Wefan llawn yn dod yn fuan

Wefan llawn yn dod yn fuan

While we put the finishing touches on the full website please feel free to have a scroll and read here and contact me if you have any questions.

I gweld yr tudalen yma yn Cymraeg cliciwch yma

Photos by Kasper Siebrands

What do we do?

Leading, teaching and coaching in, with and through nature; in North Wales and further afield.

Developing unique experiences to enable to better connect with their environment and themselves.

Offering varied activities within climbing (indoors and on rock); walking/scrambling and CPD (Continuous Proffesional Development) courses.

  • Aled Oddy

    SYLFAENYDDb

    Climber, skier and mountaineer from Southern Anglesey who has somehow made a job out of sharing his passion for the mountains with people.

    I grew up staring out of the kitchen window at the mountains of Eryri before going out to walk them with my mother before eventually climbing amongs them with my friends and then working in outdoor shop at their foot (Crib Goch in Llanberis). By now I am a qualified climbing instructor (RCI) and mountain leader (ML).

    On top of those qualifications I have done a number of further courses to enhance my skillset including FUNdamentals from the BMC, Foundation Coach training (FC), Physical Training 1 (PT1) and I am an Eryri Ambassador gold.

Be ydi friluftsliv?

In short ‘friluftsliv’ is a Norweigan outdoor philosophy which personally I discovered while studying for a year in a folkhøgskole (folk high school) in Lofoten; an archipelago north of the Arctic circle.

A direct translation would be ‘free air life’ but the way I came to understand and appreciate it was as part of the idea that rather than nature playing an incidental backdrop to an adventurous activity and us trying to over-inuslate ourselves from it that the environment and the activity should be seen holistically as going hand in hand.

Additionally in ‘Friluftsliv’ there are emphases on other elements of traditional wild craft like ‘bål’ which is broadly speaking a campfire with friends but often in a comparatively wild surrounding and then also collecting plants and berries to make things of.

Of course I’m wholly aware of the impossibility of transplanting everything I’ve described exactly, and not just because of the legal and cultural differences over fire, but I am inspired to share the experience of a mix between personal independence and co-dependence with nature which I experienced while in Norge with the individuals and groups I work with and that’s exactly why I called the company Aled Oddy Friluftsliv.

I’m passionate about strengthening and spreading the use of Welsh in the world of the outdoors and therefore a number of the CPD (Continous Professional Development) courses and other projects I’m working on at the minute are to do with that. In the past I have also given speeches/lectures and facilitated discussions on subjects related to the topic on behalf of Bangor Univeristy Linguistics Society and the Snowdonia Society.

Welsh language projects.

Developing Welsh language climbing terminology

Inspired by my experience studying in Norway and the climbing terminology used there I’ve used a good part of the year since I’ve been back collecting equivalent terms in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Norweigan, Icelandic, Finnish, Polish, Hebrew, Russian, Japanese as well as from pre existing Welsh climbing/mountaineering literature. On the back of this work I’m in the process of developing further terms and resources to enable more sessions to be run through the medium of Welsh and therefore am very interested to hear from any with an interest in/ideas about the subject.

In the medium term I’m aiming to create Welsh language resources for climbers and instructors/coaches but also more simply about climbing in the Welsh language. In the future the intention is to run CPD sessions on the subject and the hope is that every person who wants to learn to climb through the medium of Welsh will be able to do so.

Functional Welsh for the mountains.

The purpose of this CPD course will be to enable leaders who don’t speak Welsh or are in the process of learning to understand the generic elements, such as ‘carnedd’ and ‘waun’, which are so prevalent in Welsh mountain names. the idea is to avoid complex etymologies and instead focus on those that can be used time after time to better understand the maps we use and the places we are in; focusing on the ‘Carnedd’ and not the ‘Filiast’ as I like to say.

I’m hopeful that this course will be ready by late Autumn/Early Winter but due to the process of trying to develop proprietary course materials and other logistical factors that is subject to change. After the initial course is ready the hope is to develop a second similar one that will deal with such elements as the weather, botany and greetings that we can encounter in the mountains. In the long term there is the option of doing something similar but specifically for Welsh language mountain leaders.

If you have any interest in taking part in these or have any ideas please use the contact box below.

Get in contact

If you have any questions about that discussed above or anything else feel free to message us here or on social media.

Also if you have any interest in my services as a mountain leader, climbing instructor/coach or any other experience you believe I can offer feel free to get in contact the same ways.