Rob Howard

Wilderness point man Jamie Pierce gets paid by the trip in lieu of salary; Everyguide that he is, he's adept at hefting gear for clients (below) without anyone losing face

If your name is Jamie Pierce, you faced such a moment last February on a remote stretch of highway in the African interior. Pierce had just led his girlfriend, Tammy Towers, a 32-year-old Seattle doctor, and Dan Newbill, a 67-year-old Honolulu physician and longtime client, on a climb up Mount Kenya and a tour of Masai Mara Reserve. Right before that, he'd guided two other expeditions up Mount Kilimanjaro. All he wanted to do now was get back to Seattle and relax for a couple of weeks before ramping up for Mount McKinley in late spring. But as the trio's minivan huffed up a long mountain pass on the way back to Nairobi, Pierce spotted some people huddled around a van on the side of the road ahead. His driver assured him that it was OK, that they were just broken down. Pierce didn't buy it. "That's bullshit," he said. "Those people are being held up." No sooner had he said it than a masked gunman broke out of the brush and charged the minivan, brandishing an AK-47.

"Back up!" Pierce ordered the driver. "Reverse!" He pushed Towers to the floor, praying that the gunman hadn't seen her, and covered her with tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks. The driver immediately started speeding backward down the hill, navigating with his head out the window. At the bottom, they came upon a group of Kenyan road workers chugging up the pass in a dump truck. With the driver translating, Pierce proposed what might be called the Burly Construction Dude Offense. "These workers knew that if you rob tourists, it takes business away from the economy," he later recalled. "So they got all fired up, started pounding their truck like, 'Yeah! Let's get these guys!'"

With a half-ton of adrenalinized muscle hanging off the truck right behind the minivan, the convoy started up the hill. From beneath her nylon concealment, Towers protested, "Why are we going forward?" Pierce told her that this was their best, and perhaps their only, tactic. "We do not want to be stuck out here," he said. (Less than two weeks later, across the border in Uganda, eight tourists were killed by Rwandan Hutu rebels.) The gambit worked. The highwaymen took one look at the convoy, did the cost-benefit math, and scattered into the bush.

"I had to kinda react quickly to get us out of that situation," Pierce deadpans, recalling his stressful day at the office. Forgive him if he's a little dry today. It's an Indian summer afternoon in Seattle, the day after the end of the busiest guiding season in American history, and he's finally getting a chance to rest. He stretches his back and sighs. "People are tired," he says. "Myself included. You keep doing this stuff week after week after week, not allowing yourself time to recover, your body doesn't heal."

A 30-year-old mountain guide with a perpetual chestnut tan, Pierce does a good job of concealing the physical and mental toll that eight years of guiding has taken on his weatherbeaten frame. For the past three months he has led doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists, FBI agents, and Navy SEALs into the Cascade and Olympic Mountains for Alpine Ascents International, the Seattle outfit owned by renowned Everest guide Todd Burleson. Now he's feeling the pain. The patellar tendon in his right knee is giving him fits. His back aches. The barrage of names and faces, the glare of glacial ice, the smell of white gas, the sound of afternoon rockfall, the musky funk of his own sleeping bag—all of it blends together in a haze. At one point he worked 22 days nonstop. "You get going in a long stretch like that," he says, "it doesn't help to have a day off, crazy as that sounds. You get into a groove and you're like, 'Let's just keep going.'"

You could call that the guide's mantra. As Pierce's joints can testify, these are flush times for the guiding trade. With the computer industry, the Internet, and media-entertainment conglomerates gorging themselves at the Wall Street equivalent of a lazy Susan full of IPO investors and mutual-fund dollars, the roaring nineties economy has allowed the newly affluent to indulge their every whim in adventure travel. As a result, guide services are finding their schedules booked solid months in advance. Climbers who called Rainier Mountaineering Inc. in April were assured they could reserve a spot—for the year 2000. Exum Mountain Guides began selling 1999 trips up the Grand Teton in January and were sold out by mid-February. "We are amazingly busy," says Exum co-owner Al Read. "Our business has grown 10 to 20 percent each of the past two years." The good times are spread wide: Kayaking, fishing, and whitewater guides are all benefitting from the booming economy.

Never has the guide's life seemed more glamorous. As the definition of "work" becomes inexorably shackled to a blinking cursor, the guide's low-tech, high-competence engagement with the physical world appears refreshingly archaic. Soulful, even. Mountaineering guides, in particular, are finding their triumphs and tragedies the focus of intense public interest and not a little envy. While you fired e-mail around the office last week, the guide climbed New Hampshire's Whitehorse Ledge. Twice. While you added your four-wheel-drive Subaru to the evening commute, the guide caught a flight to Ushuaia, Argentina, to meet a sailboat bound for Antarctica. The guide is the hard guy (or more often now, gal) who'll save your ass when things start going down. He's seen clients seize on Rocky Mountain pinnacles, he's outwitted gunmen in Africa, he's brought the dead back to life on Everest. Once, the guide was Sacajawea or Kit Carson. Today it's a guy like Jamie Pierce.

Like most guides, Pierce isn't famous. He's merely one of the success stories of the 1990s: an Everyguide who's making a living at the trade, something his elders only dreamed of. Though he isn't salaried (guides are generally paid by the trip, and Pierce preferred not to tell me how much he makes), he sits here today with both a late-model car and a romantic relationship in good working order, and he may soon purchase his own house. Buying a home at 30 isn't strange in stock-option-besotted Seattle, but even today it's rare in a profession in which one's possessions tend to reside in rented storage units, in which "the back of my pickup" is not an uncommon response to the question, "Where you stayin'?" For Pierce, guiding has become a full-fledged career.