Over 9 days at the end of October we played host to two groups of students from Merchant Taylor School, in Northwood, London. The first 66 due to arrive were 10 groups of Gold candidates for their practice expedition. We had 11 members of Lupine staff on site in Edale and waited for the hoards to arrive. There was a bit of a problem with getting the coaches over the narrow bridge on a bend at the beginning of the Edale valley meaning that the groups were a bit late getting to the campsite. Once on-site the Mountain Leaders got to work helping the participants with their tents and going through some emergency procedures exercises before observing them cook their evening meal.

On the first day the teams dispersed to their various campsites with each Mountain Leader walking with their group to assist with any navigational questions and to check that they were ready for remote supervision (we had not been involved with their training as the school had taken care of this). By the end of day 1 all leaders were happy enough with their group's skills meaning that for the rest of the expedition all the groups could be remotely supervised.

By the end of Day four 64 of the original 66 who started finished their expeditions and were deemed to be ready to proceed to their assessed expedition next spring.

We packed up our base and moved it south to make a new base camp in the white peak ready for the silver participants the next day. We had a small change over of staff (replacing one and adding a 12th member) for larger number of Silver participants due. With better weather, more facilities at this campsite and no transport problems we were able to get more done on the first evening with the silvers and most groups got off to a rocketing start early the next morning. By the end of the silvers practice we had no dropouts due to injury but we did ask that one group perform a second practice expedition before being sent on to assessment.

This was our first mass expedition and all in all it went extremely well. We've highlighted a few areas that both we and the school can improve on for future expeditions and look forward to getting many of the same participants back in the new year for their assessed expeditions.