I’m very excited about the look and function of the new IAG web site. The intent of the design is to highlight what an incredible place we live in here on Vancouver Island and to give the visitor to the site a bit of a feel for each of the destinations of our varied trips. We have been immersed in this project with Trigger Communications for some time now so some objective input from you would certainly be appreciated. Please send us your opinions about how the site looks and works for you or anything about it that you care to share with us. Use our contact form or email me directly at [email protected]. And please be aware that the site is brand new and may well have some things to work out. Your patience and your feedback is much appreciated! 

Soon IAG will enter it’s fifth year of serving Vancouver Island’s mountain recreation and education needs. While I have been guiding in these Island Alps for about twenty years, it was not until 2007 that we decided to formalise things and start IAG. And here we are entering our fifth year thinking “the timing was about right”. We’ve grown considerably every year since we started and are looking strong into the future as Vancouver Island’s premiere mountain school and guide service. Our growth to now has been thanks almost exclusively to you people right here on the island who keep coming back on more courses and trips with us and sending your friends. Looking into the future we certainly intend to keep meeting the needs of our fellow islanders right here in the island alps. We’ll also start to expand into the wider world of adventure travel by offering exciting multi sport adventure holidays to new guests from off the island. The result will be further growth and success for IAG and bringing new tourism dollars onto the island. 

Some of you may be asking “where is the Vancouver Island Mountain Conditions Report (VIMCR)?”. Well it’s not gone but it will take a different form. The fact is that the spammers and hackers were getting the better of our VIMCR on the old web site and maintaining it in the face of their onslaught became unmanageable. So this blog will become, amongst other things, our new VIMCR. When an IAG guide returns from a trip and has information to share they’ll do that via this blog. Similarly if you have observations of routes, conditions or access we encourage you to send them to us and we’ll include them in this blog. This will allow us to “moderate” the information to ensure that the spammers are kept at bay and that the information our users want is always available and useful. We'll also be linking to the popular Vancouver Island Avalanche Bulletin soon. 

I hope that you’ll have a cruise around the new site and get in touch with your feed back. I also hope to see you on a trip this summer and look for some exciting new developments coming in the winter. 

Happy trails everyone!

 Jan