Resources for Continuing Education for Climbers, Skiers and Rescuers

During the shelter-in-place/lockdown/quarantine it's come to our attention that many people are looking for resources to continue their education as backcountry travelers. This blog pulls together some resources for you to explore while you're at home...

Mt. Baker with the moon, early in the morning from Mt. Shuksan.

Before we jump into anything else, I wanted to note that we regularly provide links to interesting articles, blogs, videos and podcasts on our Facebook Page .

Here are our recommendations by category:

Training

For rock climbing training, you might explore, Lattice Training and Training for Climbing. These are training sites/podcasts/instagram/facebook resources. Do a search on your preferred platform. Additionally, the TrainingBeta podcast is really good.

Gripped has a whole pile of free at-home training plans right now. Do a search on their site to go through a progression. And Climbing has been promoting this paid Six Weeks to Stronger Fingers program for awhile.

If you have a home wall, then you might look at Mani the Monkey's youtube page. He's got a lot of great tips as well.

For alpine and ski training, check out Uphill Athlete. This is a paid site, but they have posted at least one plan for free.

I built a drytool training circuit on my deck using door-hinges.

My kids are using it for PE during the pandemic.

Technical Education

As noted, our Blog and Facebook Page are an excellent place to start with this. But you should also check out the AMGA Facebook and Instagram (often the same material) pages. There is a ton of good material there.

Skiing and Avalanche

My favorite skiing podcasts are the Totally Deep Backcountry Skiing podcast and the Next Level Skiing podcast. Both are super engaging and provide some thoughtful tips for backcountry skiers.

The Avalanche Hour is a great podcast for those who spend a lot of time in the backcountry. And the presentations from the Northwest Snow and Avalanche Workshop on youtube are priceless.

Rescue and Accidents

For general climbing and skiing, the Sharp End Podcast is exceptional. This provides in-depth analysis of accidents in North American climbing.

For the mountain rescue community, the following podcasts provide a tremendous amount of insight on different topics:

• Rescuer MBS - This podcast looks primarily at stress injuries suffered by those in the mountain rescue community.
• Ronin RescueCast - This is a rope rescue nerd dream world. It includes a combination of discussions on techniques and technical rescue case studies.
• The Fine Line - This podcast specifically addresses mountain rescue incidents in the Tetons and Wind River ranges of Wyoming. It is very well done.

Let me know what I missed, and I'll add them to the running list!

--Jason D. Martin