The Mountain Guide School

Course Description

Day 1: You drag your backpack outside, straining under the load.  The van has just pulled up, and your instructor comes up to give you a hand.  “Welcome to the Mountain Guide School.” she says with a smile.  “Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.” You reply, perhaps a bit nervously. 

You load your backpack into the van and, just like that, it’s begun.  A two-year mountain guide training course. 

The Mountain Guide School provides you with the training, skills, and certifications you need to begin a career as a mountain guide. Training and working in mountains across the globe, you will discover what it takes to succeed as a mountaineering guide, pulling from many different strands of skills and knowledge.

To work as a mountain guide, you must be strong and prepared on many different levels.

Day 67: One last photo from the summit, and you begin your descent.  The good weather has held so far, but you don’t want to push you luck.  Clipping in to the rappel rope, you double check the anchor, your harness, and the knots.  Yelling “On rappel!” you start down. 

At the bottom of the mountain, you strap your skis back on, check the map one more time, and begin across the glacier, heading toward camp.  The clouds are rolling in and the wind has really picked up.  You’re glad you didn’t dally on the summit.  Maybe you’ll make it back before the storm hits.

The foundation for any mountain guide is development of strong technical skills such as belaying, building an anchor, or judging the avalanche hazard of a slope.  On the Mountain Guide School, you will spend the bulk of your time in the field, learning technical skills step by step and in context.  Later, as you transition from the student to practitioner, you’ll put these skills to use every day, for months on end.  In this way, the skills you learn will be so well practiced that the become second nature.  Finally, as you begin guiding others, you are confident in both yourself and your depth & breadth of knowledge. 

Day 182:  “Zero!” you yell into the wind, and the rope stops moving.  You glance up at the mountain in front of you, at the ridge you will begin climbing the following day.

Probing out a safe area on the glacier, you belay your climbing partner into camp.  You look around and let out a small laugh. 

“What’s so funny?” she asks.  You shake your head and smile, motioning to the towering peaks surrounding you, the peaks you will be climbing over the next 6 weeks. 

“Nothing really.” You reply.  “I just can’t believe we’re here, on our own, ready to climb.” 

She smiles back.  “We’ve certainly come a long way since the first day, eh?” She quips.  You nod in agreement, grab your shovel and start to dig a snow wall.

More than just a venue to learn skills, the Mountain Guide School holds many opportunities to lead in the backcountry.  First, as a student, you will take on the responsibility for the day-to-day decision making of the course.  Your instructors will support and help you along the way, as you develop your backcountry decision-making skills and judgment. 

As you become more comfortable as a mountaineer, you will begin planning and executing your own remote mountaineering expeditions, taking you across the Patagonian Ice Cap, the glaciers of Alaska, or the Peaks of New Zealand.

Finally, as a guide, you will not only be responsible for yourself, but begin caring for and supporting others, helping them to learn the skills that you have mastered.

Day 241: Your crampon scrapes across the rock, letting out a screech of protest.  You reset it and stand up on the tiny flake of rock.  You reach higher with your ice axe, wedging the pick in a small, ice filled crack of rock.  You look down.  You’re 15 feet above your last piece of protection, 300 feet off the ground.  Re-focusing, you place your foot carefully, and stand up again.  You can see a ledge a bit higher, and a crack where you can make an anchor.  But you’re not there yet.  So you reach up with your ice axe, place it in the crack, and pull up.  The axe holds, and you keep climbing.

One of the most valuable outcomes of the Guide School is the extensive amount of time you will have guiding real clients (many guide training courses don’t actually involve you doing any real guiding). You will do an internship with an international mountaineering company where you will begin the life long process of understanding and applying many of the other, non-technical skills that are at the core of being a quality guide.
More than just being competent technically, you will develop the ability to work with people, empathize and encourage them, while managing the inherent hazards of the activity.

Much of what a good guide does is invisible to their clients. Working with clients on a day-to-day basis, while being supported by an instructor, will enable you develop these crucial skills.

Later, when you are guiding, your ability to positively interact with the clients will greatly enhance your effectiveness as a guide.

Day 417:  You stand in front of the group, six mountaineers keen to learn more.  You start first at the snow bollard, explaining how to build one, the important qualities, and when it is an appropriate anchor choice.  Moving on to a top clip picket, the group discusses how and when it should be used.  Finally, you bring the group to a deadman anchor you’ve built, and discuss its proper application in the field. 

“So, which anchor do you think will fail first?” you ask. 

One of the students immediately pipes up, “The bollard.  It’s just snow.  That’ll go before the picket.”

“Ok,” you reply.  “Let’s find out.”  You have the students wrap the rope properly around the bollard.  They start to pull.

The experience you will gain with the Mountain Guide School will be the ideal foundation and launching pad to a rich and exciting career as a Mountaineering Guide. By the end of the School, you will have traveled to many different mountain ranges and experienced the transition from being a student to being a guide. And this is just the beginning.

Day 502: “Time to go!” you yell to your student, and she nods, looking nervous.  The wind whips around you and snow blasts your jacket.

She clips into the rappel rope and is about to leave, but you stop her.  “Double check everything,” you holler over the wind.

She looks down to her harness, checks the anchor, and looks to you.  “On rappel!” she yells and sets off into the clouds. 

The rope goes slack as she gets to the bottom.  You clip yourself in, check everything, and set off for the bottom yourself.  As a mountain guide.

Lead.  Climb.

Course Progression

Module One, the Foundation:You will begin your training as a student, building your personal foundation of outdoor and mountaineering skills, as well as decision-making and judgment skills. This first phase allows you to start your guiding career with a solid understanding of the mountains, learning to thrive in a remote backcountry environment, on many different levels. You will learn the basics of mountaineering, rock, ice, and snow climbing, camping in a variety of environments, navigation, backcountry risk management, and judgment. You will also take your first steps to becoming a certified guide by obtaining a Wilderness Education Association (WEA) Outdoor Leader certification, a wilderness first aid certification, and completing a Leave No Trace Trainer course.

Module Two, Technical Skills: At this point, you will have a strong grasp of the basics of mountaineering, and will be ready to start developing deeper technical and instructional skills. This will happen in concert with your continued maturation as a mountaineer. Shifting away from the snow and ice of the Patagonian Ice Cap, you will spend a six week rotation on rock, practicing traditional, aid, and big wall rock climbing skills. You will learn about placing rock protection, making traditional rock anchors, route finding, leading in technical terrain, and will also learn basic aid climbing and big wall climbing skills needed for multi-day rock climbing expeditions.

Transitioning from rock, you will continue to develop your personal mountaineering and outdoor skills. With your fellow aspirant guides, you will plan and execute a six-week crossing of the southern Patagonian Ice cap, the third largest in the world. Working together, both students and guide instructors, you will select a route that allows a series of challenging climbing and glacier travel objectives, further consolidating your skills. This will be the first expedition where you will be responsible for all facets of the expedition, from planning and preparation, to carrying out the route. Along the way, you will have the opportunity to climb rock, snow, and ice to summit some of the most spectacular peaks in Patagonia.

Module Three, the True Mountaineer: After working with your instructors to complete the ice cap crossing, your personal development will continue as you will and execute an international, six-week climbing expedition, this time with minimal input from your instructors. Possible climbing destinations include Bolivia, Ecuador, New Zealand, Argentina, and North America. Where you go will depend on you and your group’s goals and desires, and will focus on further enhancing your outdoor resume.

During this phase of the course, you will also continue along the course to WEA guiding certification by participating in an instructor training certification course.

Module Four, the Apprentice Guide: The final semesters of your program will see you transition from a competent mountaineer to a solid guide. Initially you will work as an intern guide, and then as a full guide, in a series of progressively more challenging expeditions.

Traveling abroad, you will spend three to four months working as a paid intern at one of our affiliate companies running single and multi-day expeditions. This will allow you to experience the guiding industry from a trip leader and employee perspective. You will work with clients on a daily basis and, over the course of the summer, will gain more and more responsibility. Exceptional students may be trusted to take their own groups out on multi-day trips by the end of the summer, making the first transition to full guide.

Module Five, the Mountain Guide: Following your internship aborad, your training will continue in Patagonia by working as a co-guide on a 42 day mountaineering expedition, co-leading a group of six novice clients into the Patagonian backcountry. You will be responsible for helping to teach and train a group of students of varying levels of experience in an incredibly remote environment.

For your final step in the guide training program, you will work two expeditions as a full lead guide. From beginning to end, you will be responsible for taking a group across the Patagonian Ice Cap, up a remote peak, or rock climbing, training and helping the students to develop their outdoor skills. The final 42 day expedition will serve as your final evaluation for WEA Instructor Certification, and upon successful completion, you will have become a fully certified guide, coming full circle from student to competent instructor and outdoor leader.

Challenge Yourself.

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Up the Hill
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Thank Goodness We Have Snowshoes
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Avalanche Probe Line
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Coming Down
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More Fun than a Barrel of Monkeys
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