From Guided Days to Going Alone: John's Journey
Journey 003 | Progression
April 2025 onwards
Walking | Scrambling | Navigation | Welsh 3000s | The Lab
John was on the very first guided Mountain Craft mountain day.
It was Saturday 26 April 2025, an open group on the Nantlle Ridge. Mountain Craft was still very new at that point and John was simply one of the people who booked a place. He already had plenty of mountain experience, so this isn't a story about somebody starting from scratch. What has changed since then is the ground he is comfortable tackling, how much of the planning and decision making he now does himself, and the sort of mountain days he considers realistic.
The easiest way for me to see that change is probably through our messages. Early on I was sending meeting details and deciding where we were going. These days John is quite likely to send me a GPX file he has drawn himself and ask what I think of a particular descent, river crossing or bit of obscure ground he's considering using to make a route work.
The first year
After Nantlle there were more days together and gradually more scrambling and rough ground. Bristly Ridge came into the mix, and later I took John and his friend Derek over Moel Hebog, Moel yr Ogof and Moel Lefn before we finished on Castell, a slightly random scrambly summit that made a good end to the route. Once we were beyond Hebog we saw nobody else all day.
A lot of our days also involved far more discussion than simply how to get up the next bit of mountain. John is interested in navigation, route choice, weather, kit and why one option might make more sense than another. If I mentioned something I used or suggested a piece of equipment, there was also a decent chance I'd receive several messages afterwards once he'd disappeared down the corresponding research rabbit hole.
That carried on into 2026, by which point we were deliberately doing days where the skills and decisions mattered as much as whatever summit happened to be on the map.
Rhobell Fawr without Rhobell Fawr
We had Rhobell Fawr and Dduallt planned for an April day in 2026, but the forecast had gusts of around 60 to 70mph higher up. There wasn't much point marching onto an exposed summit just because that happened to be the original plan, so we stayed low and went into Cwm yr Allt Lwyd instead.
It became a pretty full on micro navigation day in rain, strong wind and periods of poor visibility. We spent most of the day below about 550 metres, moving between smaller features, practising bearings, measuring distance and working out exactly where we were on fairly uncompromising ground.
We didn't get anywhere near the summits we had originally intended to climb. That really didn't matter. John was increasingly interested in being able to make his own decisions in the mountains, and a day spent navigating accurately in rubbish weather was directly useful for that.
Welsh 3000s and the Blackout
At the end of April 2026 John joined one of my three-day Welsh 3000s groups. That put three big consecutive mountain days into the mix and gave us plenty of time to talk through navigation, route reading and how decisions change when you're tired and dealing with several days rather than one isolated outing.
Around the same time I was developing something rather less normal.
John knew I was putting together the first Solstice Blackout before I had properly finished it and had already told me he wanted to be involved. The idea was 24 hours in the mountains with no known route, no client phones or cameras and an overnight camp. Once he committed, the practical side became its own project. Tent options, cooking kit, water, pack weight and how much stuff he really wanted to carry all got investigated in fairly serious detail.
By the time we actually met for the Blackout in June, John had bought and tested his shelter, loaded his pack for training walks and thought through most of the things that could conceivably be thought through beforehand. Then I took his phone away and didn't tell him where we were going.
It worked. The group camped out, had an extraordinary solstice evening and, after the initial oddness of nobody being able to reach for a phone, settled into it remarkably quickly. For John it was another quite different bit of mountain experience to add to everything else we had been doing.
Then the messages started changing
The biggest progression probably wasn't another guided route at all.
In early June John sent me a message after going out independently around the Carneddau. He'd been doing more navigation work on his own and then tackled Crib Lem in less than perfect conditions. He stopped below the scramble, looked at the weather, checked the guidebook, considered turning around and then continued when things improved.
What interested me wasn't simply that he'd completed it. It was the process. He was thinking about whether the conditions, route and his own confidence actually justified carrying on, and was perfectly prepared to go home if they didn't.
His message afterwards said the navigation work we'd done had given him “a real confidence boost for my solo forays” and that lessons from our scrambling days had come back when he needed them. That's far more useful feedback to me than somebody simply saying they'd enjoyed a guided day.
By late July he was sending me a proposed circular route over the Aran ridge and asking what I thought of a descent from Drysgol and the stream crossings below. We went backwards and forwards over the map, I suggested an easier escape option, and John went out and made his own call on the ground.
The result was just under 22km, a little over 1,000m of ascent and about seven and a quarter hours. He altered part of his original plan, navigated the return through unfamiliar ground and came back having learnt quite a bit about which bits of his planned line were sensible and which were less useful than they had looked on a screen.
Back onto steeper ground
Not long afterwards John took that progression back onto scrambling terrain.
He put together a day involving Tryfan's North Ridge and Bristly Ridge, with the Bochlwyd Horseshoe forming the wider journey. Visibility wasn't particularly generous and he had to work hard to identify the correct line into Sinister Gully, at one point realising he had drifted too far towards the scree descent before correcting himself.
Again, the bit I found interesting was his account afterwards. He'd studied the route beforehand, carried the guidebook, kept checking his position and recognised when what he was seeing on the ground didn't match what he expected. A few months earlier he had told me he wouldn't have contemplated attempting a route like that independently.
By August he was doing exactly that.
He described it afterwards as “another brick in the experience wall” and said he was already looking at more Grade 1 and 1+ scrambles, while also being sensible enough to point out that the mountains would still be there next year.
Good. That's basically the balance I want.
Still coming back
None of this means John suddenly stopped booking guided days.
He came back for the Rhinogydd 700s again in August 2026. He had already done the route once but had missed Diffwys, as had Jason, another returning client on the same day. I reversed the normal direction of the route and ran it anticlockwise so both of them could finally include the summit they had missed previously.
That's one of the nice things about having people come back repeatedly. It stops being a case of selling somebody another generic mountain day. I already know what John has done, what he enjoys, what he is working towards and which gaps are still sitting there annoying him.
There will probably be more of both. More guided days, and more messages containing a GPX file followed by some version of “does this look completely stupid?”
John has also started talking about whether a 24-hour Welsh 3000s attempt might be realistic in 2027. A year earlier he was joking that his legs wouldn't manage it. I'm not making any promises on that one yet, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
What I like most about John's journey is that the guided days haven't simply produced more guided days. They've fed into what he does for himself. He's still asking questions, still occasionally checking a route with me and still joining Mountain Craft trips, but he's also out making his own decisions on unfamiliar ground, changing plans when he needs to and coming back with another bit of experience in the bank.
For me, that's exactly what progression should look like.
ABOUT JOURNEYS
Journeys is where I tell some of the longer Mountain Craft stories that don't really fit into a normal trip report.
Some are about one big objective. Others, like this one, make more sense when you look at what has happened over a much longer period.
