I’ve talked many times about my Level 2 Walking Qualification but I realise I’ve always been a bit vague about what that involves. Well, in 2023 I want to get at least three more logbook walks and so in recognition of putting at least a little work into it, I’m going to start the year by talking about it.
One of my favourite things on the internet is to see people learning. I love people doing qualifications and people doing training and I find myself following a few more outdoorsy people every month. Some of them are working towards their Mountain Leader qualification. Some already have it and are using it to either train new people or lead mountain hikes. A lot are female-dominated and quite a few involve people who either don’t see themselves as the typical outdoors type or are not seen by other people as the typical outdoors type.
I’m not hugely prone to judging my life from what other people are doing online but when I see someone collecting QMDs for their ML logbook, I kind of feel like my decision to do my own walking qualification is validated a little bit. I’m one of them! I’m a walking qualification type!
I’m not actually doing my Mountain Leader. I’m not the mountain type. For one thing, I’m spectacularly bad at walking uphill. For another, I live on the south coast. Getting to mountains is an epic in itself. I’m not averse to doing the Hill and Moorland Leader but I’ve compared what I am doing to the nationally recognised qualification and decided to stick with mine.
It’s Girlguiding’s Walking Scheme Level 2 which enables you to take girls on walks in Open country. It’s roughly in line with Mountain Training’s Hill & Moorland Leader, a little bit lower perhaps, but a lot cheaper and obviously with a little more emphasis on the fact that the people you’re leading are likely to be under 18. I don’t remember my exact sums but I seem to remember the trainings required for HML worked out at £700-900 before adding on the QMD collection/consolidation. I can’t find the price of the Level 2 training I did in 2014 but right now, the training weekend is £100, which will be more than I paid back then, so if I do two weekend courses, that should work out at under £200, plus the first aid and that’s a much cheaper way to build my skills and get them recognised.
Small disclaimer: Girlguiding’s walking scheme is only recognised by Girlguiding. You can’t take it to an outdoors centre and use it as evidence that they can employ you as a mountain guide. You can’t take Scouts out for a walk on it (well, from what I know of Scouts, the only qualification you need is probably “I once saw a mountain on TV”). That’s fine for my purposes. I’ve already got everything I actually need out of it – I’ve remembered how to apply compass to map to landscape and I have the confidence to head out onto Dartmoor on my own. Now I’m just badge-chasing!
Yeah, I originally did the Level 1 training all the way back in 2014 because I realised my own skills had gone so rusty that I had no idea what to do with a compass anymore. Then I realised there’s a shiny badge (and a certificate; I’m not so excited about bits of paper) so I figured I’d do the qualification.
That meant planning and leading an observed walk as well as doing the training and the logbook walks. The logbook was no problem. Six UK walks, one of at least 6km and one as leader. If I didn’t have those in 2014 (I did), I definitely had them by the time lockdown was over. But finding someone who was qualified to sign off the observed walk was really hard, so I haven’t done it. Everyone is busy, especially the walking folks. Now I have girls again, maybe I’ll get in touch with County and have another go at that. I absolutely won’t finish Level 2 in 2023 but it’s entirely possible I could have one of those shiny badges for Level 1 by the end of the year. By the summer, even. From what I know of Girlguiding, I’ll get another badge and another certificate for every level I complete but it’ll be the same badge each time so it won’t be as exciting by Level 2 but believe me, I’ll be screeching about Level 2 for months here if I ever achieve it. Anyway, it might be quite fun to have two matching badges on my tab!
Anyway, with the Level 1 training done, I found myself going to the Level 2 training and I now regularly go on the Region leisure walking weekends. So far I’ve collected 11 Level 2 logbook walks. Well, technically I’ve got 13 but I’m not sure two of them count when I don’t remember any of the details and only know they happened at all because I have a handful of photos. Having gone through my previous walking posts and tagged them all “level 2 walking qualification“, it’s no coincidence that the only walks in my logbook I don’t have a blog post for are those two! So for safety, I’m saying I have 11 walks and I’m going to make a point of blogging them from now on. The logbook is more about bullet-pointing distances, times, difficulties, weather, route etc but a dedicated tag on a blog works really well for more detail and for jogging my memory.
So, for my Level 2, I need:
- to attend a Level 2 training (done!)
- To complete the 4 modules of the scheme (I think this is done?)
- 20 logbook walks (in progress, really slowly)
- Attend a Level 2 assessment course
- Plan & complete an assessed walk
- Complete a 16 hour First Aid qualification
My logbook is the bit holding me back. I’ll do the First Aid when I’m ready to hand everything over, otherwise it’ll expire and I’ll need to re-do it half a dozen times. “I need 20 walks” sounds easy enough but there are criteria:
- They have to be in at least three different Open areas.
- I’m currently only technically on one, Dartmoor. I have a couple of level 3 walks in South Wales but as that’s not an Open area it probably doesn’t count towards this category. Wales is Remote, Level 3. In the event I decided to do my Level 3 (which I’m not going to; it’s basically ML Lite and way beyond me), I could count them there.
- At least one walk must be undertaken in adverse weather conditions.
- That’ll be a leisure weekend walk. On my own, I’m a fair weather walker. We had a “heavy rain at lunchtime” walk once, a “strong winds” once that was planned for the wind to help us on the way back, a “mist at first, then horizontal rain” but actually, most have been pretty non-adverse.
- You must be the leader for at least two walks.
- Now, I’ve never led a walk but certain conditions do auto-fulfill if you walk alone – I’m the one making the plan, doing the navigating, making decisions, changing plans if conditions change and so on. But there’s no group management involved, so I might actually have to lead some walks with other people. The Adventure Queens might be quite good for that.
- All walks should be at least 10km in length or five hours in duration.
- Yes, otherwise they’re just not in the logbook. They can – and do – go in Other Experience because the assessors like to see that sort of thing but they’re not counted in my 11 (or 13) logbook walks so far.
- You may include up to ten walks in more mountainous country
- The Wales walks count here, just not towards my three Open areas.
- All walks must be in the UK
- My various hikes around Iceland go in Other Experience.
Other Experience covers everything. I’ve got the Stage 1 Walking Badge walks I did when I was a Guide in my Other Experience! The assessors like to see that you’re a well-rounded walker and not that you’ve just laser-targeted these twenty walks. It’s also a good thing to see things like “planned an 8-hour 20km walk and had to cancel halfway through because conditions became dangerous” – to know when to call it a day is an important skill and even if those walks don’t technically count towards your logbook walks, they’re still important evidence of your walking abilities and your judgement.
I don’t remember much of the training weekend. That’s because I didn’t blog about it! Lesson learned! Looking through the book, we would have covered clothing & equipment, map and compass skills, access & legalities, admin, planning a walk, route cards, weather, hazards, risk management, group management and I know we did some first aid/emergency practice. That was at the foot of Hound Tor – we got out the big orange survival shelter and passers-by asked us if we needed help. We had to reassure them this was just a training exercise and the person wailing over the broken leg was entirely uninjured. On Saturday we walked out from the Haytor visitor centre, probably up Haytor and around the tramway and the quarry. On Sunday we drove round to Hound Tor. At some point, presumably Sunday, we made our way down to Becka Brook, which is at the bottom of the ravine that separates Haytor from Hound Tor.
And on Saturday evening, we did a night nav. That meant we had to put our navigation skills to the test in the dark. Obviously, that’s a lot harder when you can’t hold your map up and compare it to the landscape in front of you. I really need to do that again – on the leisure weekends, we’re invited to join them but my feet are always too tired after a full day of walking and it’s usually cold and sometimes raining. See, the leisure group go out early and walk at least 10km, usually closer to 14km. The training group spends most of the morning inside covering theory and only do a relatively short and easy walk to try things out for real in the afternoon, so their feet aren’t as tired as mine! On my night nav, we made our way to the top of Haytor via the tramway and the east side and coming down the main highway, we ran into black cows minding their own business lying in the path in the dark. I adore cows and I’m not afraid of them but they’re still quite something to trip over at night.
My Level 2 training was now more than 8 years ago so it might be that I need to redo it. Fair enough if I do. I’m not thinking about that right now. My logbook is my priority and I can sort everything else out once that’s done. Priority this year is getting some logbook walks done. I’ll update you as I go along!