First Steps doesn't necessarily mean beginner, we like to think of it more as 'early days' in the mountains. We will take the skills you have from any walking or mountaineering in the UK or elsewhere and introduce them to an Alpine environment. We will look at all the essential alpine skills necessary for you to operate in the Alps with a mountain guide or on your own at an appropriate level. Any trip will include glacier travel techniques, rope work, route choice, equipment (use of crampons and ice axe), crevasse rescue techniques and moving together as well as climbing a number of great routes on mountains up to PD (peu difficile) in grade.

An introduction to many of these techniques can be found in our skills section

Created for those who have some mountaineering experience and would like to develop their Alpine mountaineering skills and be a bit more adventurous.

Typically those joining an intermediate alpine trip will be comfortable using crampons and done a bit of scrambling. This will give us the basis to develop the rope work and movement skills to move onto more challenging peaks. These could be technical peaks at any altitude or some of the classic 4000m peaks.

If you can rock climb in the UK then you can rock climb in the Alps. There are routes of all lengths and all grades in fantastic situations with amazing views and fabulous climbing. MAC has clients that come back year after year to explore a new area or a new valley each time. The beauty of many of the rock climbing venues is that they are on slightly lower mountains, which means that you don't have to battle with the affects of altitude and can often miss much of the adverse weather that can affect the high mountains.

Mont Blanc is probably the most famous peak in the Alps and an accessible goal for most fit walkers. Surprisingly it is often ascended by people in their first week of alpine mountaineering.