seconds.
- Organizing equipment on a belay stance.
- Placing runners: friends and nuts, correct placement and what to do when they get jammed.
- We will visit a crag to climb some pitches using a mixture of our own placed runners and fixed bolts. You will need to pluck up the courage to trust falling on your gear in order to learn how to place runners effectively and when they are not worth placing.
- Other clean protection: threads, vegetation, trees.
- “Ironmongery” with pitons and hammers. We will practice repeated peg placements because this is an important element in traditional mountaineering that requires experience and technique.
Second session
- Belays are fundamental components in the safety chain.
- There is some confusion about this subject because of the many alternatives, but we will establish a clearly defined system.
- Setting up belays using our own equipment or in-situ gear, we learn to recognize how good placements are and how to back them up.
- Setting up and testing a belay by dropping a tyre from above.
- Using half ropes and how to arrange them with runners along a pitch.
- Multiple abseils down unknown faces.
Third Session
- Choosing a route, learning to read a description and understand whether it is within our capabilities.
- Various aspects of walking in to a route.
- Climbing a traditional multipitch route.
