Our Chalet hosts Queen's Guide Expedition

                          

Challenge and Adventure on the Alpine Trails of Adelboden

Over four days during Summer 2011 Our Chalet was host to a Queen’s Guide Expedition, planned, organized and led by myself, the current Programme Manager. The Queen’s Guide Award is the highest award within Girlguiding UK, and this expedition made up one part of its completion.

As the title implies, the aim of the expedition was to give the participants (the international resident staff, plus a few friends) the opportunity, to challenge themselves by hiking new and more demanding terrain than they had experienced before, predominantly the Swiss white-blue-white Alpine routes. As part of daily programme at Our Chalet, we regularly lead hikes on white-red-white mountain trails (a steep, narrow trail, with uneven sometimes rocky terrain), but rarely have the opportunity to explore the trails of the next level up, the white-blue-whites, where the terrain is not only steep, narrow and rocky, but less well marked, exposed in places, and can also require some climbing!

I therefore decided that, alongside the Assistant Programme Manager, Jennamari from Finland, and some experienced friends from the UK (Alex), Switzerland (Sam) and the Netherlands (Marjolein), together we could offer an expedition to enable others to experience the thrill, excitement and stunning beauty of Adelboden’s Alpine routes.

So, as the expedition route overview in the attached document (right) demonstrates, the expedition ran for four days (three nights), and Our Chalet acted as our base, most of us camping in the grounds.

By selecting the attached expedition report document to the right of this article, you can read about how the expedition developed, and which challenges and adventures were faced as the days wore on.

Katie Scales, Programme Manager