William Skea’s Mentorship for Ice Climbing, Mixed Climbing, and Alpinism during the New Zealand Mixed & Ice Festival
Hi everyone! I created this group to gather expressions of interest for mentorship by myself at this year’s Ice and Mixed Festival in the Remarkables, New Zealand. The festival runs from 12-15 August, with daily talks from famous climbers, events, and film festivals each night.
Because I am only one person, I can only mentor 2 people at a time during this festival. I can however extend my flights and stay on there for all of August to run 2-3 trips in a row with each person or couple. I am avaliable from 12 August and beyond.
I’ll write an online application form on my website for everyone to submit soon – i’ll post the link here. Once I have everyone’s applications submitted on my website, I will work out what we can do to maximize everyone’s ability to do a trip.
This course is intended for experienced multipitch rock climbers, as ice and mixed climbing builds on those skills and is certainly ‘next level’ in exposure and adventure. I can rock guide in Australia before the trip to get participants as ready and experienced as possible if they feel they need more improvement in their climbing skills first. I’m guiding at Mount Arapiles, Victoria, for all of April, if anyone is free to come down for some days multipitch trad climbing. Then I am in the Blue Mountains where I can guide multipitch trad, sport, aid, speed climbing, and rope rescue skills.
This trip to New Zealand will be about everything alpinism, beginning with toprope ice and mixed climbing, followed by rope rescue, mountaineering and glacier travel skills, avalanche forecasting and analysis,
then some grand multipitch adventures on real peaks where all our learnt skills come together. There’s several great multipitches in the Remarkables but it might be possible to do an objective like Mount Aspiring via the South West Ridge at the end of the trip. We would need a minimum 5-6 days together to get to that level. For deciding on who I can mentor, I would lean preference towards those I can spent the most days with to maximize your mentorship progression and opportunities for objectives.
The cost of the trip will start with a deposit just to book our flights and so I can order some equipment I need to guide ice, then a final payment before the trip which is probably best done at the end of June as it’s all tax deductible as a donation so you can claim everything off your income right away come the next financial year. The flights are currently $900 return, all accommodation can be in hostels for $20-$30 per night per person, food will be covered for about $60-$80 per day, then guiding fees will be about $250-$300 per day as an amount that doesn’t put my charity at a loss for making a profit towards cat rescues as I need to use some of it to buy guiding equipment. Everything will be written as a trip package so you can donate for all of it and then my charity purchases it. Estimate would be $4-6000 for 7-10 days. All equipment provided.