Wheew! The 2011 summer season has ended with a bang with three full courses running concurrently, our busiest instruction week of the year! While the Easter bunny had a little difficulty getting through the gale force wind, everyone had a productive trip.  With few people in the hills we were lucky enough to have the huts to ourselves.

Guides are scattering like seeds in the wind to get some time off before the winter work starts at the end of June. It looks like a busy season coming up with the first trip off to Peru June 18th and then Waterfall Ice Courses kicking off June 24th. If you have always wanted to try out a bit of thrash and dangle with a frozen waterfall, there are still spaces available.

The national news reported that the local ski areas were predicting a big year since we had already had a dusting of snow in the hills. With ski season still nearly two months away it seems like a bit of guess, but what else are the ski marketing people going to say “don’t be daft, winter is miles away”? 

Aspiring Guides have a full range of ski tours lined up for this winter – anything from 1 to 5 days in some fantastic locations.

This September in conjunction with Wild Women on Top we are running a 5 day Girls Only Ski Touring Adventure (sorry guys, you don’t qualify!). If there are any Wild Women out there interested in joining this trip (12 – 16 Sept) please contact us for further details or click here for info : WWOT go ski touring. We’d love to have you along. NEWSFLASH : Trip now full, but waitlisting. Also check out Aspiring Guides Summit to Sea trip running 18 to 22 September - all genders welcome.

Men welcome on all our other tours, but you will want to get in quick, there is a coating of snow on the hills today and I can see it will be a really good winter!

We’ve also been busy and recently changed the format of the Aspiring Guides newsletter - it is now being updated regularly as a Blogspot  : click here to view

We’ll still send out a regular email letting you know what has recently been posted, but if you want to keep really up to date with the latest news or interesting snippets of info, just click the “follow” button. 

Latest info on the Aspiring Guides Blogspot at http://newzealandguides.blogspot.com/

• West Coast Bush – Tree Top View
• Mountain Skills Course # 9 crawls back to sea level – updates from our latest MSC
• Fear of Falling? – check out the video
• Osaka Climbers Summit Mt Aspiring!

Hope to catch up with you over the winter.

Cheers,

Whit Thurlow
Chief Guide/Director
IFMGA