Last week I attended the Annual Berghaus Athletes Camp. This is a chance for the sponsored athletes to get together with the designers and marketing people in Berghaus to weld as an effective team and exchange ideas on the design of gear to ensure that they get what they need for their various adventures and that these ideas spread into the full Berghaus range.
| Thee “Camp” was a very comfortable one at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, staying in an excellent hotel for three nights | 
|
| We were going to start with an out door activity which we wanted to be as inclusive as possible so that every one could take part. Nick Parks of Mountain Tracks who was organising it suggested snow shoeing as something that every one would be able to do. Some of us were a bit sceptical thinking the skiing would be more fun and demanding, but of course not every one knew how to ski and there would have been a wide range in ability | 
|
| We snow shoed up a local hill – all 1000 metres of it – through glorious woods. | 
|
| And here we are at the top. | 
|
| We started down in a sedate manner. | 
|
| But that quickly fell apart as our athletes and some of our more energetic designers decided to invent the exciting new sport of extreme snow shoeing. Here Rob Garmin, brilliant extreme mountain biker, does a bit of speed snow shoeing with some big jumps | 
|
| Not to be outdone, Leo Houlding, speed climber, base jumper and all out mountain adventurer develops the somersault technique. I just focused on plodding down carefully. | 
|
| But we did do some serious work – here, James, one of the extreme snow shoeers and the Mountain House senior designer is taking us through some new development and getting fed back, supported by Julie Gretton, our technical genious. | 
|