BMC Student Seminar 2008

It was that time of the year, the annual BMC Student seminars held at the national outdoor centre that is Plas-y-Brenin.

After along day at work I popped over to my friend’s house and promptly got some kip in ready for the 5:30am wake up ready for our 2 hour drive to Llanberis. We got there in time to munch some chocolate and great some of the others.

The first few hours we spent in the main hall, learning about club responsibilities and transport, a break for lunch then the activity began.

Matt Cooke took the choice of ………while Myself went for the indoor rock training for the afternoon, 3 hours or learning new ways to train and having a go for ourselves. We ma not have done anything hard but climbing for that long doing something different every 5 mins really warn us all out, to the point of wondering if we would have any energy for the evenings bouldering comp, having said that the afternoon was great fun and we all took something away with us that im sure will be extremely useful in the future.

In the early evening being a centre full of students, everyone headed straight for the bar were we spent the night swapping tales and getting to know each other. Looking outside the river was still flooding, rain was horizontal and the wind was picking up. The idea of driving just down the road to set up our campsite didn’t fill us with any joy so the idea of just kipping in the van in the staff car park seemed fine, time now for more beer we thought, great!!!

Sunday morning we had a nice early wake up with many people giving us remarks as we sat in the car park with our tables and chairs out to cook a fry up.

We all went our separate ways, myself going for the single pitch training and Matt Cooke multi pitch training for the day.

It was cold,, it was damp, it wasn’t worth getting our shoes out of our bags when we got to willies crag, so a couple of ropes were slowly set up and we all talked to keep warm. After about an hour the sun decided to help us and slowly warmed up the crag, still we were talking our time talking and having the random climb or play every so often but we still learnt an awful lot from everyone in the group.

And that was pretty much the weekend, well worth it and thanks to all the volunteers and the BMC for it.