A school outing

 

Sunset from Les Diablerets Refuge.

Certainly when I went to school I do not remeber going on an outing quite like this.  I was one of four Mountain Guides, four school teachers from Aiglon College who accompagnied 15 adolescents on a two night, three day ski touring expedition. 

We all conveyned at the school, where we distributed and checked  the equipment - transceivers, shovels, probes etc.  We then walked the short walk to the ski lift in Villars where everyone picked up their skis from the local hire shop. We split into two groups .  Terry was the lead Guide and I brought up the rear. We then skied through the lift system to Diablerts. 

Mt Blanc seen from the top of Villars lift system.

 After which we took the shuttle bus to the Col des Pillions and rode the enormous cable car to the middle station before dropping down to Les Cabane des Diablerts where we dumped  all our overnight kit before skiing around on the glacier.  We finished by doing a short ski tour of about 20minutes just to check all the equipment was working properly.   It was beautifully remote.

Lead Guide Terry making the skining track.

We arrived back at the Cabanne and settled in for the evening and enjoyed a spectacular sunset.

Cabanes Les Diablerets reflecting the evening sunset.

The next day was to be the big day and the main goal for the expedition.  Namely to climb the mountain of Les Diablerets , the highest mountain in the Canton of Vaud.  The weather was perfect, if anything a little too perfect because it was very hot and some of the kids struggled with the heat. 

Stopping to put skins on before climbing to the summit  on right of photo.

 Nevertheless everyone, eventually, reached the summit.

view from the summit.

We then all skied back into the lift system where everyone inhaled  a huge 2nd lunch before some of us went to explore the spectacular bridge recently built between 2 summits.

It was then back to the Cabanne for our second night.  In the morning the weather was not so good.  It was very windy and the resort was shut. We therefore had to escape by skiing down to the road head and catching a bus back to Les Diablerets, where the weather was much kinder.  After lunch Terry lead the group on a long off piste run through some beautiful terrain , where we eventually arrived back at the piste which ends about a quarter of a mile from the school.  [Only in my dreams do I remember my school being at the bottom of a ski piste. There again my school was in Stockport.]