This Fall at CBMG, many of us have had the opportunity to partake in some local (and not-so local) AMGA Rock Instructor & Rock Guide training courses, to help us better hone our guiding skills, improve upon our climbing, check out some new climbing areas, meet some guides from other parts of the world, and overall help us be able to offer our climbing clientele a better and safer climbing experience with us at CBMG.

Many of the CBMG staff have been busy….as previously noted, senior guide Steve Banks completed his final AMGA exam, the Rock Guide Exam, in Red Rocks, Nevada…earning him complete AMGA/IFMGA status. CBMG Guide Mike Bromberg also travelled to Red Rocks to take part in his AMGA Rock Guide Course & Aspirant Exam. Mike’s first trip to Red Rocks proved a successful one as he enjoyed his course and did well passing the necessary technical skills and guiding skills on his Aspirant Exam.

 Closer to home, CBMG Guides Laura Chase, Johnny MacKinnon, & Jayson Simons-Jones completed a privately run AMGA Rock Instructor Course here on our local stomping grounds of Taylor Canyon & the Black Canyon. The course was run by outgoing AMGA Board of Directors President & Colorado Mountain School Owner, John Bicknell. A longtime Outward Bound instructor, John was familiar with the climbing in the Crested Butte area, but we all gave him a thorough tour of our local crags, and we’re pretty sure he left having gained a full appreciation for the ‘Taylor Canyon sandbag’ as well as getting to experience the awe and wonder of climbing in the incredible Black Canyon. It was great to run a professional guides training course on our local turf, allowing our guides to immediatley put to use skills in a relevant and familiar setting….we look forward to more courses like this running under the CBMG umbrella again in the future.

Next up…..look for our first officially sanctioned AMGA Ski Guides Course to take place in Crested Butte from Feb 23 – March 6, 2009 ! Details and enrollment will be up on the CBMG & AMGA websites soon…

And lastly, as Fall winds down and Winter begins to make it’s presence known in the mountains above town, we are all out still enjoying the last days of sunshine on the warm rock of Taylor & the Black Canyons. And soon we will all be hanging up the rock climbing shoes and mountain bikes for skis, boots, ice climbing tools, and avalanche beacons. We look forward to another healthy dose of Old Man Winter again this year, and hope to share many more days of deep, deep powder skiing, warm evenings around the woodstove on a hut trip, and days on skis or on ice with everyone again under the bright Colorado sunshine this winter!!!

—- CBMG Staff

CB Mountain Guides

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.