Three Years After Deadly Avalanche, Swiss Court to Decide Fate of Two Ski Guides Who Led Boarding School Students Down the Wellhorn

More than three years after an avalanche swept two 18-year-old boarding-school students to their deaths on a Swiss mountainside, the two men who led that ski tour are set to face a Swiss judge this week, in a rare criminal trial testing where legal responsibility begins and ends on the flanks of the Alps.

The trial of the two guides opens Wednesday, August 12, at 8:30 a.m. at the Oberland Regional Court in Thun, with both men facing charges of negligent homicide in connection with the deaths of Emily Franciose, an 18-year-old from Vail, Colorado, and Archie Harvey, an 18-year-old from West London. Both defendants deny violating their duty of care, and the presumption of innocence applies as the case proceeds; a verdict is scheduled for Friday, August 14.

A school built around the mountains

Franciose and Harvey were students at the École d'Humanité, a private, co-educational international boarding school founded in 1934 in the Bernese village of Hasliberg, with roughly 130 students and a heavy emphasis on ending academic classes at noon so afternoons can be devoted to hiking and skiing. For Franciose, that emphasis was the whole point of enrolling. Having grown up in Vail and attended Vail Mountain School from kindergarten through 11th grade, she chose to spend her senior year at the École so she could keep skiing the backcountry in the afternoons after school, following in a lifelong passion — she'd been on skis since age two. She had completed avalanche safety courses and travelled with a first-aid kit; the school's backcountry program ran ski tours into the Swiss Alps at least once a week, and she'd arrived at the school in August 2022, the day after turning 18.

Harvey, meanwhile, had come to Hasliberg from schooling in the UK. The exclusive school, whose fees run to roughly £57,000 a year, sits a short distance from the ski slopes above the village. Friends paid tribute to him after his death as the son of property developer Philip Harvey and designer Sarah Metcalfe; a family friend told reporters at the time that his parents were "devastated," adding that "it's the worst thing that can happen to any parent."

The day on the Wellhorn

According to an independent investigation by the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF), the group of 12 — students and staff of the École d'Humanité — set out into the Rychenbachtal near Meiringen on March 21, 2023, beginning their ascent from Broch at around 10:30 a.m. and eventually climbing to roughly 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) below the north face of the Wellhorn. Leading the tour were Guido Bieri, a longtime École d'Humanité employee in charge of the school's outdoor program, and Lukas Iten, a veteran mountain guide from the area.

SnowBrains

The group's first descent passed without incident: the guide chose a comparatively gentle line on the eastern side of Gstelliwang, with a slope angle below roughly 35 degrees, skiing down first himself and instructing the group to keep proper spacing as they followed. Everyone reached the gathering point safely.

It was the second descent that turned deadly. The avalanche released shortly after 4:15 p.m., catching Franciose and Harvey and sweeping them away; both reportedly died of asphyxiation, buried beneath the snow. Harvey was located roughly an hour and 35 minutes later, under about two meters (6.5 feet) of snow, and was already dead. Franciose, however, was not recovered that day, or that week, or that month — her remains were not found until nearly three months later, on June 18, 2023, in the Rychenbach, the stream running through the valley below.

Months of searching, then a wait for answers

For the Franciose family, the search for their daughter became its own prolonged ordeal. The day after the avalanche, Emily's parents, Sue and Reg Franciose, flew to Switzerland to join the search for their daughter. Reg Franciose, a trauma surgeon, has long served as the medical director of the Vail Ski Patrol; on the second anniversary of the avalanche in March 2025, Sue Franciose led members of the ski patrol down Vail's Pepi's Face run in her daughter's memory, a tradition the patrol has now repeated for two years running. The family has since partnered with Vail Mountain School to establish the Emily Franciose Outdoor Learning Fund, intended to build a backcountry ski hut in her honor — a project rooted, her mother has said, in the fact that "the whole reason why she went to Switzerland is to be able to do that in the afternoons after school."

What the court will examine

The two ski tour leaders are scheduled to appear before the Oberland Regional Court on charges tied directly to their handling of the group's second descent. Over the course of the trial, the court is expected to examine the route selection on Gstelliwang, the snow conditions present that afternoon, the decisions made during both the first and second descents, and the specific division of responsibility between the two men leading the tour.

Central to that inquiry will be the SLF's own post-incident analysis. Investigators found the group's cautious approach on the first descent — shallower terrain, controlled spacing, a guide skiing first — reasonable; the SLF's assessment instead focuses closely on what changed, and what wasn't accounted for, on the descent that followed.

A wider reckoning for guided alpine trips

The Thun trial lands amid a broader moment of legal scrutiny for guided backcountry travel across the Alps and beyond. Criminal cases alleging negligence by mountain guides — once vanishingly rare — have surfaced with unusual frequency over the past year. In Austria, alpine prosecutor Robert Waller has noted that despite roughly 285 mountain fatalities recorded annually in that country alone, criminal cases like these remain highly unusual. An Austrian court convicted a climber of grossly negligent homicide earlier this year after determining that his experience made him the "de facto" guide for a fatal ascent of the Grossglockner, even though the outing had been framed as a recreational trip between partners rather than a formal guided tour — a ruling now under appeal that has drawn close attention from mountaineering and legal circles alike for how it defines who, exactly, bears responsibility when a trip goes wrong.

In the United States, meanwhile, attorneys handling ski-accident cases in California, Colorado and Utah have said they'd not previously encountered a fatal avalanche during a guided trip that triggered a criminal investigation, following a deadly slide during a commercial backcountry tour in California earlier this year. Together, the cases mark what some in the guiding profession see as a shifting legal landscape — one in which decisions made in real time, on shifting snow, are increasingly being revisited afterward in a courtroom.

What's next

Under Swiss criminal procedure, the trial in Thun is expected to run across several days this week, with testimony likely to include the surviving members of the March 2023 tour, expert witnesses on snow science, and the two defendants themselves. A verdict is due Friday, August 14 — a ruling that will be watched closely not only by the Franciose and Harvey families, but by ski guides, boarding schools with outdoor programs, and backcountry travelers across the Alps, all waiting to see how a Swiss court weighs the line between a tragic accident and criminal negligence in the mountains.

This is a developing story. Coverage will be updated as the trial proceeds this week.