Mountaineering is much more accessible from Delhi than many of us realise, with comfortable and affordable overnight buses to great places like Manali and Dharamsala. Decathlon and other outdoors gear stores have helped lower the cost of acquiring high quality equipment, so it is now possible to acquire light weight and dependable equipment for trekking and mountaineering, and be self reliant when doing trips away from teahouses and villages.
Delhi Rock is working with a few of the avid mountaineers from our community to organise a mountaineering program. As with our other trips, these are run in a club format, so everybody pitches in time and effort, and costs are split equally. We have folks in the group who’ve done both the basic and advanced courses (or their equivalent) from NIMS/HMI, so we’ll be helping share and propagate those skills. Our goal is to, for perhaps the first time, have a self-sufficient and club-format mountaineering community based out of Delhi.
The program for 2016 consists of the following:
Tuesday, 29 March: Meet and greet, review program and goals. At Delhi Rock, 1.5 hrs in the evening. Discuss basic glacier travel principles and equipment, prepare for first practical outside.
Saturday, 2 April: First trip to Dhauj to review glacier travel, being roped up, and crampon and axe usage. All day. We’ll spend the day out practicing being roped up and travelling on steep slopes with axes and crampons.
Thursday, 14 April – Monday, 18 April: Manali trip. We’ll pick a nearby snowy peak, most likely Patalsu, to go and climb and practice our ropework on. Also a good conditioner and shakeout for climbing with a full pack.
Tuesday, 26 April: Crevasse rescue technique review, avalanche and routefinding considerations. Theory session, at Delhi Rock in the evening, 2 hrs.
Saturday, 30 April: Second trip to Dhauj to practice prusiking out of a crevasse, passing stakes and fixed points. All day. This will be a more technical outing, and we’ll cover good ground on actual crevasse fall situations.
Thursday, 12 May – Monday, 16 May: Dharamsala or Manali trip. We’ll pick a higher peak this time, and try to go relatively fast. Another conditioner and snow camping trainer.
2016 expedition: Hanuman Tibba, xxx – yyy
Lin/Ruta: What are the dates for this?
In order to participate, you will need to:
1) Train consistently to be fit enough to carry all of your own personal gear, plus group gear, running to about 20-25 kilos, over an extended period of time at altitude. Here’s a post on fitness you can consult.
2) Acquire all of the modern personal gear you need to do the training trips and the expedition. This has to be light-weight and high spec, so that you are comfortable and do not present a liability to the group. See this list for what is required.
3) Purchase a copy of Freedom of the Hills, 8th Edition. This is the reference book we’ll be using for all of our technical training, so everybody should have a copy to read and refer to. You can pick one up at Amazon.
If you’d like to take part in our program, please sign up at the link below:
http://goo.gl/forms/mzKfApVhTD
Many thanks! The organisers for the 2016 Delhi Mountaineers program are:
Anuraag Tiwari
Eirliani (Lin) Rahman
Ruta Sidlauskaite
One of us will contact you after you sign up so that we can assess your readiness and start including you in our coordination groups. If you have any questions, please e-mail team@delhirock.com.
