Full Transcript of Alpine Story with Iona Pawson

Please note this talk was transcribed by a robot and then checked by a human. both are prone to errors, so please forgive any typos or poor grammar.

Louise Kennedy [00:17:45] Hi, everyone. How you doing? Welcome to the fourth of our fun stories we're super excited to have Iona here tonight talking about her ski mountaineering. And if you've missed them, you've missed three high quality talks. We've had Tomain Gay talking about her expeditions in Greenland. Fantastic to hear about her climbing an unclimbed peak with two TV hunks and that TV film crew for the BBC. We also had, Lou, last week talking about the Grandes Courses, her experience leading up to becoming an aspirant guide. And also, we had Sylvia from the Dolomites come and talk to us about her Patagonian adventures. So all of those talks are available on the website now. You can catch up at your leisure. And just before we start, I'm here to just give you a little bit of background about who we are and then we'll get started.

Louise Kennedy [00:18:46] So Women's Alpine Adventure Club, we are a community dedicated to helping women achieve their alpine dreams, and we do that by getting together and sharing skills and having workshops in the mountains around rock climbing, ice climbing, ski touring, navigation, alpinism, all the skills you might need to meet in the Alpine terrain. And we also have a Web site that we have favourite routes on. We have obviously all the talks like this. We also have skills, videos like Crevasse rescue, et cetera. So you do use that as a valuable resource. So just before I kind of go on to introduce Jenny and Iona just a little bit about housekeeping around this. Cool. So you may have noticed we've muted all your mics and the same for video. And we do ask that you do that throughout the talk. Just say that it's not distracting for Iona as she speaks. We will have Q&A time at the end and you'll be able to submit your questions. Jenny, will walk you through how you can raise your hand digitally so that you can get your question answered at the end, but also you can write them in the chat box. And hopefully loads of you guys have already been writing the chat box to tell us where you're from. Please keep doing that. It's really nice to know, too, if we can't see your faces, at least know where you're from. And then. Yeah, and the Q&A just wait to be called upon until you ask your question. And it's up to you. You can put your mic on any video on and actually have a chat with us and share a question in person. Or if you're feeling a little bit shy, then that's no problem at all. We're happy to ask the question for you. All the talks are being recorded and we're also live on Facebook just so that we can make this publicly available talks. So just so that you're aware of that before you speak.

Louise Kennedy [00:20:39] And that's it really from any from housekeeping. I don't think I've forgotten anything, but I'm sure. Jenny, will remind me if I have and then I'm going to talk to Jenny and you're going to. She said. Thanks, Jen.

Jenny Dart [00:20:52] Hi, everyone. Just to briefly check in for Iona.

Jenny Dart [00:20:58] We're thrilled to have Iona to join us on our series of stories. So Iona is a self-confessed ski mountaineering obsessive. She always is talking, right? Ski mountaineering, pulking ultralight. Well, that kind of stuff. She's going to tell us a little bit about her journeys in the mountains, how she got into ski touring, ski mountaineering. And then tell us about a couple of her big trips. She is a mountaineering climbing instructor and an international Mountain Leader. And she's based in North Wales during the summer where he has a friend in the National Mountain Centre. And in the winter, she disappears off somewhere snowy, wherever that might be, to have some adventures and also work towards her qualifications. So I know you want to turn on your video and mic. Thank you so much for joining us this evening.

Iona Pawson [00:21:53] Hi. Thank you so much for Introducing me Jenny. And I'm thrilled to be here to chat about my adventures, all of you. So I'm just going to just a little technical thing as I get control of the screen.

Iona Pawson [00:22:12] Oh, awesome. OK.

Iona Pawson [00:22:15] So the same thing I'm going to talk to you all a little bit by my journey into the mountains, how I got into this sort of sport of ski mountaineering, if you like, this hobby and also some of the trips I've been on. So I got to talk mostly about a ski trip to Mt. Logan in Canada and then two more recent trips to Scandinavia as well. And then will be a very short little video at the end so you can sort of see it in real life, as it were. And then that's it. Then it'll be time for questions and answers.

Iona Pawson [00:22:47] So during the summer months, as Jenny said, I work mostly in Snowdonia, predominantly for Plas y Brenin, but also for a few other people as well. And I just take people into the mountains, teach some things, have a really good time. This is a picture of me with some two clients on the first of a multi pitch rock climbing rates on Idwal slabs last summer. And then during the winter time I used to spend a lot of time in the Alps, spend less so nowadays. But one of the things I loved about living the Alps was teaching skiing. That's what I did as a profession. But of course, living and being based in Verbier means that you've got this picture here, but an hour from the top of the highest ski lift. And that's amazing because it means on all your days off, you can just get out and explore and go ski touring and have all sorts of adventures right out front.

Iona Pawson [00:23:38] More recently, though, this has been my view in the winter, so spent a lot more time in Scotland and in the UK as I've worked towards my winter mountain leader qualification and done a bit of suffering and got a bit better at navigating some whiteouts.

Iona Pawson [00:23:54] But really in the winter. Well, I love my holidays. And some will see this sort of picture. And that's not a holiday because I've got a massive rucksack on and I'm towing a pulk, which is essentially like a toy sled, if you like. It's like a really advanced sledge. And we connect it to ourselves using plastic plumbing pipe because it doesn't get brittle in the cold. It's quite flexible. And it's a lot easier and lighter than using metal rods like some people use when they carry pulks in the mountains. OK. So why do I do it? Well, the reason why I like taking a massive rucksack into the middle of nowhere is essentially to go skiing. I'm not going to see anybody else or very few people, you know, so we can have all the self resilience and sort of reliance as a team and we can decide where we're going to go and what we're going to ski. We can get in the first tracks in the powder. We could have the closest thing to a true adventure you could have at the moment. I think in that sort of snowy environments. And I just love that. I love that feeling of having everything you need to survive for. It might be for a week, might be for four weeks. It's just amazing. It's so cool. So why did it begin? Well, I was lucky enough to have parents who I think are actually watching evening who sort of took me. This is me, my sister in the Alps. They took us on lots of trekking holidays as kids. And I think for me, that really opened my eyes up to the mountains. And I knew that I would enjoy being in them. But I also used to see people tied together, with ropes on the glacier, on the top left in the ski resorts. And I sort of think like, I really want to do that. And I would go to lectures at the Royal Geographical Society in London because my dad was a member and I always sit there and be like, wow, all these mountaineers when they talked about their stories of first descents and things. And I just thought, yeah, I really want to do that. And I I'm sticking my hands up and being like, how do I become a mountaineer? And the guy he was talking at the time just sort of said, well, you just have to go climbing a bit. And I was like, right, okay. Well, I guess I'm going to have to find someone that goes climbing a bit because I don't know anyone that does, but but it sowed the seeds for things to come. So it wasn't until I took a gap year off the school that I first started getting my first few pay cheques in and was really fortunate to live at home rent free, which then meant I could buy things like my first ever ice axe, which I still used today quite a few years later. I love it. And then, of course, you know, why do you go to learn to be a mountaineer? Well, I thought, well, you go to Nepal don't you. That's where all the mountaineering is. So I went to Nepal to join the Nepal Mountaineering Association, Basic Mountain Trekking Guides course, which was great. I learnt so much. It was forty five days long. And just incredible. So before I carry on, I thought maybe I should just talk a bit about what touring is and be really cool to know if you put in the chats who ski tours, who skis. So I have a bit of an idea, maybe towards the end of the chats, like who actually to ski ready and who has got no idea what the sport is, too? Well, this hobby, if you on to call me ski touring is like a combination of every single mountain sport I can think of.

Iona Pawson [00:27:23] And you'll see in this picture here, I've got lots of different food types at the bottom and that's because we're gonna be camping. So you need to be able to camp in the mountains. I've got a harness at the top left and some climbing gear and and ice axe, you need to have some winter and some summer sort of technical mountaineering skills, lots of warm clothes. You can see my bright yellow down jackets in the top right hand corner. So you need to learn to be able to look after yourself in the mountains and you need to navigate. And of course, you get to go skiing as well, which is just great, says not many sports. That includes so many different elements all in one day. And I think that's one of the reasons why it really appeals to me.

Iona Pawson [00:28:03] So the next question people ask me is like, well, how do you get uphill? And I always find this really funny because I think they sort of imagine it's a bit like this picture here. And they said, imagine you carrying your skis up the hill like this. It's not quite like that. I love that fashion sense, this picture. That's why I chose it. Really. So you have really comfortable boots. So the boots are much lighter, much more flexible than a normal like downhill ski boots.

Iona Pawson [00:28:33] And that means that it's much easier for you to walk around than you've got bindings, which mean that you can free your heel for the way up the hill. So you might have seen people cross-country skiing and sort of pushing their skis and on in front of them.

Iona Pawson [00:28:46] So you do that on the way up the hill. But then for the ride downhill, you get to clip your heels into the bindings as well, and then you'll suddenly a bit more like an alpine skier and you can ski as you would normally. And then underneath your skis, you put what we call a skin underneath the ski. So it's it's like well, it's like almost like a piece of fur. And in some parts of the world, they still use actual animal fur as the skin underneath the ski. But we tend to use more of a synthetic style sort of mohair mix on most of our skins nowadays. And as you glide up the hill, it sort of glides with you, but then to stop you sliding back down again. So it wouldn't be very good. So all the fur underneath the skin grabs on the snow. So you make forward progress and you can see that top right hand picture. That's the skin just being peeled off the ski. So that was great. Am I done? That's a rock climbing and a bit of mountaineering and I've done a bit of ski touring, but I still didn't know anyone that could ski to not all my climbing friends. Like none of them were very good skiers. They might just be survive down the mountain. But I certainly wasn't going to go off piste with them in the middle of nowhere. And then all of my skiing friends and a lot of my skiing colleagues just thought it was not. And they just thought like, why on earth would you want to do that? Like, how one would you possibly want to do that when you can just take a lift or helicopter or something else? And it wasn't until someone said to me, well, join the Eagle Ski Club that I suddenly thought, oh, right, OK. And before I know it, I became a member and started going on trips. Now, one of the first of trips I went on was to Mongolia and, um, and it was amazing. And I guess what I find funny about this is that it was it was a basic chance, really. Best of luck being in the right place at the right time to go on this trip. I remember writing an email to Dave. He was leading the trip and being like, hi, Dave, I'm really keen. I've done loads of camping. I'm a really keen skier. I've just passed my ski instructor qualifications and I really want come on a trip.

Iona Pawson [00:30:51] Can I please come on your trip? And it wasn't years later. Until years later. He like I said, it's me that he was like, yeah. And I got this e-mail and this 21 year old lady and I sort of thought, I'm not really sure. She's never been on a ski expedition like this before. Does she really want to spend a month with five grumpy old men in a tent sort of thing? But you took a gamble and it paid off. And I was really grateful. I learnt a huge amount and it was just incredible. [00:31:21]And it's not every day you get to see camels carry your skis into the mountains [3.7s] so that bottom right hand picture we use camels to get from the end of where the vehicle could drop us off to the start of the glacier. So it was pretty cool in itself. And then after that trip, pretty much actually about two days after it finished, I moved to Snowdonia to start a job as a centre assistant. Like a trainee at classic Brenin ands I realised that I wanted to learn a lot more about the mountains and get a bit more knowledge and a bit more skills. So went out in the winter and had lots of friends, fun, friends, and this is us, I think we were on Crib Lemm, which is a classic great one or two winter route in in Wales on the left hand side and also started doing a lot more rock climbing. You can just about see my feet on the slate, holds the picture in the right hand side. And although I had the mountaineering skills, I still wasn't really that good at climbing. The still don't really know that much about climbing. I learned everything backwards, so I learnt to ski and mountaineer before I learnt to rock climb. Traditionally, most people do it in the other way and I'm still a climbing instructor at this stage. So it's slowly working towards qualifications in the outdoors too. The following year they've had me back on another expedition. Thank you. And this time I went to the bugaboos. We never actually made it to Roger's pass because we got stuck in our tents for four nights because it just kept snowing and snowing and snowing. But we did manage to traverse the entire of the bugaboos and that was really cool. It was a very different journey and that we were continually travelling from place to place along the way. And you can see that I'm towing a little haul bag behind me. So we towed haul bags in Mongolia, but only for a couple of days. And the Bugaboos is my first experience of having something in addition to carry my rucksack every single day anyway. Fortunately, at the end of the trip, we managed to get helicopter ride off those four nights in the tents because it snowed so much. We couldn't go back. We couldn't go forward. We couldn't go out. We would have been totally stuck. And then subsequently, I took really every single chance, an opportunity had to get better at skiing. So lots of steep skiing. Probably much to my mother's horror on the left hand side that because that's some where they held the free ride world tour extreme like final on that mountain. And and it's great to ski. It's amazing. You just can't fall and skiing, in Snowdonia. On the right hand side. That was really early before work one day. And I knew snow was going to melt during the day. And I just thought, you know what? It's not every every chance. You know, every time you get to skiing. Snowdonia Especially when it doesn't happen every year. So I got up really early and went into the top of the Carneddau and ski down and then went for a day of work afterwards. It's just just so cool. I sat smugly in the staff room for the whole morning like I've just been skiing. But I guess the other thing to skiing, things like this is quite often when you go skiing during a mountaineering, the snow isn't really like on the best and you get really bad that you do get really good powder but you also got all of the crap so they know what's to ski. So just being better at skiing, lots of different types of snow in lots of places meant that maybe I could enjoy my holidays a little bit more. And then a few years ago I was sat around the table in the lake district and it was that one of the leaders meetings for the Eagles. And everyone was going round the table and sort of saying what trips they were hoping to lead over the next year or two. And Phil, who who I didn't really know very well at the time, said, well, I'd like to lead a trip to the highest mountain in Canada. Notorious for bad weather and arduous pack hauling. That probably won't be much skiing. And I was like, sign me up. That sounds amazing. What more do you want from your holiday? And so began by nearly two years of packing and faffing and organising kits and equipment and preparing for the trip. And it's amazing how at the start of every single trip, you just seem to spend so long deciding what kit you're gonna take and how much food to take. So you can see all those little plastic bags at the top. Each one of those is one day a food for one person. It was my foods. And normally I take 500 grams of food a day on a trip like this. But we were really worried about how cold it was going to be. So we decided, well, maybe we should err on the side of caution and take 600 grams. That was a mistake because about three days later, I felt really sick from having took too much food and I had far too much stuff to carry. So ends up caching it on the glacier. I picked it up on the way back home. So I'm definitely not ever going for six hundred grams of food again. But lots of other choices like do you take really fat skis?

Iona Pawson [00:36:21] It's really easy to ski when you carrying heavy rucksack. Would you take really skinny skis because it's going to be much lighter, much easier to carry up the mountain anyway by the time that was all done.

Iona Pawson [00:36:32] There's a team of six of us in the bottom right corner with all of our food and equipments. And I weighed all my equipments because you have to weigh yourself and your equipment before you're allowed on the aeroplanes, that the pilot knows that he's going to be able to fly in lands, and that's quite important. And so I realised I had fifty three kilograms of personal kits and food that was excluding my share of fuel. That was probably another couple of kilos and my share of the tents and some other great equipments. And that's nearly as much as I weigh. So there's quite a lot of stuff. Anyway, some of you probably were wondering when Mt. Logan is and the highest mountain in Canada. And you're not alone. A lot of Canadians have got no idea. That is the name of the highest mountain. And this caused much hilarity as we flew over. We flew all the way across the country on different internal flights. And one of my team-mates squid's. So Krijns, the air hostesses. And this is quite amusing because he wants to go. You know what your highest mountain is. We're here to ski it. And they'd be like, oh, is that like Mount Kilimanjaro?

Iona Pawson [00:37:42] Sorry, I can't do the Canadian accent, if you like. Oh, no. I think you're in the wrong continent maybe like, oh, maybe Katmandu. And we're like, yeah. No, that's not actually a mountain. And then they'd be like, oh, it must be Denali. We're like, no, that's next door.

Iona Pawson [00:38:00] Not in Canada anyway. So we have to tell them what it was and where it was. But there's a reason why not many people go there. And why not? Many people have heard of it. So you can't see it from a road. You actually have to fly in to be able to see it. You can go to scenic tour in the summer if you fancy not skiing. And and it's sort of got a reputation for bad weather. And you can see how close it is to the sea. All of the sort of wind is going to be coming straight off the sea, picking up all of the extra precipitation and just dumping it down on the first range of mountains that stop it. So that's why Denali, which is a little bit further west and mount Logan and the tourists are really bad weather and that whole area just gets so much snow and bad winds. And you can also see all those little white strips on the Google terrain photo that that really, really big glaciers. So it's got some of the biggest glaciers and ice fields outside of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Iona Pawson [00:39:02] So this is a picture taken from the flight in, and it was at this moment that the scale of the mountain really started to sink in.

Iona Pawson [00:39:11] So if you look closely just towards the bottom left hand side of the picture and you can see a tiny little shadow of a tent and then right in the middle of the picture, there are two little dots and that two people. And for those of us in the team that had been to some pretty big mountains, like in the Himalayas and places in for them, it was a scale unlike anything else that a lot of us have been been to. And to give you an idea of that, a lot of the glaciers in the Alps might be a couple of kilometres long, but here there are a couple of kilometres wide and really, really, really long. So it was it was just huge.

Iona Pawson [00:39:53] We would call it the the Logan effect. How big the terrain was, the winter camping. Like it's not that bad, really.

Iona Pawson [00:40:00] You know, unless you're in a blizzard having a base camp, this is a different trip because we sort of just had one mountain. It was like all our eggs in one basket rather than during the journey. But it did mean that you could stash loads of really good food. So we have Parmesan. We brought in hot sauce. We brought in eggs and frankfurters and breads and everything. And it was really quite nice. And of course, when you're camping in the snow, you can dig yourself a table and some chairs the sit on and you can make it really quite luxurious. In fact, our igloo, Loo, was so successful that it was there three weeks after we returned from the summit of the mountain. So, you know, it goes to say that, yeah. Snow. Snow camping is not that bad, really. So and that's quite interesting about Mt. Logan is it's not a very technical mountain in terms of difficulty. So it's actually really quite easy provided you can ski and controlled to avoid the crevasses and other people and things like that. It's not really technically that difficult, but psychologically it's really difficult. So there's a a cold on the peak that you have to go over. And once you go over that cold, there's not really any turning back. If the weather comes in, you can get stuck on the plateau. And the only way answer that is essentially two kilometres of steep serac glaciated terrain, which is like a no, you just wouldn't go there. So lots people do have all sorts of ethics by going over the col and not being able to return easily. And of course, it's a blooming long way. So on the bottom picture, that little tent that's just appeared. That was so we flew into and where we are here and the picture is about one to three days of walking. So it's it's a really, really long way and it's pretty high. You know, it's far is just under 6000 meters. Five thousand nine hundred fifty nine meters. So you've got to acclimatize as well. And one of the best things about doing a mountain and a big mountain is that you can acclimatize relatively easy on this one and that you carry all of your stuff up or lots of your stuff up to the next camp. The one that you haven't reached out to. Then you ski back down and then the following day you take everything else up with you and then you camp at that camp and then you do the whole thing again and the whole thing again. And we've made it to the summit. So that helps you acclimatize quite a lot. It does also mean you get skiing the whole mountain twice. So it's quite good as well. But some yeah, it's it's a really long way and quite psychologically committing. We did get into really good skiing and the backgrounds above those peaks. That's the Pacific Ocean. That was really special to suddenly feel like we were gaining elevation on the mountain. This is above the icefall. So it probably nearly two thirds of the way up the mountain at this stage. And it was just amazing. I still couldn't get over the views around us. We did get some bad weather as well. Not bad enough to need to take shifts the whole night to dig out the tent. So we just had a little bit of digging in the day. It wasn't too bad. If you saw or read any horror stories in any mountaineering books and this was in a way that's a bit disappointing, sort of because you kind of go into a mountain like this to see if it's tough enough and to see if you hard enough to survive. You know, the terrors that might await, even though you wouldn't wish on anyone and actually secretly you really don't want, you know, several hundred mile an hour winds and blizzards and being stuck in your tent for days on end. But there's like a small part of you that sort of does a little bit. So I'm glad it didn't happen. But yeah, we'll see. And then at some stage, particularly if you're on a long trek, I find that it tends to get this little thing called food stress. Well, I call it food stress. And that's like, you know, I'm sure a lot of you might have been my situation. Well, you're right. I it could even just be on a day to walk by yourself counting the M&Ms and you're like. Like one for you, one for you, one for you, one for me, two for you. Like if anyone's got three and you've only got two. Oh, my goodness. I mean, that is just not on. But it's even worse when you're stuck on a big mountain in a tent. It's the same people all day. And so we used to do things like play top chumps on the back of all food packets and be like, I bet I've got more grams of protein in my food packet than you do. And they'd be like, well, I think I have more grams of fat than you do. And now it's a while away the hours and take your mind off other foods and fried eggs down at base camp. And we were really lucky enough. Well, unlucky for the Canadian team that laughs at that for us. But we were lucky enough to be given the G.P.S. coordinates for a stash of foods. They'd let us up the mountain and because of altitude problems, they weren't able to compete there a sense. But they said, well, you know, you can dig up our food and eat it if you like. And inside was a cheese boards of cheese. It was just incredible. So that bottom left hand pictures, all of the cheese we dug up. And I think we decimated it in like two days. But it was delicious and sort of took my mind off food stress for a bit. And then we finally made a bid for the summit. We had just enough weather to be able to get the summits and get back before this horrific storm was due to arrive. Once we've gone over the cold on the plateau before summit, this is the morning of summits. We had our first sunrise, which is really special and not when you're in the Arctic regions and spring because you're so far north, you just never really see the sun unless you're already early since at 4:00 in the morning. So it was yeah. Felt really special to be up ready for the summit and see the sun coming up to. And then this is this is also the summit on the one taking the photo. And you can see the weather was already coming in and that was really strange because we knew there on the summit and you could sort of feel the steepness as the terrain coming down from you. So even though you couldn't see it all, it felt really airy and really like you could imagine these knife edge ridges were just sort of like descending away from you. And it was some. Yeah, quite amazing. And then, of course, the long way home by this stage, we were pretty knackered and I definitely didn't eat enough on Summit Day and you know, I can remember once along and counting my paces and being like, OK, I count to 50, 50 paces and then I count another 50. And then it got to the end of that and I was like, right, I'm down 20 now. I'll just count 20. And then I couldn't count in terms of 20 paces off. I'll just count every 10, you know, just like totally not kids. And you can see no us too invigorated in any of those photos. However, we still had some good views and it was just incredible to be in that scenery. I've never experienced scenery quite like it on my skis before. And despite the fact we were feeling tired, it was really enjoyable at the same time. So the next trip I'm going to talk about is one that I did a couple of years ago to Sweden. And this was a bit of a different trip and now we had a stop points. So that's the, which is the bottom stall on the picture on the right hand side. And we have an end points, which was our best go in the north. That top on the picture on the right hand sides. And those two stars are the ones at the top of the map on the left. Sweden is quite a big country and lots of lots of places. And you can just might see that there are some mountains where the texture of that map there. And the reason I say this is a different check is because we only had two weeks to get from the start to the end and we didn't really make a plan about how we were going to get between the two. The plan was so we're just gonna go from one to the other and we'll just pick a route along the way. And we had a few different ideas about where we might go in different peaks. We might time, but we didn't really make a formal plan. And I remember a few weeks before we left, my maps had arrived in the post and I kind of write an e-mail to David, who is leading the checking thing like David, why are we actually going have I sort of like missed a whole chain of communication here? So not really a very organised individual. I thought that maybe I just missed the entire plan completely. But no, I was relieved to hear that, actually. That was the plan that we were just going to go from one place to the other. And there was my plan in between. So all access and egress and sort of escape routes along the routes was the Kungs Laden which some of you might have heard of. It's quite a popular some walking routes. And I didn't realise that they actually waymark the entire routes with these crosses the whole way along in winter as well. And quite a few people cross-country skiing in the winter. So we did come across a few cross-country skiers on this route and it made for a really nice way into the mountains. And you can just this was our first view of the first mountains in Sweden. So this is like a typical day on our holiday, if you like, having our lunch break, and normally what we would do is we would pack up camp, move it down to the next door valley and then we would see a peak that took our fancy climate look across and say, okay. Oh, sure, we do that one tomorrow. And then we'd ski back down. Go to camp, you know, have a nice dinner, and then we do the same the next day. And it was just amazing. And we skied a peak almost every single day. We would that for the 14 days in of what time we travelled 200 kilometres and averaged about a thousand meters of ascent today. So that was quite a lot for carrying a pulk and a big rucksack as well. And it was just amazing. I mean, we were so lucky with the weather and the snow conditions like perfect spring snow every single day. And skiing is sweet and it's really quite good. I always thought it was more of a cross-country destination, but there's some pretty good peaks to ski if you can. If you can be bothered to walk in, that's like a bit of a shot of what it looks like. And some of the skiing was so good, despite the fact the mountains are a bit smaller than more Scottish mountain size and sort of like the Alps. We would do this thing that like the North American school yo yoing where you basically you ski down and then you like ah that's. So amazing. I'm just gonna climb back up and ski it all over again. So on some days you had sort of like ski peaks two or three times because they were so good. And what was really good about the terrain as well was that we had these lovely long sort of cairngorm-esque valleys which we could journey through. So the journey of the pulk was like it was made for it. We could tell you are Pulk's pretty much effortlessly 90 percent of the time, but still get really good skiing on the peak. See the signs? There was every finding here and there along the way. So a few bits where we had to sort of like, you know, challenge ourselves and think that we could get through some of the glaciers because we couldn't find much information online about people that being through particular cols or even gone skiing. So it was quite difficult to figure out whether we would be able to go the route that we thought we might. We saw a few animal tracks. This is a route, a wolverine, and you might think that looks really cuddly, but yeah, they're quite scary. I didn't take a photo. I found it online. I was really pleased that we didn't meet one on the way, actually. And then towards the end of the trip, it had been really hot, actually. So much so that the highest mountain no longer became the highest mountain in Sweden, because the spring in the summer was so hot that the glacier shrunk by a couple of meters. But we turned the corner towards the end of the trip and saw this and suddenly thought, oh, my goodness, we're gonna run out of snow. And we were still about 40 kilometres away from the train station. Oh, no, we're gonna have to carry everything anyway. Thankfully, we just had enough to get to the end. Had a few moments, so we thought we might get a bit wet, which is always good fun when you when your skin's get totally wet. The problem is, is that then if there's any dry snow around, they sort of stick and you end up dragging a whole mountain of snow. Is it sort of sticks like glue underneath your skis. So every evening I would lay my soaking wet skins across my belly in my sleeping bag to dry them out, which was foul but so worth it for the next day. And we finally made it to the end, made it the train station and spent about an hour in the supermarket deciding what to eat. And then in the end, we settled on frozen beef burgers of lettuce and fruits, because nothing else took a fancy. But it was so good. Best beef burger ever. And I'll never forget on the train ride back to back to the airport, we pretty much had our own carriage to ourselves because what would happen is because we were a bit smelly. They'd been out for two weeks by washing. And someone would like open the door to a carriage made sit down. Then a couple of minutes later, they probably stand up and leave. And that's what happens to everyone that entered our carriage. And it became like a bit of a joke. Like, how long are they going to last in the same current success? So the final trip that I'm going to take you along on this evening is last year we went to the Lyngen. And this picture here is, I guess, what most people will see the Lyngen as it's some steep, amazing skiable mountains or a lot of steep skiing as well. And amazing fjords below. So it's that sort of ultimate Norway summit to see skiing. But of course, we want to do it in a slightly different way. We thought, well, why don't we just see if we can traverse the whole of the peninsula rather than just like staying in a really nice, expensive lodge or a nice huts? In fact, even the not very nice sort of blooming expensive over there. So we thought, well, we'll just come and see if we can link up this amazing high level rate across all the glaciers. So Lyngen is the sort of long bit on the screen with all the little stars on. So so the star on the left hand side. That's so we flew into. And you can see actually in the map on the left where we were in Sweden the previous year with those two bottom saw. So we're a little bit further north and the mountains are changed from being really Cairngorm-esque to suddenly being really, really alpine like and. About a week before we left, the avalanche forecast wasn't getting any better. It was pretty bad actually for anyone that skis or knows about snow conditions. It was high, which is sort of four out of five. Basically, if you would put it in terms of crossing a motorway, if you were going to cross the motorway and there was a high risk of you getting hit by a car, you probably wouldn't do it. And that was kind of what it was like in the mountains. Like if you were going to go in there and there was a high risk of you being avalanche. You probably wouldn't. So we suddenly had to change overnight our entire routes from this amazing high level, really exciting route that we've plans to. Right. How can we avoid every single slope over 30 degrees, which is like a real challenge and a really steep area of the mountains. And we finally managed to figure, right. That there was this really cool routes that we could do. So going up the eastern side and then across the middle and then up the western sides, and it really all hung on the fact that weakens the tourist office to find out about public transport. And we discovered that there was a ferry that took us from that most northerly star all the way across and back to Tromso. Right. Amazing. There's a ferry that goes on that day, which is our last day out there at the perfect time. And of course, everyone's wants to explore that fjords of Norway because that's why you go there. So that was it. We were like, right, well, we're going to have to ski from the size to the ferry and and have a full Norway experience. Something else that was really different about this trip to any other expedition I've done so far was that we had mobile phone reception nearly the whole way through. I put this slides in there just to sort of jog my memory of that. And it was really nice because you could speak to people and I could paste focuses on Instagram every day, like this is what we've done. That's we've been and, you know, whatever we were doing. But it sort of felt a little bit weird as well. Not sure if I like to sort of open up the tent and someone's like.

Iona Pawson [00:56:46] Oh, yeah. How's the baby? And did it sort of like someone else is like, well, heard you and has a dog. And I'm like, it's kind of I don't know, I quite like just being on an expedition without all the external stuff.

Iona Pawson [00:56:58] But who knows? I don't know. Many people could see the photos. That was cool. So the start of our trip, we had about two or three days of pretty much weather, mostly like this. So I was really thankful that I just spent pretty much the whole winter in Scotland like navigates going to whiteout almost every single day. And that was still a bit of a challenge because of course, then it was like, oh, yeah, well you just spent like a month in Scotland, you know. I think it was three months in Scotland. You can totally go out in front and do all the navigation on you preparing for your assessment. So I'm like, okay, well, I'll try not to fall off the radar and send everyone into the river for like hours. But it worked. We were fine and we didn't get avalanches. So happy days. And we did get in some skiing as well. We climbed a couple of peaks on the route, not as many as in Sweden, but that was yeah, really, really nice because the terrain was pretty steep, even though we were avoiding the steep terrain, Lyngen-esque to offer, you know, carrying the pokes and all of our loads just took a lot longer than normal. Some of the skin was was rudie quite difficult with the Pulk's as well. So that was really nice to get in some weeks without all pulk's. And the advantage of this peak was that we could see what we thought would be the route finding crux of the entire trip. And really the traverse of Lyngen for us depended on whether we could get through on that orange dotted line or not. And it looked like we could, but we weren't ready to show again. I couldn't find any information online about whether anyone that's ever been through that. I'm sure people must know because there are some pretty popular peaks around there. And in the end, we managed to sneak across like a massive old avalanche underneath all these seracs at the bottom of the glacier, this sort of like tumbling icefall. Oh, yes, someone's recognised Del Tinden And that's the peak. Yeah. It's an amazing ski peak. Anyway, we managed to make it across through into the next valley, which was really cool. A nice nice to make it through. And I guess another really cool thing about going on ski exhibitions to wild places is that you get some amazing campsites. You know, it's not every day you get to camp on. On the left hand side, that picture and you can see the fjord and the mountains all on the right where you've got this whole mountain scenery, just yourselves and sort of the really long daylight hours of Norway and just. Yeah, it was fantastic. Really, really lovely. Towards the end of the trip, one of the hardest things sometimes was finding places to cross rivers as everything was melting and it was quite a lot of rainfall cost at the end of the trip. Even on the summits of the peaks. So that was always a little bit hair raising. We had to sort of think, well, I don't think we'll sink through there. And, you know, we'll probably be okay with giving a bit of a probe and just checking. It's gonna be thick enough. And towards the end of the trip, because of the rain that was forecast, we sort of sacrifice this amazing route that would have taken us up this really long glacier and threw it across to. It must have been another valley or two across towards the ferry for three days of mostly this sort of walking through Birch woods and not that much good skiing, a few bits here and there. But on the whole, it was. It was a bit more like this for three days. However, finally, the end was in sight. And if you follow the bridge down that those two guys stood on that all the way across to the left hand side, you'll see the land ends and that's where the ferry was from. So it was really nice to get a really good ski peak in which from where we were stood here all the way down to the ferry. And it felt really cool to have been that having sort of survived the birch forests and all the steep skiing. And that's some really good descents along the way. And before the worst of the rain was due to head, you can see the clouds. This picture looked quite grey in the distance. So it chucked it down the following evening. I mean, and that evening, I mean, it was pretty horrific. In fact, we had one day to spare. We spent it in the tents because none of us wants to go skiing. The torrential rain and the Norwegian Avalanche will cost the full costing like slush flow, avalanches. And none of us had ever heard of this before. And they were saying like they might reach 5 kilometres long at the bottom of the mountains. We were all thinking, oh, my God, it's going to be safe camping like by the village. Anyway, we made it to the ferry, of course, have to get a compulsory shot of us all beside the ferry. And it was raining at the time, but yet felt were pretty cool to finally have made it across the Lyngen. And you'll notice we've all got weird antennae on the back of us. So those are all Pulk's, which caused much amusement as we tried to get into the ferry of our luggage. And then, of course, wandered across the whole of Tromso carrying them. But yeah, it was it was good fun. So I've just got a little video that I'm going to play for you all. And then there's one more slide before we go for questions and answers. So it's a short video, but two and a half minutes and hopefully it will enable you to see what it's like in real life to do some of this stuff.

Iona Pawson [01:05:40] I've had so many team-mates on multiple trips all over the place. So just thanks to all of them for joining me and teaching me things and having an amazing time. And then lots of organizations and ski clubs have given us grants over the years, despite the fact that we haven't necessarily been doing first ascent. So even decent, so many thanks to the Eagle Ski Club, the Austrian Alpine Trump, the UK section of that and the Alpine Ski Club, because they've given us grants over the years and that's been amazing. Of course, everyone loves to ski companion with the camera because it means you've got some photos of beauty. That's quite nice. And Google for the maps. Very useful for looking at Google Earth as well. And then, of course, you know, lots of game on a fatuous have been Hrudey kind's and giving me discounts and donations over the years. And that's just amazing, particularly when you agreed to a trip like go to Lyngen.