Eight days
above the clouds.
What the kids taught me.

I didn't fully know what I was signing up for when I took the ATL role for the Insoul summer camp. I knew the trail. I knew Indiahikes. But leading kids — that's a different thing entirely from leading adults. You think you're prepared, and then a ten-year-old looks at you with completely unfiltered honesty and you realise you're not.

Eight days total. Two days getting there from base city, six days on the mountain. Ali Bedni Bugyal and Dayara Bugyal — high altitude meadows in Uttarakhand, the kind of terrain that makes you understand why people keep coming back to the Himalayas. Beautiful doesn't cover it. It's the kind of place that makes everything else feel smaller in the best possible way.

Here's the thing about children on a trek — they have no ceiling. They don't arrive thinking about their limits. They just go. They complain loudly, stop frequently, and occasionally cry. Then they get up and keep walking because the person next to them is doing the same.

No filters. No performance. Just effort. Watching them push through something genuinely hard — not because someone forced them, but because they found something in themselves that wanted to — that's not something you can manufacture in a classroom.

The transformation doesn't happen in one moment. It's gradual — so gradual you almost miss it if you're not paying attention. On day one, everyone stays close to who they already know. By day two, they're helping someone they met yesterday with their backpack straps. By day four, the group has its own language, its own rhythm.

Teamwork on a trek isn't taught. It's discovered. When the trail gets steep and someone reaches back to offer a hand — not because an instructor said to, but because it felt like the right thing to do — that's the outdoor classroom working exactly as it should.

There's one kid I keep coming back to. Small, quiet. Whenever something got to her — the altitude, the exhaustion, the distance from home — she'd pull out her journal and write. Not to complain. Not to document for anyone else. Just to process.

I watched her close the journal one evening, look up at the valley spread below, and smile. I don't know what she wrote. I didn't need to. That image is its own complete story.

That's the outdoor learning concept I've fallen for — not the curriculum, not the activities, but the idea that experience is the teacher. The mountain asks something of you. And in answering it, you find out something about yourself you didn't know was there.

I came to this role thinking I'd be mostly managing logistics and keeping kids safe on the trail. That's part of it. But the learning goes much deeper than I expected.

Everything above is what the camp meant. What follows is what it actually looked like — the shape of the days, from the airport pickup to the final goodbye. If you're a parent deciding whether to send your kid, this is the part that tells you how they'll be held.

The first task is the smallest and the most important: getting everyone here safely. Some kids fly in and we pick them up from the airport; others are dropped off directly at the designated stay in Rishikesh or Dehradun. Once everyone has arrived, found their bunks, and eaten dinner together for the first time, we sit them down for the briefing.

Tomorrow is a travel day — eight to eleven hours from Rishikesh to Lohajung. I tell them what stays in the daypack and what goes into the offload: water bottle within reach, rain poncho in case the hills decide, head cap, a fleece for when the road climbs. The first night, mostly, is quiet curiosity. They are reading each other — and us.

The drive is the first real test, and not in the way they expect. Motion sickness on mountain roads is common — the bends, the climbs, the engine downshifting through villages. As ATLs, we're given basic training by a NOLS WFR–certified guide — the wilderness first-responder standard — on how to handle exactly this: who to seat where, when to stop, how to read a kid who has gone quiet because they're trying not to be sick. A certified paramedic also stays in contact with us throughout.

We reach the base campus by evening, where the trek leaders are waiting with a welcome — short and warm. Once the kids have settled in, the first thing we do is take their vitals and medical history — done by the trek leaders themselves, who are NOLS WFR certified — and write it all onto a card that travels with us for the whole trek. Pulse, oxygen saturation, allergies, any past episodes. If anyone's numbers begin to drift on the trail, we already know their baseline. It looks like paperwork; it is one of the quieter ways we make sure no child disappears inside the group. We also hold a ratio of one lead to every six kids, so no one is ever far from someone who knows what to do.

After that, the leaders introduce themselves and walk the group through what the next six days will look like. Then comes the gear briefing, which the kids love more than they expect to. How to unzip and re-zip a sleeping bag without fighting it. How to set the height on a trek pole. The double-knot for trekking shoes that doesn't undo itself at altitude. How to ranger-roll a t-shirt so it takes a third of the space. How to pack an offload bag and a daypack so the weight sits right on their backs.

Then comes the call home. Each kid speaks with their parents — sometimes a minute, sometimes longer. After that, around nine or ten, we collect phones and anything else that can make a call; they get their devices back only once the trek is complete. It always surprises me how quickly the relief sets in, once that decision is out of their hands.

Night check-ins are where the real work happens. We move through the dorms, help the kids finish packing, gently take out the things that won't survive the mountain, and make sure nothing essential is missing. This is also when the homesickness arrives — almost always at night, almost always quietly. Someone sits at the edge of their bunk and doesn't know they're about to cry until they do. We sit with them. We listen. We don't promise it'll all be fine, because we haven't earned that yet. We tell them: let's see how tomorrow goes — together.

From here, every day keeps the same shape at its edges. A wake-up call at five, black tea, the vitals cards out for a morning reading, time to freshen up, breakfast, and then the group assembles. The cards come out a second time over evening snacks — twice a day, every day, so a small change never goes unseen. And every evening, before dinner, we sit in a reflection circle and then lay out the plan for tomorrow.

Equipment check. Head count. The drive to Wan village takes about forty-five minutes from base camp, and this is where the trek truly begins. Before the first step, the trek leaders give a short brief — the route, the terrain, what the next few hours will ask — and a warm-up. There's a small protocol that always sounds strange the first time you hear it: what to do if mules come down the trail. Step to the uphill side, face the mountain, and let them pass.

For the Ali Bedni Bugyal route, day two is seven kilometres to the first campsite, packed lunches in the daypacks. What I love most about this day is the slowness of the conversations between climbs. The trek leaders pause and point — that's a rhododendron, that's an oak, that's a wild pheasant if you stay quiet long enough. The rhododendrons are my favourite. There is nothing in a city that prepares you for a hillside of them in bloom. We eat lunch in their shade, and someone always starts a story, and someone always interrupts it, and that is exactly the point.

Day two also holds the first steep ascent — the moment when at least one kid looks at the rest of the climb and quietly decides they cannot do this. The work then is to slow down with them, hydrate them, and check that it isn't something more serious — a real signal we should listen to — rather than the panic of a body meeting altitude for the first time. If it's the panic, we bring them back to themselves: name what they're feeling, move them out of the alarm and into the next ten steps. Almost always, ten steps later, they're walking again, a little surprised at themselves. Dinner tonight is louder than the night before. They've done a full day on the mountain, and they feel it.

The morning runs its now-familiar shape, and then the kids assemble for an energizer game to shake the sleep off. The real work of day three, though, is social. We split them into four fresh teams — deliberately scrambling the little groups that have already begun to form — so they have to make new friends instead of retreating into the people they arrived with.

Straight after the energizer, the outdoor games begin. They're built to need things the kids can't fake — teamwork, a bit of strategy, sharp observation — and the favourite is Where's My Monkey, where one team has to guess an object while their teammates act it out, the acting getting gloriously unhinged. Veera — here on his eighth trek with us — brought the whole group down. We get a couple of rounds in before lunch.

After lunch comes me time — two hours that belong to them. Some journal, some rest, and some pull on gloves and take bags out into the meadow to collect the litter other trekkers have left behind — the Green Trails habit Indiahikes builds into every trek. When the rain came, it pushed us indoors, which turned out to be its own kind of gift: we ran a session on the plant kingdom — how it all evolved — and our local guides, Bubli and Divya ji, told trail stories: Roopkund, the Lathu Devi temple, the kind that land differently when you're sitting inside the very weather they describe.

Reflection circle, then the plan, and tomorrow is a big one. Day four is their DIY day — do it yourself. The kids lead the trek and take the roles themselves: lead, middle, tail lead, hydration in-charge, timekeeper, and a kitchen team responsible for serving the food. Our trek leaders shadow them on walkie-talkies, ready to step in the moment a decision goes wrong, but otherwise hands-off. For one day, the mountain is theirs to run.

The DIY day starts the moment they wake. The kids make the wake-up call themselves, check that everyone has eaten, and run the warm-up and the formation. Before we set off, they get a demo on un-pitching tents — and then strike a couple of them together as a team. They take their positions on the trail by role, we hand out the trail snack, and we let them lead.

The weather had other plans. The sky turned cloudy as we climbed, and the forecast for the coming days was poor — so rather than push for everything, we made sure they reached the edge of Ali Bugyal, banking the meadow now in case Bedni slipped out of reach later. The kids had their fun up there regardless.

One boy wasn't in great shape on the ascent, so I walked him down to camp early, gave him rest, and treated his symptoms before they could grow into something larger. By the time the rest of the team rolled in, we had the welcome drink waiting: aam panna, the raw-mango one — my favourite of the lot. Camp tonight is at Abin Kharak. The evening keeps its shape — vitals over snacks, a reflection circle, a round to make sure everyone is genuinely okay — and then the plan for tomorrow: Bedni Bugyal, the higher meadow.

The mountain gave us back everything it had been holding. The weather broke open — clear, generous, visibility for miles. Our technical guide Deepak ran a session at the top, and for a while it was just the meadow and the light.

Not everyone found the summit push easy. A few kids struggled near the end, and the answer was the same as it always is: let them move at their own pace, keep talking, hand them small tips, stay beside them. And then — everyone summited. Every single one.

We were back by lunch. After me time, we ran a coordination game that needs all thirty kids moving as one — not six, not a single team, all of them. They failed it, regrouped, made a plan, tried again, adjusted, tried again. It took several cycles. When they finally cracked it, the cheer was louder than the summit.

Gehroli Patal is my favourite camp on this trail, for one selfish reason: from here, I can see Mt. Trishul.

We came down after breakfast and the warm-up and reached before lunch, just as a light rain began. The afternoon was meant to be a tent-pitching session — a demo, then the kids pitch their own. But the rain picked up, and instead of retreating to the community tents the way most groups do, they wanted more. "Sir, we'll do more," they said, and pitched more tents than we'd allocated, in the rain, grinning. I have rarely been prouder.

The rain rewrote the rest of the day into a survival session: a little theory, then equipment they got to actually handle and try — flint and steel, compass navigation, water filtration, the small camp stove.

When the rain let up, a game of cricket broke out on the flattest patch of camp — a stick for a bat, the whole group fielding, nobody quite sure of the score and nobody minding.

And then the kids hosted ABB Got Talent — they ran it, and they performed in it. One girl sang a song she had composed herself. A few belted out film songs together. There was a card trick, and a kid who knit something at impossible speed. Our trek lead Guree read a poem he'd written. One kid turned out to be a walking atlas; another did stand-up. It was, simply, a joy to sit inside.

The morning runs its shape one last time. The trek down went smoothly; we reached the road head by one, lunch eaten on the trail. We stopped near the Neel Ganga, and the kids did what kids do near cold mountain water — got straight into it.

Forty-five minutes by road brought us back to base campus. After a break came the unwinding: rentals returned and cross-checked, offload bags collected, liners and eco-bags handed back. Then the debrief — each kid naming their highlight, their hardest moment, and the one thing they were taking home.

Certificates. And to mark the finish, rhododendron juice — the same rhododendrons that shaded our first lunch, now in our hands at the end — along with marble cake and a proper thank-you to the kitchen team, who the kids had quietly fallen for over six days of meals. Indiahikes trains its kitchen crews to a standard before they ever reach the slopes; the kids tasted the difference without ever knowing why. After dinner, the phones came back.

The drive to the airport. They arrived as strangers and they are leaving as friends, carrying a week of things that don't happen in routine life. The final goodbyes are always a little hard. You hope you'll meet them again — on some other trail, in some other year.

The camp ends. The kids go home. You pack up and start the descent and the 6–8 hour journey back to Dehradun. And somewhere on that road, you realise it's over, and you feel it.

I felt good about what I'd learned. I felt ready to do it again, better. And I felt genuinely sad that it ended — which I think is the sign that something mattered.

The outdoor learning model works. I've seen it. Not in theory, not in a case study — in the faces of kids who came up a mountain unsure of themselves and came down having discovered something they didn't know they had. If you're a parent reading this wondering whether to send your kid — the mountain will give them something you cannot give them at home. Send them.

And if you're someone curious about outdoor education, about what happens when you replace a classroom with altitude and effort and shared experience — come find out. There's nothing quite like it.