Welcome to the YRC

Formed in 1892, the club is unique in being involved not just in one outdoor 'activity' but in exploration in its widest sense. So whether you are a caver, climber, mountaineer, scrambler, walker or ski-tourer the club has plenty to offer you.

We have an active programme of meets throughout the year both in the UK and internationally. The wealth of experience and expertise of members of the Club can be counted on to provide help for those wishing to pursue their activities at home or abroad.

Exploration has always been a key part of the club's ethos both in formal expeditions and through members organising their own trips. Recently the club has:

• Mountaineered in Malawi and on Mera Peak in Nepal
• Trekked in Bolivia's Quimsa Cruz, Peru's Chachapoya, Bulgaria's Pirin Mountains, the Jebel Sahro in Morocco, across Dolpo to Mustang in western Nepal and visited Kanchenjunga South and North base camps in Eastern Nepal
• Scrambled and walked in the Retezat mountains in Romania
• Ski toured in Svaldbard and Norway
• Snowshoed in the Franco-Swiss Jura
• Caved in China www.chinacaves.org.uk, Spain and the Apuseni mountains in Romania
• Climbed in the US Sierra Nevada as well as in El Chorro and Costa Blanca in Spain

The Annual Dinner is rather more sedentary and has now taken place for over a hundred and twenty years. Members of the Club have been entertained by some of the leading climbers and explorers of the day including Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Harold Tilman, Eric Shipton and Professor Noell Odell and the later generations of Peter Boardman, Sir Chris Bonington, Chris Brasher, Simon Yates, Kenton Cool, Alan Hinkes MBE and John Porter.

If you are interested in joining an active club with a wide scope of activity at all levels of difficulty why not contact our Membership Secretary.

What's on the site

The YRC has a long history of achievements and this is recorded in our Journals where you can read:

• about the earliest explorations of Gaping Ghyll through to our modern explorations of the caves of China
• early explorations in the Alps, Norway and the Himalayas and our latest Alpine meets
• sailing and walking in the Western Isles in the early 1900s through to competing in a recent Three Peaks Yacht race

We also have an extensive digital image library where you can see images from the dawn of photography through to the modern day.

We also provide resources for like-minded individuals such as Google map showing most of the huts that BMC members can use, as well as TomTom 'poi' files to download and use to avoid that Friday night panic to find the hut before the pub shuts.