Five Reasons to Hire a Guide

While many of us are experiential learners who have developed their outdoor skills through trial and error over many trips, there are many benefits from using a professional guide to help you turn your dream adventure into a reality. While there are certainly numerous reasons to seek professional guidance to safely “learn the ropes”, I will highlight five of the top reasons to hire a mountain guide.

1. Local terrain knowledge.

           

So you just saved up all your vacation time from the past year to be able to take a trip to climb a peak in a mountain range you have never visited. Do you want to spend half of your trip wondering if you are off-route or inadvertently in dangerous terrain? Snow, glacier conditions and avalanche conditions change rapidly and dynamically- going with someone who has intimate knowledge of your route in a variety of conditions will keep you safer and perhaps more successful.

2. Ability to match your ability and goals to a trip.

Whether you are a casual climber or hiker who wants to do a unique and fun trip once a year, or a keen mountain climber looking to develop skill sets to be more self-reliant, working closely with a professional guide can help you customize your mountain experience. Guides carefully match the challenge of a route with the desired outcomes of their guests to deliver the best education or experiential outcome.

3. Experience in managing groups in the mountains.

Sure, you just joined a local Meet Up style group that offers climbing trips. But what kind of qualifications do these trip leaders have, and how much responsibility do they have for you if something happens? Signing up for a group trip through a guide service will ensure safe and prudent group sizes, and attention to risk management so that all participants have their needs met. Plus, you usually eat a whole lot better on guided trips!

4. Qualifications and certifications.

Mountain climbing and backcountry adventuring can already be a dangerous activity, so seek out a guide who has passed formal internationally recognized exams through the American Mountain Guiding Association (AMGA). The long and rigorous process to become a certified guide involved not only guiding exams and professional development courses, but also wilderness medical training and attention to teaching outdoor-based curriculum.

5. You just want to get out and hike or climb, but can’t find a partner!

It can be frustrating to have to deal with schedule conflicts, partners who bail, and friends who just aren’t interested in another one of your half-cocked trip plans, so hiring a guide can take away a lot of the stress of planning a trip. Guide services work with your schedule, deal with the logistics and permits, and get everything lined up so that you get to show up and have fun without all the hassle of finding an appropriate partner.

Arrow Peak: Worth the price of admission.

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” 
-Rene Daumal

I will freely admit that when I am not working, I take a much more relaxed approach to route planning. Pack, drive to trailhead, start hiking- how bad could it be?  Well, it seems like my steady diet of high elevation trailheads and "casual" 3-4,000 ft. approaches has made me soft.




Enter Taboose Pass.  After leaving Mammoth at around 6:30 (too late), it was already 90 degrees at the trailhead!  What?!  Beginning almost at the floor of the Owens Valley, Taboose will get you sweating right out of the gate, and spinning your wheels at the same time thanks to steep switchbacks of deep sand.  Thank God for the guy who dreamt up sun-umbrellas.






After some hours of grinding our gears up the 6,200ft of elevation which separated us from the Pass, we crested over into the Sierra High Country and immediately forgot the past difficulties.  Feasting our eyes on such a massive view was humbling, and inspiring.  We could see our intended camp along Bench Lake and high above the Muro Blanco and so after a short lunch we hoofed it down the last 4 and a half miles to camp.  Arrow Peak dominates the view from Taboose, as it towers over Bench Lake and sits in between some of the highest concentration of high peaks in the range.



After 13 miles and quite a bit of elevation change, we enjoyed a well deserved break, fishing the lake and sipping on small batch bourbon.  Our route up Arrow would wait for us.





In the morning we awoke and while the NE Spur of the peak, first ascended by Walter Starr Jr. had been my first choice, it looked a bit too intimidating for Jen to get excited about, especially as we had forgone the rope or even helmets.  So the South Face route would be our path, and we wended through forests, marshy lakes and up through the benches of Arrow Pass to reach the route.
The route consisted of some 1,000ft of loose sand and rock; not the highest quality ascent but a means to an end for sure.





Then as soon as the summit of Arrow is reached, along a slender ridge of granite fins, the views become overwhelming.  All you can see are high mountains, from Mount Goddard to Whitney; the Palisades, Lakes Basin, Clarence King and Gardiner as well as the Western Peaks in the far corners of Sequoia and Kings Parks.  I was impressed to the point of being over saturated by such an immense sight.  But as Daumal says, we can't stay on top forever, and the allure of swimming in the deep blue waters below was too appealing.





The next day, hiking out without the wind blasting us in the face as it had when we ascended, we said farewell to the majesty of the high peaks and open country, and then reacquainted ourselves with our old friend, Taboose.  Climbing the 6,200 ft suddenly felt a whole lot more fun, as the ankles and knees started to get angry.  But after reaching the sandy flats which took us back to the car, and eventually to ice cream and beer, it started to feel worth it.  Worth it because of knowing now how much more there is out there in this range to see and experience.

ryan

On a Wing and a Prayer

 

Everything about Angel Wings is big.  The approach, the climb, the roof, the cracks- there is a reason why the South Arete Direct has a special place on the High Sierra Hardman Ticklist.  

After approaching for 18 miles along the High Sierra Trail, you finally hit basecamp at Hamilton Lake and can gaze up at the massive walls of Valhalla- Angel Wings, Cherubim Dome and Hamilton Dome all rise up precipitously out of the lake forming a deep hall of highly featured granite.

What makes it even sweeter is when your climbing partner, Matt Meinzer, just happens to be friends with the trail crew stationed at Hamilton Lake and they put you up in the nicest digs imaginable!

For two days after hiking in the weather was a bit unpredictable, so we hung out around the lake reading,  playing on pool toys in the lake, drinking beer and frying up all the fresh trout we could catch!  Trail crew rocks!

Base camp scene.  Books, New Yorkers, PBR, what more do you need?!

After we were fully relaxed and rested, we got after the matter at hand, the South Arete Direct on Angel Wings.  Put up by in 1991 by perennial badass Dave Nettle and partner Jim Nowak, this route probably gets climbed by one party per season, and it shows.  Watching Matt lead the first pitch, nut tool in action digging out grass and dirt from the cracks, before launching into burly squeeze chimneys, I started feeling the Anti-Stoke rumbling pretty good.  It was probably just the under-hydrated Mountain House meal I had eaten the night before, but the effect was the same.

 

Oh, you say my feet are going to scorch for the next 11 hours?  Better massage them now...

 Once we got about 600' up the route we came face to face with the crux, the Black Roof.  It is given 5.11+ on the topo, but I can only imagine how hard onsighting the roof while gardening it would be.  As it was it was probably A2+ before the wild unprotectable knob traverse above the roof into the chimney system.  It was super hot and our feet were excited to get out of the black rock bands.

So much squeeze chimneying meant the camera stayed in the oack most of the day...

Upon reaching the chimneys and climbing out onto the South Arete proper, the rock changes into a very featured, yet brittle, orange Red Rocks kind of experience.  But with more grass and less gear.

Six more long pitches of fairly demanding climbing got us up to the top of the pillar and to the true summit of Angel Wings.  

We chose to take a little longer but more obvious descent off the north side down to the Lone Pine Creek trail, and made it back to camp just as it got dark.  Our friends Galen and Nick monkey called us into camp and greeted us with a hot meal of pork chops and veggies, with a bottle of whiskey to wash it all down.  Didn't I say that Trail Crew rocks?!

Worked!

I have to work in a couple days so I hiked out solo and drove back to Mammoth in one day, stoked to have ticked off a major climb in my Sierra bucket list.

Thanks again to Matt, Galen (full given name Galen Alpine, how COOL is that?!) and Nick, and even to Dave and Jim (despite the fact that I was cursing their names on"Jim's Double Fisted Cracks" pitch!)

Mountain Madness in the Palisades!

Ah, the Palisades.  The Sierra Nevada have a lot to offer, but it is in the upper reaches of the South and North Forks of the Big Pine where a truly spectacular and humbling mountain environment exists.  Here the mountains rise up in the greatest grouping of 14,000 ft peaks in the range, dropping down along their gendarmed and complex ridges and faces towards the Palisade glacier and a host of milky azul lakes and groves of aspen and lodgepole pine.  In other words, it is pretty cool.  

Over the past week I have climbed a cool route on Temple Crag with my friend Jonathan Cooper, and then guided a 5 day mountain camp for Sierra Mountain Center along with fellow guide Andrew Soleman.  With Pete, Alex and Bronson, we worked on snow and rock skills, then put those new skills to the test on the Fornication Arete of Mt. Robinson, the Yellow Brick Road on Mt. Gayley, and the Starr Route on Mt. Sill.  

With incredible (and very windy) weather, we were able to do all the climbing we hoped for, and have a really fun time on the way.  

Thanks to Tom Kurzeka, our tireless (now probably pretty tired) intern, who took most of these photos for me as we climbed our routes.  

Coop navigates the upper reaches of Venusian Blind

The Youth, doing his best to make a graceful entrance into Third Lake

Pete Barry enjoys the corners on Fornication Arete

Pete climbing over towers high on Mt. Robinson

Andrew brings Alex and Bronson over the first tower

Alex self arrests high above Moraine Lake

Above the L-shaped snowfield, into the rock part of the Starr Route

Atop Mt. Sill, perhaps the single greatest vantage point in the Sierra

Lowering down after climbing Mt. Sill in a vrey quick camp to camp time

The season is really just getting started, and it is shaping up to be a very fun one with a lot of good trips coming up- Whitney, Mt. Lyell, Temple Crag, Crystal Crag, the list goes on!  

Now it is time for some relaxing and being light duty for the next week...