SCOTLAND STEEP CREEKING COURSE

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Scotland with Dennis Newton from Sweetwater Coaching for a Steep Creeking course. Scotland is well known for being one of the UK’s premier steep creeking areas with a virtually endless number of small burn and creeks. However, everything is very rain dependent and small streams can turn into raging torrents in a matter of hours with the right rainfall.

Throughout the week we only had one day of solid rain, so a good amount of the trip was spent on low water technical drops, allowing us to work on our technique in a low risk environment.

As the week progressed we had the opportunity to move on to bigger volume- a day on the Moriston and a day on the Etive and Alt Kinglass at medium/high flows were great ways to test our skills. Sadly, the rain didn’t continue so towards the end of the week we decided to mix things up with some downriver freestyle to broaden our skills- this resulted in a fair bit of falling on our faces but there were a handful good moves thrown.

Thanks Den for a great trip!

By Jake Norman