Author’s background
There are guides who talk about the outdoors, and there are guides who have spent many years being accountable in it. I am one of the latter, with a desire of sharing my knowledge and experiences with others who may be starting out or looking to improve their skills.
I came into adventure guiding the long way round. Starting as a Boy Scout, but before I stood at the front of a client group next to a rock face or in a river canyon, I worked as an emergency care practitioner, a firefighter, and a mountain rescue responder. I have seen, up close, what happens when people who should know better don’t. That background doesn’t show up on every page of this book — it doesn’t need to. But it underlies everything I write about professional responsibility and preventable harm. I am not speculating about what failure costs, I already knew before I ever held a guide’s qualification.
I have spent more than thirty of my fifty-plus years1 in the adventure industry working as a professional guide and trainer. Together with my wife Michelle, I owned and operated two outdoor centres — not managed from an office, but built and run from the ground up, in the way that teaches you everything the theory never quite gets to. And worked as a mountain guide. I also managed the start-up of a third outdoor centre, which had its own lessons learned: the gap between a good idea and a functioning operation – key areas that have ended more than a few promising ventures. Those years of operational ownership give my views on planning, administration, and business management in this book, a weight that comes from having carried those responsibilities personally, not just trained others to carry them.
I founded a Guide Training Network in South Africa, which I ran for twenty-six years, training guides across a wide range of disciplines and watching — with the patience of someone who has done it long enough to see patterns — which ones lasted and which ones didn’t. I served as Chairman of the South African Mountain Guides Association and represented South Africa on the UIAA’s International Training Standards Committee for a decade. I hold qualifications in mountaineering, rock climbing, canyoneering, archery, ropes courses, adventure-based learning, and wilderness emergency medicine. I am also a licenced and certified drone pilot — a qualification that reflects both my instinct to understand new tools properly before deploying them in the guiding sector and my awareness that the adventure industry keeps moving, and the professionals who last move with it.
My recreational experience spans snorkelling, scuba diving to rescue diver level, skydiving, and 4×4 off-road travel. I know what it feels like to be a beginner in a new discipline while already being experienced in others and have never pretended that competence in one area transfers automatically to another.
I am now based in the Scottish Highlands, where Michelle and I continue to explore recreationally. Having already written a Navigation skills book (Navigation Anyplace Wild) I am wanting to give back to the industry that gave so much to me over the years, and this book is the result. Covering topics not normally included in technical qualification courses, it is not a textbook, nor a qualification workbook. It is me, a guide, talking honestly to other guides, through real life scenarios — about what the job actually is, what it costs to do it properly, and what it costs not to.
- I did my first unsupported 50 mile cross country multi day hike with three friends at 12 years of age ↩︎