Welcome to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Mountaineering Club Website. For those of you new to climbing or mountaineering, please feel free to have a look around and see what we get up to – there are a variety of disciplines that may be just right for you, whether that’s indoor climbing in the gym, bouldering on short problems without ropes, or getting the ice axes and crampons out and going off on an alpine adventure.

For those who might be interested in joining the club, the link on the right takes you to the sign up page, and our membership section at the link above will give you a breakdown of the benefits!

A message from our president Lieutenant General Rob Magowan CB CBE RM

As the world has started to gradually recover from the standstill of COVID lockdowns, our club has been working hard to regain a small measure of business as usual while optimistically looking ahead to future activities. When I last wrote to you I mentioned two major expeditions that were being planned for this year – Ex Scottish Surprise and Ex Cairn Conquest (formerly known as Alpine Conquest, changed to reflect the exercise’s new location). For obvious reasons, there was some trepidation that these would be able to go ahead. I am therefore extremely proud of our club members who, in the midst of a global pandemic and alongside their own busy day jobs, worked extremely hard to successfully deliver these two concurrent expeditions. I managed to take some time to join the second of these for a few days and it was fantastic to catch up with many old faces and meet new ones. These two expeditions also delivered great returns for the club’s collective experience, between them achieving 250 summer mountaineering and 125 rock climbing training days. With the climbing tailored to individual abilities across routes from VD to E3 5c, foundation qualifications for rock climbing and summer mountaineering were achieved by RNRMMC members on both expeditions.

While the routine meets programme had been initially suspended for 2021, as restrictions slowly lifted our meets team worked rapidly to exploit the ‘art of the possible’. Thanks to some late nights and long hours of planning, their diligence resulted in almost all programmed meets being held (albeit with a bit less notice than usual!). This flexibility, diligence and perseverance are the skills we climbers all inherently strive to possess; my sincere thanks to the meets team for their proactive efforts in achieving what they did this year.

2022 is shaping up to be a great year for us. Already there is a comprehensive meets programme with activity forecasted throughout the winter and summer seasons, and some major expeditions are already deep in their planning phases. I urge you all to get your people and yourselves involved; after the past 18 months you’ve earned a few days out of the office so please sign up. I have done so already and so really look forward to seeing you back on the hill very soon. 

Lieutenant General Rob Magowan CB CBE

President RNRMMC

Any questions, queries or comments, please contact Tom Hinchliffe (Webmaster).