There’s a proclivity for naturism the closer you head towards the land of lederhosen, but I’ve hit an early pitstop in the Swiss Alps. I’m 7,200ft up a mountain, pointing my camera at a man who has just removed all of his clothing, sat his bare derrière on the seat of a mountain bike and is pedalling along the brow of a hill. The fang-like peaks behind dwarf his slender silhouette. Some of the group I’m travelling with stand, others squat, and a couple drop to the floor lying in the grass Attenborough-style, all snapping furiously to try and capture this moving target.
While to the naked eye, it might seem like I’ve travelled to Verbier to pose as the world’s worst voyeur, I’m here on a weekend-long group photography camp with grandiose plans to become the next Chris Burkard, next to no camera experience and a geriatric Canon dusted off from a decade prior. Despite being told a naked model isn’t a planned inclusion in the package, what is guaranteed is that you’ll leave the experience a better photographer. It’s thanks to the guidance of photographer Melody Sky, who is hosting the trip with Basecamp Events and is endowed with decades of experience, a hefty backpack of lenses and a gift for tactfully critiquing your mediocre shots. Once a wee Scottish lass with dreams of becoming a fashion designer at Central Saint Martins, she soon swapped capris for Craghoppers, commencing a successful career as an adventure sports and environmental photographer and documentary maker. She’s no stranger to hurling herself into the frozen lakes of Tignes to capture ice divers, and as the first woman in Europe to have a ski film broadcast in cinemas globally, it’s fair to say she’s qualified to teach us how to capture Verbier’s landscapes and sporting escapades.
The luminous blue glacial lake of the Corbassière glacier
Christy Spring
While some destinations are best enjoyed from the comfort of your own home, Verbier is not one of them. It’s in part because a visit here is an altogether comfortable experience. while you propel up steep inclines rather than focusing on your searing quads. We won’t head back to the village until the end of the camp, so preserving its battery is a fine art. Get greedy with maximum speed, and you’ll be forced to give it your best Geraint Thomas on unassisted climbs.
You’re in the land of efficiency, punctuality and 450 alpine cheeses, where a train delay is as likely as a vegetarian fishmonger
The focus of today’s photography exercise is capturing objects in motion. Specifically, two mountain bikers called Yann Guigoz and Ludo May. The latter is an enduro champion living in the village of Villette who has ridden every single one of the resort’s roads, tracks and trails. I’m convinced he has putty for kneecaps. We park at the foot of a rock-strewn hill framed by a thunderous peak, ready to capture the duo charging down. By this point, Sky has lent me a mighty telephoto lens to clip onto my old camera body to capture Guigoz and May’s stunts in crisp detail. It goes to show that you really can put lipstick on a pig.
Despite owning my Canon for the best part of a decade, I’ve learned more about how it works in the past four hours than ever before. As Sky explains, cameras are, in simple terms, a balance of how much light is allowed through the lens (aperture), how sensitive it is to light (exposure) and how quickly it takes the photo (shutter speed). Remember this and the reciprocal rule (the shutter speed shouldn’t be slower than the length of your lens), and you’re on track for taking a nice photo. When capturing landscapes, you shoot in aperture priority and for motion shots, it’s shutter priority. Shooting photos using the automatic settings on your camera is a bit like eating cold fondue. You don’t do it.
Yann Guigoz and Ludo May mountain bike downhill
Christy Spring
With this wisdom in mind, we stuff our SD cards with vertigo-inducing images of the duo hurtling down the hill before stopping for lunch in Les Schlérondes. A picnic spread of terrine on toast and fudgy apricots is washed down with hot coffee as we take in the view of a distant paraglider. We remount our bikes to head home for the foreseeable, which, as the name Verbier Basecamp might allude, involves camping on a mountain. It’s a statement that might not seem shocking unless you’re well-read in Swiss law, in which case it’s astounding. In the same vein that recycling is prohibited on Sundays and urinating standing up after 10pm is banned (it’s far too noisy), camping in Switzerland is largely outlawed, particularly in remote areas of natural beauty.
The reasoning has more grounding than the two aforementioned laws. Authorities enforce strict regulations about where people can peg tents to preserve the country’s encyclopaedic array of flora and fauna and maintain public order. Wild camping is only considered acceptable on protected areas of Swiss terrain if it’s above the timberline and for educational purposes. Thankfully, in our case, Basecamp Events work closely with Verbier, the police, and the landowners to get the correct authorisations. No trace is left and you’re encouraged to learn about the Swiss environment via experts like glaciologists, astrophysicists or Verbier’s professional athletes.
Camping? On a mountain? It easily conjures an image of hauling a tent, stove, camping chair and other assorted paraphernalia thousands of feet up a massif while you desperately gulp thinning air. However, unlike an Ikea flatpack, the campsite below La Chaux is fully formed on arrival. It’s kitted out with enough gear to make Bear Grylls weak at the knees. Tents have high-loft insulated Klymit blankets, North Face sleeping bags and memory foam mattresses; Yeti coolers are stocked with local wine and German beer. There’s a portable sauna, shower and toilet. When the sun sets, the camp illuminates with the glow of Barebones lanterns and Suprabeam lighting. Even your bags have been ferried up Les Ruinettes gondola on possibly the most scenic journey of their lives.
Inside the tents provided by Basecamp events
Melody Sky
As someone who works a classic nine-to-five and consequently spends the majority of my time inside, I start noticing the benefits of spending over 24 hours outdoors like this. Your senses oscillate between a broader spectrum, and experiences are full of far more extremes and contrasts than being perched at a desk. Hot saunas, icy plunges, warm campfires, cold beer, blue skies, inky nights, immense mountains, cosy tents. This modern taste for camping and adventure holidaying owes much to the pandemic.
What started as a convenient Covid romance while travel was restricted – when we were housebound and itching to get outside – has blossomed into a more sustained love affair. Antoine Blazieu, founder of Basecamp Events, mentions that there’s been an increasing desire for outdoor holidays since the pandemic. I’ve certainly felt this way. Ask me ten years ago to go on a camping holiday, and I would have rather walked behind a flatulent donkey, but now I leap at the prospect. I’m no anomaly either – one in five British adults has been on a camping or caravan holiday since the pandemic began. Of these, about 4.5 million were sleeping in a tent or caravan for the first time.
Christy Spring snaps a photo close to camp
Melody Sky
Dusk settles as camp chef Vincent Mairiniac stokes hot coals over a cast-iron cooking tripod laden with local chicken, lamb, beef and a bubbling cauldron of ratatouille. ‘Funky Nassau’ by The Beginning of the End plays from the kitchen tent as I take a pew on a camping chair, hands cupped around a steel mug of hot tea, trying to thaw from the cold plunge and sauna combination I’d subjected myself to an hour prior. A thick cloud swamps the campsite, and there’s little to see beyond the confines of our pitch apart from a nearby mountain face threaded with a narrow tunnel. It’s part of an epic strategic military network of tunnels, bunkers, and fallout shelters known as National Redoubt that have been carved into the country’s subsoil like Swiss cheese.
The cloud, more persistent than a TV licence warning letter, is firmly here to stay. Plans of dark sky photography are quashed. Despite being unable to take any photos, we pile into a heated tent with scientific mediator Michael Cottier and astrophysicist and exoplanet expert Jose Rodrigues, who both work at the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Observatory in St Luc to take a peek through their astrophotography slides. Cottier clicks through photos taken on various telescopes like the Hubble, with lenses metres in diameter. We gawk at nebulas clouded by red mist from hydrogen explosions, billion-year-old stars (which in extraterrestrial terms are youthful) and snaps of Betelgeuse – a giant star due to explode in the next 300 years that will release more light than the moon.
We gawk at nebulas clouded by red mist from hydrogen explosions, billion-year-old stars and snaps of Betelgeuse
“What happens when it explodes?” “What’s a black hole?” “Is there an end to the universe?”. We bombard them with questions even an astrophysicist with a PhD cannot respond to, so instead, Rodrigues tells us how to take pretty photos of the stars. “You need a tripod, 13mm lens and a cable release for starters – so you don’t have to press the shutter with your fingers, making for shaky photos”, he says. June, July, and August are the best months for capturing the Milky Way, and you must check for light pollution online before taking photos. Verbier is perfect. Somewhere like London, less so. The earth rotates by 15 degrees every 60 minutes, so keep long exposure photos of starry skies to under an hour – otherwise, you’ll wind up with star trails smeared over your images. With an amygdala crammed with enough existential thoughts about parallel universes to keep me awake all night, I head to my tent to kip.
A paraglider swoops past a hill in Verbier
Melody Sky
A star-studded sky above the tents captured on a clear night at Basecamp
Melody Sky
While I’d love to say the melodic bleating of a chamois rose me from my slumber the following morning, it was the smell of food – specifically, vanilla lingering in the alpine air. I unzip my tent, eager to locate the source like a ravenous labrador. The culprit in question is French toast. But before we eat, the day commences with yoga practice led by Luli Boffelli from Inspire yoga studio in Verbier. No amount of vinyasa flow in a subterranean air-conditioned London studio can prepare you for a practice held 7,200 feet up a mountain. Every downward dog involves a view of the razor-sharp arêtes between your legs, and the babbling of the steam makes savasana deeply meditative.
We click the buckles on our helmets and mount our e-bikes for the final hurrah up Monte Forte at 10,800 feet. The final stage of the journey to reach the highest point in the 4 Vallées involves taking a cable car. The valley has a quirk of giving them godparents, and above the door is a brass plaque that reads Diana Ross. It might seem random, but this disco legend was a regular on Val D’Isere slopes – alongside James Blunt, a coveted lift godfather. Stomachs plummet as we pass Europe’s steepest zipline before reaching the top lift station, catching a glimpse of Igloo du Mont-Fort, which holds the accolade of serving Europe’s highest fondue. There’s a sense of being sequestered up here, away from the sounds and sights of civilisation, the extremes of summer heat, and the incessant pings of technology.
Grand Combine
Christy Spring
We clamber up a metal staircase to point our cameras one last time. The view is a monochrome cocktail of dark rock and snow, interrupted only by the luminous blue glacial lakes of the Corbassière glacier and the cappuccino-like dusting of sand deposited on snow from the Sahara winds. The massifs of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn coquettishly peer through the clouds, but the cantankerous Grand Combine poses in the fore, ready for her money shot. It’s said that a photographer is only as good as the subject they choose to capture, and if this rings true, I may have to quit the day job.
Outdoor Photography Workshop with Basecamp Events and Melody Sky from £2,400 for three nights, including meals and accommodation. For more information visit melodysky.com
