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Training for Altitude: Guiding in Altitude
5.4k Plays7 months ago
In the latest episode of the Uphill Athlete podcast, Alyssa and Steve welcome AMGA guide Bill Allen, to discuss guiding practices and client preparation at altitude. They provide recommendations for clients concerned about altitude, how a guide assists and assess’ clients at high altitudes and how guides keep themselves safe on the mountain. They continue with common mistakes they see from clients and offer specific advice to make the best out of your high altitude mountain trip. Tune in to hear from two expert guides and learn their perspective on staying safe in the mountains.
Check out more information here: https://uphillathlete.com/mountaineering-training/
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You can learn more about Mountain Trip at: https://mountaintrip.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Alyssa Clark, and I will be your host today. I'm joined today by IFMGA guide and familiar voice, Steve, and a special guest, AMGA guide, Bill Allen.
Bill's Background and Guiding Experience
00:00:19
Speaker
Bill is an AMGA ski guide, two times seven-summitter, and owner of the guiding company, Mountain Trip.
00:00:35
Speaker
Thanks for joining both of you. Thanks, Alissa. It's great to be back. Yeah, thanks. Awesome. Yeah. And Bill is a guest from prior uphill athlete podcast episodes kind of before Steve and I took control. So it's good to have you back, Bill. Thanks.
00:00:55
Speaker
So I'd love to hear more about your background, what drew you to the mountains and particularly, you know, the high altitude mountains. Also where and how long you've been guiding for.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, my mountaineering experience and altitude experience really mostly started in Alaska. I grew up in Oregon, and so I played in the Cascade Mountains as a kid. But as I got out of college, I started going up to Alaska.
00:01:31
Speaker
getting into the mountains there and then you know Denali was obviously the big draw up there and that wasn't really what originally you know got me excited about it but of course you just want to continue to pursue the next big challenge or whatever and especially as a guide you know Denali was a
00:01:55
Speaker
was a goal to get up there. I started guiding on Denali for Mountain Trip when the original owner, the guy who started Mountain Trip, Gary Boccard, owned the company. That was in the early
Big Expeditions and Challenges on Denali
00:02:11
Speaker
mid-90s. I started guiding up there.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, and that was, you know, the beginning of my kind of big mountain and altitude experience was up there. And then from there, I was able to, you know, go do some other big expeditions and altitude expeditions. Aachen Kagla was one of them. And in terms of just pure altitude experience, I think that's a
00:02:38
Speaker
a big one and then continued around to the seven summits and all that and been to Everest three times now and yeah, still mostly guide in Colorado where I live and then expeditions in Alaska and then a variety of international expeditions occasionally still.
00:02:59
Speaker
And my Denali guiding probably started about the same time as yours, Bill. Like I was, I think my first trip was in a second guide for American Alpine Institute in 1992 with Doug Chabot. And we were on the mountain 24 days that trip and we're stuck at 14 for 10 days, I think. And, you know, it was a, it was a,
00:03:28
Speaker
interesting time, I think, to be up there in hindsight. I mean, Peter Hackett, we were just talking about a moment ago, was still up there doing research on and off. Guiding was, I mean, it's still hard, but I think it was really
00:03:45
Speaker
set the standard in terms of work ethic for all the other guiding I did in my career, just the sheer amount of physical and mental and group dynamic and medical work you had to do for those trips. And a big part of it was the medical component, which of course is directly connected to the high altitude component of that mountain. Yeah, you learn a lot up there about
00:04:12
Speaker
The workload of being a guide on Denali, for the clients, it's massive amount of work. But being a guide up there, it's just huge. The climbing, the carrying the loads, the digging camps, the melting every drop of water you're going to drink for almost a month and all that. So yeah, pretty much everywhere you go after that. Not that it's easy, but it's not Denali hard.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah. Even Everest, honestly. Well, this is more, I guess, just a general question of me not knowing a ton about guiding in Denali, but do you go in with one specific group to bring up or do you kind of just get planted there and then take groups up from there? Is there kind of a standard? No. We'll have a
00:05:05
Speaker
a climbing team and pretty much everybody does it this way but you'll have a climbing team and you'll have the guides and clients meet. We meet everybody in Anchorage and then fly in and yeah we're a team up there. I think one of the differences that like from the 90s like you were talking about Steve to now is
00:05:28
Speaker
that we do more smaller guide teams now, climbing teams. And so you may have a team three days ahead of you and two days behind you. And every camp you move into, there's another team there that has been there for a little while. And you can go in and fill up your water bottles in their kitchen and all that. And I feel like it used to be we were more spread out and felt a little bit more on your own out there.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's different. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, as I recall, how we would run it with American Alpine was that the tripler stays spaced a week apart. So you were like, you'd be at 11 and somebody be flying into base camp, or you might even be at 14 people be flying.
00:06:16
Speaker
So obviously a weak part is a lot. We never have more than maximum three teams on the mountain at the time. We didn't really see each other that much. We didn't have caches, I mean, except our own. But the altitude on Denali, I think, is also really interesting because, and I don't know about your experience, Bill,
00:06:41
Speaker
I first heard about this on Denali. Like you, Denali was my first high altitude, significant high altitude experiences. And I always heard like, oh yeah, you know, 6,000 meters on Denali is higher than 6,000 meters in Asia and these kinds of things.
Altitude Acclimation and Global Comparisons
00:06:58
Speaker
And you think, oh yeah, I don't know. That sounds funny.
00:07:02
Speaker
I have to say, I actually think it's mostly true. It is harder to acclimate above 4,000 meters or so on Denali in my experience and in the experience of my own guiding on Denali than it is in other places around the world.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a pretty significant difference, for sure. And I think it's part of what gets people in trouble, like coming from Colorado, where I live, where people can run up to 14,000 feet for a day, go to the peak, and then they come back down. And then taking that and thinking you can run up to 14,000 feet on Denali,
00:07:48
Speaker
and getting up there and getting into trouble in a hurry. The difference between 14,000 here in Colorado and 14,000 in Denali is pretty significant. And then also just spending the night and staying there is a big difference. People aren't sleeping at 14,000 feet on the top of a 14-er in Colorado. Yeah. Can you explain why it is different? I've also heard this before, but
00:08:16
Speaker
What makes it feel different than, say, 6000 in Asia? My understanding is that the atmosphere of the Earth is stretched at the equator because it's spinning. And so it's wider at the equator, so it's stretched at the poles. And so it's actually just thinner at the poles. And so your relative
00:08:43
Speaker
barometric pressure and therefore the available oxygen is lower as you get to the north and south pole. Yeah. And I have to say, I think that what is certainly true is that there is just, like we were saying, more work involved. And I think that one of the basic concepts that I tried to pass along to people around acclimatization is that acclimatization is
00:09:13
Speaker
let's say a task that your body has to do and it needs, it needs rest, it needs energy, it needs food, it needs all the things that you need to complete any other physical task. And you're having to do that on top of a whole bunch of other work that you're often not accustomed to doing like what we were just talking about. It's not just the carrying the loads.
00:09:35
Speaker
which is a massive amount of work. It's also sleeping on the glacier in a sleeping bag on a thermorest or whatever your pad is, like in a tent that rattles all night because it's windy, being uncomfortable because it's really difficult to get up and urinate during the night.
00:09:58
Speaker
Then you sit up and you knock all the frost off the tent and it falls into your partner's face and you wake them up. And I mean, it's just sort of a veritable sort of, you know, comedy of circumstances that make living really tough up there. And so when you put all these factors together,
00:10:20
Speaker
and you're eating substandard food. You have to eat a lot of dehydrated food and other things. You're just not rested as well. You're not fueled as well. You're doing a ton more work. You're often under a lot of stress. I don't want to underestimate
00:10:42
Speaker
people really beat themselves up mentally and I'm sure Bill you have all kinds of experience with this. Like a lot of what I did as a guide up there was simply coaching people that they could do it because they would have themselves talked out of it before they even got to 14 a lot of times and it's purely in their heads and that's a tremendous amount of stress that they're
00:11:03
Speaker
they're going through. And it's just like with training adaptations, it's just another, commonization is just another adaptation your body is making to an environmental stress and it takes resources.
Memorable Mountains and Success Rates
00:11:15
Speaker
And those resources are scarce on Denali, they just are. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. Thank you both for
00:11:24
Speaker
That explanation, I think it's just, I've heard it before and was curious what your reasonings were. So I guess to go from there, what are a few mountains that have stood out to both of you from your guiding experience, particularly at like high altitude and what has made them very memorable for you?
00:11:50
Speaker
You know, for me, yeah, I mean, Mount Everest, obviously, is is a big one on a lot of levels. And that was, you know, for me, that was the culmination of, you know, decades of of guiding at six and 7000 meters before I ever went to Mount Everest. But, you know, I've
00:12:15
Speaker
you learn a lot about altitude on, you know, like we were talking about on Denali at 6,000 meters or on Aconcagua at 7,000 meters, you see a lot of, you learn a lot about not just how you do, but how clients do and, and how to kind of manage that sort of, um, extreme altitude. Yeah. I never guided in the Himalaya personally.
00:12:41
Speaker
So all my experience with high altitude guiding was in South America and Alaska. And one of the places that was actually pretty formative for me is I did a lot of trips over about four or five seasons in Ecuador.
00:12:58
Speaker
really early in my guiding career and those are actually great starter altitude experiences. I really recommend those climbs for a lot of people because I think they're accessible, they're very high, you get a lot of experience both as a guide and as a climber.
00:13:20
Speaker
these approaching and over 20,000-foot altitudes without all the commitment of a 21-day trip like Denali typically is. And it's super beautiful down there. It's a really, really gorgeous part of the world. Is the success rate generally higher for Ecuador, like those types of trips compared to a Denali? Oh, yeah, much higher. That's what I figured.
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say the typical, I forget the statistics, Bill, you may know, but on Denali it's typically around 60% of people on guided trips summit and typically around 40% of independent climbers summit on Denali. That's, as I recall, what the averages tend to be. They kind of tally them each season and they vary a little bit from year to year.
00:14:14
Speaker
And I would say, you know, we would do these Ecuador trips and we do cayambe, codapoxie, and sombrozo typically in a 15-day trip. And, you know, it seemed like
00:14:27
Speaker
Everybody would summit at least one of the mountains. And a couple of people would summit all three out of a group of 10. And assuming weather was stable and those kinds of environmental factors. But that's a much higher success rate than the 60%. Yeah. No, that's really good to know. I know a lot of our clients go down there first and then kind of move into
00:14:56
Speaker
Denali, et cetera. Yeah. And if you only do code epoxy, you know, I mean, you can just do some acclimatization hikes in code epoxy and have a great trip in, you know, nine days, uh, you know, car to car kind of a thing or, or jet to jet as it were.
Preparing Clients for High Altitude
00:15:13
Speaker
So Steve, you touched on this of when you're on the mountain of how a lot of it was just reassuring clients that they were capable of.
00:15:24
Speaker
existing in the altitude and succeeding. But Bill, when you're doing your pre-trip communications and such, how do you help clients who are concerned about the altitude when you're kind of in the pre-trip planning stage?
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's really manage the things that you can, right? Like there's a lot of people, you know, and not to keep going back to Denali, but that's what we do a lot of and a lot of people, that's going to be the first time they're up to 20,000 feet. Like maybe they've climbed throughout the US and maybe they haven't traveled to Ecuador or, you know,
00:16:03
Speaker
Argentina or wherever and gone to those higher altitudes. And so it's going to be the first time that they're above about 14,000 feet. And so, you know, controlling what you can, meaning be fit and strong and
00:16:19
Speaker
take care of that component of it and gain the other experiences so that the technical skills and the movement on the mountain is easy for you and that you've got that side of things.
00:16:36
Speaker
I you know there's things you can do to pre acclimatize obviously now which is great like these hypoxico tents and those are getting used more and more not just by people who want to do like a quicker ascent but just by people who are joining our trip and going on the normal
00:16:55
Speaker
schedule and the normal acclimatization plan but they want to make it a little bit easier or easier on themselves while they're on the mountain or just relieve some of the anxiety about the altitude that they might have leading into it and so um you know there's there's things that people can do like that to prep but really it's just like making sure that you're prepared in all the other ways and don't worry about the altitude side of it because we're gonna
00:17:25
Speaker
We're going to design an acclimatization plan and itinerary for moving up the mountain that's going to allow the vast majority of people to acclimatize and you're going to feel altitude. You might have a headache and you might not feel great every day, but you're going to be able to acclimatize at that ascent rate. Yeah, and the thing I would add to that, Bill, too, is that one of the
00:17:54
Speaker
universal experiences of altitude is that it's uncomfortable. And I think that people often get kind of psyched out because they get up there and they feel uncomfortable and their alarm bells go off because that's not normal. Climbing up to, as you said, 14,000 feet, you don't really feel that kind of uncomfortable like you do when you're sleeping about 14,000 feet for a week or sleeping at 17,000 feet the first time. It's just
00:18:23
Speaker
it's just uncomfortable. And you're going to be really uncomfortable and not be sick most of the time. And be basically fine. As it gets your body under stress, it's doing its thing, the climatization is underway. But by definition, you're summiting on Denali or any of these high mountains well before you're acclimated to that altitude. You're on the edge of that envelope. You're
00:18:50
Speaker
You're acclimated enough to go there, but you're definitely not acclimated enough to stay there, especially when you get up above 6,000 meters. And so there's a real threshold in my experience that's different for different individuals. And for me, it's about 5,000 meters. I'm like, oh, okay, this is uncomfortable now. I'm over 5,000 meters. And for me, there's another one at 7,000.
00:19:19
Speaker
where me personally, when I transition above 7,000 meters, I'm like, okay, that was a big step. It doesn't feel that much worse to me from seven to eight.
00:19:30
Speaker
but from five to seven is the same level of suck, and from seven up is another level. It's just suffering. It's just good old garden variety suffering. As long as you can separate mentally what is the difference between the suffering and the illness and what is dangerous,
00:19:53
Speaker
which is hard to do. It's hard to stay objective when you're that uncomfortable. But experience brings that perspective. And that's where I think people who are new to high altitude get really psyched out because they're just like, Oh my God, like I've never felt like this before. This has to be bad. Like I'm, you know, and their brains, our brains are built to protect ourselves or, you know, it's like, Oh my God, I'm going to die. I got to go down. It's like, no, you're not going to die. You're just going to, you're just going to have a headache and you're going to feel like
00:20:22
Speaker
not good for a while and then you're going to start to feel better and then you're going to be able to feel like yourself again in a few days and let's look at trends, let's not focus on how you feel this moment and I think that that's one of the things that I really with guiding and with
00:20:41
Speaker
being at altitude with people who haven't been there that much as climbers, just getting people to focus on the trends. Are you trending worse or are you trending better? Not from minute to minute, but from half a day to half a day or from day to day. That's the scale you need to look at. That's really helpful for clients who are going into it.
00:21:09
Speaker
say your client shows up, you're getting on the mountain, how are you assessing their preparedness to go into altitude? Yeah, I mean, it's really it's about pacing, I think, as much as anything else, you know, and it's like during the day when you're climbing, like not pushing people past where they're able to recover.
00:21:38
Speaker
is super important because it gets harder and harder for people to recover or catch up after, if they're pushing too hard at altitude, people just don't recover.
00:21:49
Speaker
So just kind of keeping an eye on people during the day and make sure you're not pushing them too deep into their reserves. And then like on a more long-term basis, like the day-to-day thing, it's just like Steve said, it's kind of keeping an eye on trends.
00:22:09
Speaker
you know, if you have a headache in the morning, like that might feel, it might've been a terrible night's sleep and you wake up and you don't feel very good and you have a headache, but is that an okay headache or is that like the onset of cerebral edema in a life-threatening situation?
Assessing Client Readiness and Fitness
00:22:28
Speaker
And, you know, most of the time it's just, it's gonna be AMS, it's gonna be acute mountain sickness and that's something that,
00:22:38
Speaker
is normal and to be expected and it's hard for people their first time at altitude to gauge whether this is an okay normal headache or if this is something that's beyond normal and there's a lot of anxiety around that for people and I think
00:23:00
Speaker
experience at altitude, I think as much as anything is learning what's okay and what's normal for you. Like if I wake up with a headache, I'm like, I'm fine.
00:23:09
Speaker
I'm gonna go have a cup of coffee and it's gonna start getting better. And as soon as I get up and I move, I know it's gonna start feeling better. And if it didn't, then that's when I would start to be concerned. But knowing yourself and how you respond and what amount of suck is okay. And when you're kind of getting pushing beyond that. Yeah, and I agree with all of that Bill and people.
00:23:35
Speaker
have to learn that and go through that themselves to believe it. You can tell them all the things ahead of time, but until they've gone through it and had that experience of waking up with a headache, getting out, shoveling a bit, having a coffee, whatever, moving around, have that feeling that you're feeling better through the morning. I think that that's something you just have to experience to really believe for yourself.
00:24:02
Speaker
The other thing that I think really helps people, frankly, is just fitness, just showing up fit because again, your body will acclimatize to a certain extent at a rate at which it has available.
00:24:17
Speaker
resources to dedicate to acclimatization. And if you're completely destroyed physically every day, I've never seen ostensibly fitness, like if you take an unfit and a fit individual and put them in a helicopter or something and flew them to higher altitudes, their acclimatization rate of acclimatization does not change. It's not directly dependent on fitness per se. But
00:24:46
Speaker
It is in the sense of if you pull into that camp and you're destroyed versus you're pulling into that camp and you're a little tired but you recover fine, the person who is a little tired and recover fine is clearly going to acclimatize better. So again, to Bill's point earlier, control what you can control and show up for the
00:25:03
Speaker
for the trip with a good aerobic base because, you know, again, aerobic is so important at altitude because there's not much oxygen. So your ability to utilize oxygen is amplified. The importance of your ability to use oxygen is amplified at high altitude. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
00:25:23
Speaker
I was just going to say the one challenge that super fit athletic people have I feel like is pacing appropriately at altitude and that's something that
00:25:38
Speaker
can be scary on a mountain like Denali where you can't just turn around and run downhill necessarily if you're not feeling good. And especially, I feel like it's the Colorado super mountain athlete people who are used to running and putting in huge days and vertical and running up over 14,000 foot peaks. And then they come to a mountain like Denali and they push up to 14,000 feet in two or three days.
00:26:07
Speaker
and then get sick at 14. And sometimes it can be pretty bad and it can come on pretty fast. And so if they weren't fit, they wouldn't have been able to get there in the first place that fast. So sometimes that gets them into trouble.
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's totally true, Bill. And I mean, so many, you know, when I was so many of my own expeditions, both in South America and Asia, you know, this is one of the reasons I really got into this mode of really seeking out objectives where I could do easy climbs in the beginning, like lower at lower elevations, for classic example, would be like in the Charakusa Valley.
00:26:52
Speaker
where you can literally be bouldering around base camp. And I think that that kind of light exercise is really good and positive for your adaptation. And then you can hike a little higher. Then you can hike up to, say, 15,000, 16,000 feet. Then you can do a rock climb that takes you up to a 15,000-foot summit. And then there's ways to sort of
00:27:16
Speaker
keep that type A personality engaged. And that also keeps that in check and doesn't, you know, because the problem is, as you say, you can potentially get up too high into a dangerous situation and be stuck and be sick. And that can definitely work against people. And it does take a certain amount of time. Like there's no shortcuts.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that the mental component of assuredness, we'll say, confidence can be quite detrimental at times. Are you ready to achieve your mountaineering objectives and perform better at altitude?
00:28:00
Speaker
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00:28:14
Speaker
So how, when you have a client who's struggling at altitude, how do you help them to manage it? I think Steve, you kind of spoke about this before, but yeah, Bill, I'm curious what your strategies are. The first thing is just take care of the basics like food and water and sleep, you know, like make sure people are staying hydrated and they're eating well and you're providing them with, you know, sometimes
00:28:42
Speaker
People struggle to eat at altitude for a variety of reasons, but making sure that you're fueling them and getting them water. And then the sleep component is really challenging for some people who just struggle to sleep in a tent at sea level, much less at altitude, not a mountain.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a big one. And then it's time. You can adjust the schedule and give people an extra day to rest and that sort of
Managing Altitude: Basics and Safety
00:29:14
Speaker
thing. And even, as Steve mentioned, when we're resting at 14,000 foot,
00:29:20
Speaker
base camp or on Denali like a rest day doesn't mean laying your tent flat all day it means like getting out and moving and getting some exercise and stimulating breathing and you know making sure that you're you're doing stuff to stimulate your body but not overdoing it and so allowing yourself to
00:29:42
Speaker
to kind of have an active recovery day. But usually if you give people a day or two and you make sure they're getting food and water, it's amazing the difference that you'll see in 24 or 48 hours with somebody as long as they're not at advanced stages of pulmonary edema or something like that and they just have to go down. But you'll see a major difference in just a couple of days of active rest and recovery.
00:30:12
Speaker
I will emphasize what Bill said, just getting out of the tent, shoveling, fixing up your campsite, walking over to some neighbors and having a cup of tea. I think that taking pictures, just getting up and out most of the time is the first step.
00:30:34
Speaker
One of the worst things you can do is just stay in your tent, stay in your sleeping bag and lay there. It's really tough mentally and I think that it's not good physically in my experience to have people just sort of stay in their tent and isolate. They don't do well in that scenario and that is an inclination, an inclination for me and for a lot of people when you're not feeling well,
00:31:00
Speaker
So it helps to have other humans around you to encourage and support you to get up and get out and just do something and move. And it's one of the kind of fun things, frankly, about high altitude climbing is you do often share a lot of camps with other people that you would normally not have met. And so there's a huge social component, whether it's Auchencagua or Denali or Everest or any other 8,000 meter peak.
00:31:27
Speaker
It's actually a huge social component just to get to know people around. There are from all different countries and all different backgrounds, and it's often super fun. That's a good side of it. Nice. Yeah, that's great advice. This is a question that personally I'm really interested in, so maybe this is more for me than anything else.
00:31:52
Speaker
How do you balance your own safety, your client's safety, and then assessing, you know, is it right to continue forward? Should we turn around? And what happens if you start having difficulty out there? Yeah, I mean, that's super important as a guide you're responsible for.
00:32:10
Speaker
for everyone on the team and so you need to make sure that you're solid before you know being able to push up higher or anything like that and so you know in terms of just acclimatizing in terms of the altitude side of things I think that just comes down to having the experience to know what works for you and how to take care of yourself and how to make sure that you're acclimatizing well and
00:32:37
Speaker
And then also just not being afraid to say, hey, I'm not there today, and I'm not willing to lead you guys up higher today, and I'm glad you're all feeling great, but I'm not, and we're going to take another day, type of thing.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously the guides need to be solid and that's all the things we talked about. That's fitness, that's experience at altitude and knowing what works for you and what doesn't and that sort of thing as well.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I would also say that the guiding team is really important. Like those are the people that as a guide, you are relying on to check in on you and you're checking in on them, you know, and you're, and that's, that becomes second nature to any experienced mountain guide.
00:33:26
Speaker
but you are one another's support and you have to be super honest with each other because we do get sick too. Every time I go to altitude, my body is reacting slightly differently. I've been to high altitudes lots and lots and lots of times, but it's still always a little bit different. I've also had experiences where I went to 7,000 meters and got full-blown pulmonary edema.
00:33:54
Speaker
And then the next season gone and climbed higher altitudes and felt completely fine. We're not entirely clear on why these things happen to people, why people get sick certain times and not other times. And guides are humans. And we have to check in with one another and keep each other healthy. And that's really the team social net.
00:34:23
Speaker
That's really the team's safety net in that way, is that connection between the two or three or more guides that are working together.
00:34:31
Speaker
One of the cool things about the expedition guiding is that you typically are working with a team of guides. And most of the other guiding I do anywhere else, it's probably just me and one or two or three clients that I'm with. And so it's kind of a unique experience almost in the guiding world to be working with a team like that. And it happens a lot on those high altitude peaks.
00:35:00
Speaker
And maybe you were going to touch on this, but another one of the real important things about like monitoring each other as within the guide team, but also with the clients and the entire climbing team is just making sure that you have open communication about how people are feeling so that you can help to address any issues as they come up.
00:35:22
Speaker
And so sort of establishing the sort of the culture of the climbing team to be communicating about that stuff and being able to show weakness, I think is really important because it's easy to, you know, people come into the kitchen tent in the morning for breakfast and just be like, I feel great, and I feel super strong, and let's get ready to go today. And if I'm like,
00:35:46
Speaker
Well, I have a little bit of a headache this morning, and I don't feel that great. And I'm a little tired from yesterday. And just changing that conversation and the sort of permission structure to say, yeah, actually, I didn't sleep that well either. And I don't feel that great. And it's like, OK, let's have that conversation. Instead of putting on the facade of the indestructible mountain guide who never feels bad, and I'm just going to keep going, let's all just
00:36:15
Speaker
talk about how we're feeling because then you can make changes. You can say, okay, well, let's have a lighter load today or maybe we'll take an extra day and really set you up for success. But I think a lot of times that is one of the challenges is just getting people to
00:36:32
Speaker
be willing to communicate with you about how they really are feeling. And with clients sometimes, they think if they show any weakness that their guide is going to turn them around, you know, like the guide is going to find out I didn't sleep well and I have a headache and they're going to make me go down. And really what we're trying to do is get the information to use the tools at our disposal to help them succeed ultimately. So that's a
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, just a big part of the sort of climbing team culture that I think is important. Do you think that's changed over the years with guiding where there is room for some of that vulnerability?
00:37:15
Speaker
Because I feel like that's culturally, in some ways, the direction that we've gone where this kind of this tough exterior of we can't really admit weakness to like, hey, this isn't going so well. Like, have you seen that change throughout either of your careers of being able to have that communication or is that there from the start?
00:37:33
Speaker
I think that comes from the confidence that you have by having experience up there. I'm sure the first time I was on Denali, I didn't want anybody to see any weakness. I didn't want to admit that I didn't feel good or that I was tired or anything. But after
00:37:52
Speaker
years of doing it I'm not concerned about my ability to be there and I guess I'm so I'm willing to express when things aren't perfect or when to admit that I have a headache this morning or I'm tired from yesterday or my backpack is heavy instead of just pretending it's all fine all the time.
00:38:14
Speaker
I think that's a great observation, Bill, because if you have the street cred that you've already done this a bunch and you're the guide and you've been doing this for decades and everybody knows you can do it, and if you admit that you're not feeling that great, it's just like, oh, Bill's having an off day. But if you're the unproven guide or the apprentice or you're the client,
00:38:36
Speaker
you don't have that social currency with the rest of the group that you can easily say that. And that is a stigma that exists. And I think we needed to just like what we're doing here, be aware of it, talk about it in the beginning and try to just... It's a lot of work as a leader of a team like that. You're just
00:39:02
Speaker
constantly communicating and building trust and observing. Every guide has a different way of doing it. A lot of people I've seen do it really successfully with humor by teasing people and they build up a little rapport.
00:39:19
Speaker
other people do it with kind of storytelling or things. But I do think that it just comes down to basic emotional intelligence and human relationships 101 to create this area of safety for those guys and clients that don't have that social currency of a ton of experience at a high altitude.
00:39:46
Speaker
makes a lot of sense and I'm glad that it's coming up because I think that that's super key in the mountain world. I think that's something Steve and I have talked a lot about. I'm sure Bill you think and talk a lot about of like how do you both, you know, be safe through vulnerability in a way. I'm curious to
00:40:06
Speaker
How do you manage clients' expectations? So say you get a client who's like, Summeter, I've wasted my money. How are you able to take that client and rein them in to a certain extent? Yeah, that's tough. We try to address that from the very first conversations we have with people.
00:40:30
Speaker
We try to define what our goals as a team are for this expedition. And getting to the summit isn't number one. Being safe and having a good experience comes in front of getting to the summit.
00:40:51
Speaker
And what we say is if you do those first two things right, if you're concentrating on safety and risk management and having a good experience in terms of treating each other well and working well as a team, then the third one, the getting to the summit, that falls into place. But if the other parts fall apart, you're not going to get to the summit anyway.
00:41:20
Speaker
We try to communicate that with our clients right off the bat.
00:41:27
Speaker
If all you're thinking about is the summit, you're not paying attention to what you're doing today. You're not only missing out on some of the joy, but you're probably not doing a very good job of what you're doing today. And so I always try to just like, yes, think about the summit, but we need to break this down into what do I need to accomplish today to get to the summit in a week or two from now and really focus on doing a good job of that and taking care of each little step along the way.
00:41:57
Speaker
You know, I think that one thing that I would tell prospective clients is, you know, first of all, the guiding community is freaking
Motivation, Team Dynamics, and Expedition Success
00:42:08
Speaker
amazing. Like it's just one of the best groups of people that I've ever worked with, known, interacted with. And that goes across cultures, across just everybody I've known who's
00:42:22
Speaker
been a mountain guide for any length of time is a good person. I think that the profession attracts and frankly selects for honest, hardworking,
00:42:38
Speaker
people who have a lot of values. What I want people to know is that the guides want to get to the summit as much or more than you do. For me, when I'm guiding, it's really important for me that I get my group to the summit. All the rest, of course, is important, what Bill was saying, and I'm not going to compromise.
00:42:55
Speaker
safety and quality experience for that summit. But I really want to be successful because that's, it's a binary thing, right? Like you invest all this time, all this energy into putting this trip together. And for sure, there's sometimes where it's just outside of your control. It's just like, and Bill and I both had many of these experiences where it's just like, there was, and those are honestly some of the easiest where it's just like, it's clear that nobody can summit right now.
00:43:24
Speaker
And what's hardest is when it's in between, when it's like maybe some people are sneaking up there and they're getting some little windows and they're getting lucky and your team is pushing you. And I just want climbers that are climbing with guides to know that those guides are driving themselves just as hard as you're driving them, if not harder. They really want to get you to the top. They really want that.
00:43:53
Speaker
not just for you, but also for themselves, for their company, for their sense of purpose, their sense of pride, their sense of a job well done, all of those things. And these people are really hardworking, good, accountable, like honest people, two down to every last one of them that I've ever met. So I just think that that's really important for people to keep in mind when they're talking to any kind of, if you're talking to a guy about Denali or Everest, I mean, these are
00:44:19
Speaker
These are not going to be people who have never guided a mountain before, right? These are going to be people who have worked their way up. And so you're already talking to a very solid sliver of the population that is going to stick by what they say, and they're going to do everything they can to make it a success.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see clients make when they're in high altitude situations? It seems like staying in your tent alone is one of the big ones. What are a few others that you see?
00:44:58
Speaker
Back to just kind of the food and water, just like the basic fueling and hydrating and people, it takes discipline to do that. You're not necessarily going to be hungry or thirsty, but you need to remain disciplined to take care of yourself in that way. And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's pushing too hard. Sorry.
00:45:26
Speaker
like people get to camp and they're feeling good and they're like at high camp and it's almost they're elated and they drop their packs and they're like, I don't feel crappy up here. This is awesome. Let's set up tents. I'm going to start digging snow and shoveling and building blocks and building snow walls and just go, go, go until they're like, Oh, all of a sudden they're bonking and feeling like crap. And then,
00:45:53
Speaker
It can be really hard to recover from that. And so just pacing yourself and pacing your energy, not just when you're climbing, but when you get to camp also and all the work that needs to be done there, because it's really hard to recover once you push yourself too deep. And I did that to myself moving up. It was on Everest.
00:46:19
Speaker
I was feeling so good moving up to Camp 2 and some of the Sherpas that I knew that were working with us were passing me and I was like, oh, I'm going to keep up with these guys today and I could do it, but I paid the price I felt like for two days after that just because I'd
00:46:38
Speaker
I got there and didn't feel like I should have and it took me days to recover because I just pushed just 10% too hard for a few hours one day.
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah, that all comes with experience. And it's my recommendation would be to just ask the people that are more experienced. And because there's a lot of these things where you just aren't going to know. And it's OK not to know. You've never done this before. But part of the reason the guiding team is there is to help you through all those questions and doubts. And a good guide is not going to mind at all answering all your questions. And they're actually going to embrace
00:47:21
Speaker
Each one is a potential way to educate the whole team, to make the whole team come together, to share knowledge. They're going to be positively motivated by those kinds of questions. So I'd say, you know, don't be afraid to ask questions. And the other thing that I'd say is, I think one of the biggest mistakes can be not
00:47:45
Speaker
not doing a good job with interpersonal dynamics. I think that this is something that I think actually we've been working to, I don't know if address, but we've been working to help with uphill athlete, with our memberships and also with our coach athletes that are
00:48:08
Speaker
that are training for the same objective and getting them in contact with one another so they can start to get to know one another before the trip. And we've also had groups where the whole group trains together for a particular expedition.
00:48:22
Speaker
And they're, they're like sharing notes on their training and they're doing some zoom calls about, you know, training subjects and stuff. And they get to see each other's faces. They get to go get in a chat group and, you know, share pictures of their dogs while they're hiking or whatever it is. Right. And, um, the interpersonal dynamics on an expedition are really important. And if you just show up at a hotel in Anchorage or Kathmandu one day and you meet like
00:48:49
Speaker
eight new strangers that you're gonna be spending 24 hours a day for seven days a week for three to six weeks.
00:48:59
Speaker
You know, that's tough. That's tough. Like I don't excel in that situation. I have our time in that situation and most of us do. So trying to put energy into making that as good as you can and contribute to that being a positive experience for everyone and being tolerant of people because everybody's going to get on each other's nerves at some point, not get clicky, not get like that's another mistake where
00:49:26
Speaker
or people form these little packs within the expedition and that has massive negative impacts and it's of course up to the guides to kind of monitor and encourage the right.
00:49:38
Speaker
culture within a trip. And it sounds funny to say culture when you have a three-week trip, but that really happens. You have trips where the group just gels and works really well together and is super strong. And you have trips, and I know Bill is nodding his head over there, has the same experience where the group fractures and it never comes together. And that is really, really important, not just to the safety
00:50:05
Speaker
the quality of the experience, but also the success because people just get demotivated when they're not having fun with people they don't really care for. Yeah, absolutely.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, I've definitely had a couple of clients actually come back from trips and be like, I did, I just did not like the group and it didn't go super well. So it is really interesting. Like that's a huge factor in their experiences. Like I didn't like my teammate. I felt really isolated. Yeah. So now that's, that's a huge piece.
00:50:38
Speaker
I'm sure Bill and I have both had those trips where there's that one person that honestly nobody likes. It's really tough because it's like, man, this person is a real jerk and not just to me but to everybody else and it ruins the whole vibe and there's really not a whole lot you can do other than
00:50:56
Speaker
Try to get to know people beforehand. This is like my my standard Advice when people come to me asking like who should I climb Denali with or who should I climb Everest with? I always tell them like find a guide that is doing those trips get to know them do some other climbing with them You might not let jive with them and you know Don't just sign up based on you know I don't know how nice the website is or something like that But actually get to know the people because that's what's gonna get you up there
00:51:26
Speaker
Yeah, luckily those those kind of toxic personalities are pretty few and far between. I feel like they are in the people that actually want to come and do these types of trips, like generally understand that it's a teamwork thing. And there's some really like you mentioned before, like really interesting, amazing, motivated
00:51:51
Speaker
driven, hardworking, really cool people that come to do these things. And then occasionally you'll get that sort of toxic personality that can really bring the whole team down. We try to, like what we've been doing for a while now is we'll do these pre-trip Zoom meetings, like a couple of months prior to the trip and the whole team gets together with the guides and has this meeting on Zoom and begins this
00:52:20
Speaker
communication months before the expedition and I sometimes catch little threads of emails or text messages and you start to see these groups that really do come together before they've ever met in person and they're like, yeah, I was out training today and I was doing this.
00:52:37
Speaker
And by the time they get to the mountain, then if somebody's having a bad day and they're, you know, they're just struggling and can't put their tent up. Well, these other people, they're already like, they're a team and they're like going to go over and help that person out. And instead of looking at them going, who's this person? They can't even put their tent up. Why are they here? You know, kind of thing.
00:52:59
Speaker
Yeah, that that culture and that teamwork I think is it's really a neat part of the expedition experience is working with a team of people who.
00:53:10
Speaker
come from different parts of the world and different backgrounds who all have this similar same or similar goal, and are coming together to work really hard together and support each other on this journey.
Post-Expedition Reflections and Rituals
00:53:22
Speaker
And it's like kind of sounds cliche, but that's really, as a guide, that's, you know, part of the reward or one of the more rewarding parts of the of the job is kind of seeing these groups of people come together and, and achieve
00:53:38
Speaker
things that are that are hard to do and require a lot of suffering and sacrifice along the way and seeing people do that together is pretty neat. It's giving a lot of flashbacks honestly to being a teacher in a classroom. It's very similar of like getting a group of there's sometimes a rotten egg but when you get them all working together in collaboration it's a pretty beautiful thing to see what they can accomplish.
00:54:06
Speaker
Yeah. So this is kind of a last fun question because as teaching high school students can be and is very exhausting. Guiding sounds extremely exhausting when you come back from a trip. What's your favorite way to kick back or like first meal you want when you're back in civilization? Probably a cheeseburger and fries. Like that's kind of a classic.
00:54:34
Speaker
Just about anywhere in the world you can find that and yeah Yeah, I'll add I would add a beer to that menu. But other than that And probably ice cream at the end and then probably ice cream. Yeah, I remember one of my early trips or one of my early experiences in Alaska was probably like 20 I would have been 25 and I guided
00:55:01
Speaker
a west buttress trip and then I guided a west rib trip and then I went back in and did a personal climbing trip and I kept a journal and I was making all kinds of notes in my journal but what I realized
00:55:14
Speaker
months later was that in the days that I had been in Talkeena between these different trips, I had averaged over three pints of Hagen-Dazs per day. I mean, part of it's the downtime, right? But part of it is just like you need to eat. You've been working really hard. You've been at a high altitude. Your body's craving calories because you're just in a calorie deficit and you just need to eat.
00:55:44
Speaker
Yeah, why not some good ice cream? I mean, that's the metric the people want, Steve. But also, yeah, when you were saying like sleeping at 14,000 feet, all I can think of is that is so many calories just existing and staying alive, let alone working.
00:56:04
Speaker
Well, thank you both so much for joining me on this episode. And Bill, I'd love to have you tell our listeners how they can find more about Mountain Trip and connect with you, see about getting on one of your, your expeditions or trips.
00:56:20
Speaker
Yeah, we actually have a website called mountaintrip.com. And we, so recently, just the last couple years, it's kind of been a passion project is we're building this new website called Summit Denali.
00:56:36
Speaker
which has been more it's trying to just be an educational website and we can't help but approach everything in there from our perspective which is as guides but we that's a new website that people can look at that's uh it's specifically just for Denali and Alaska and stuff when we've tried to include more articles that would be appropriate for
00:56:59
Speaker
private climbers that aren't necessarily coming with the guide. So like how do you manage your kitchen and your stoves and your food packing and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's us Mountain Trip. Awesome. I will link that in the show notes and also the Climb Denali was the other website. Summit Denali. Summit Denali. Wow. Mess it up right off the bat. There was two things to remember.
00:57:25
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thank you both and thank you for listening to the uphill athlete podcast. If you could rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, that helps us to help more athletes be their best at any altitude. Steve, do you want to wrap us up? It's not just one, but a community together. We are uphill athlete. Thanks Bill for coming on.