Pro Guiding Service - The Value of a Guide in the Backcountry

To borrow a phrase from the old country song, there's only two times whey you ought to think about hiring a mountain guide: before your're confident in the backcountry--and after.

Oh great, your're thinking--I've just laid $1200 for Silvrettas, skins, boots, an avvie class, and transceiver, and now some niff-naff tells me that I need to hire a guide to show me how to escape civilization. Pretty soon I'll need a night job to afford the freedom of the hills.

True, you've probably laid out more money than you wanted to, to get this far. But occasionally hiring the services of a guide can result in the most rewarding experiences you may ever have in the mountains. In a nutshell, a mountain guide offers two things:

Safety. One of the most frustrating aspects of learning to wilderness ski is that it requires a huge amount of knowledge before you even pack the car: avalanche awarenss, route-finding skills, knowledge of mountain weather, etc. Trouble is, the enthusiasm of fledgling backcountry skiers too often outstrips their knowledge. Anxious, they charge into the mountatins withou a working knowledge of the "rules." Calamity sometimes results. Skiing with "experienced" friends isn't always much safer; they often don't know a lot more than you do about the nuances of safe mountain travel.

Hiring a guide affords the best of both worlds-- getting you into the backcountry ASAP, but with someone whose main goal is to keep you out of harm's way. Peace of mind is dear in the mountains: hireing a guide to grant that peace is cheap.

Instruction. A lot of people see a mountain guide as a glorified compass--soeone that makes sure you appear at the trailhead when you're expected to show. What they don't realize is that he or she is also a sourcebook--someone that can increase your knowledge of the backcountry faster than any outside reading or unguided floundering can.

An example: As a novice randonnee skier, I took my first guided trip one spring into the North Cascades. Two other young men in their early 20s also attended--gung-ho boys who could ski circles around me, but had never been off the beaten path before.

We were all in for an education.

I've tallied the many ways we would have attacked Silver Star Mountain or Kangaroo Ridge differently, had we no one to steer us otherwise; the result is a litany of freshman gaffess and outright bonehead mistakes: skinning uphill in jagged lines; instead uphill in jabbed line, instead of more efficient.