SoCal Snow Basics Clinics, Update, 1/31/23:
In case you’re curious, this has been the process of assessing and creating this new snow safety course for the greater hiking and thru-hiking community in Southern California:
- With all the snow from multiple Atmospheric River events hitting California over the past month, it occurred to me that Mountain Education should resurrect its famous, Snow Basics Course, but not the original 3-day version, rather the 1-day clinic version and offer it where I am currently deployed, in Southern California, specifically on Mt San Jacinto.
- Further motivated by and upset from recurring fatalities of sincere, but inexperienced, hikers just wanting to get out on the steep snow and “climb a mountain” in Southern California (of all things to do in a blizzard), I put out a post to see if anyone in the greater “listening” hiker community would be “interested” in attending.
- When it became obvious that the idea was overwhelmingly well received, I asked those “interested” to select a date and let me know.
- When the proposed dates booked up faster than I could write them down, we, here at Mountain Education, Inc., realized that we’d better make this “idea” of possible Snow Basic Clinic dates a reality and published their official Course Description, Itinerary, and Gear List on the school’s new website!
- At the same time, throwing the doors open for “official” course registration (ending the unofficial email tabulations that had been going on up to that point) at https://moutaineducati.wpengine.com/
meetups-classes/month/2023-02/ - About 200 of you in the greater hiking and thru-hiking community responded with interest in the idea and selected dates by email with Ned that you wanted to attend. This was all part of the assessment process telling us that there was sufficient commitment to all of the course dates that these Snow Basics Clinics offered in SoCal on Saturdays at the top of the Palm Springs Tram need to be officially offered by the charity wilderness school, Mountain Education, Inc..
- Let the official registration process begin…and it took off yesterday!
If you voiced “interest” and you’d like to attend one of these free clinics, you’d better go to the link, above, and formally sign up, now, for a date because they are filling in earnest!
And so the process went, and now has created, another great wilderness safety course!