Cold hands: Pierce and Tammy on Rainier

The rhythms of Jamie Pierce's life are dictated by "the circuit," the seasonal globe-trot that many mountain guides follow like fruit pickers tracking the harvest. Autumn, the South American season, will find him on the Mexican volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Orizaba. From December through February, the height of the African season, he'll lead climbing groups up Mounts Kilimanjaro and Kenya. When the Alps open in April, he'll be there with a European guide to lead the classic Haute Route, a ski tour from Chamonix, France, to Zermatt, Switzerland. After that, he'll fly to Alaska's Kahiltna Glacier for the May-June McKinley season and then spend the rest of the summer guiding the Cascades.

"You're in Peru one month, in Alaska the next, in the sunshine of Colorado the next," says Bruce Andrews, 34, the head guide and co-owner of the Colorado Mountain School, based on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado. "You're running around in the mountains, watching people grow, push themselves, experience great things. It's also incredibly hard work. There's a huge draw toward this lifestyle. But once you see what it really involves, it's not as romantic as you think."

Scene: the Alpine Ascents office on a crisp Sunday morning, 6:45. The office has been open for nearly an hour. Pierce is meeting four clients here before they shove off on a six-day ice-climbing seminar. He's been on the road since 5:30, having picked up a client named Jim, an anesthesiologist from Fort Lauderdale, at a nearby hotel. In the office, the main visual diversions are the summit snapshots taped up on the walls, frame after frame of smiling, waving Michelin Men, and owner Todd Burleson's climbing boots and gear piled in the hallway. One by one, Pierce's other three clients lumber in with ridiculously overstuffed packs. There's John, a biotech scientist with bushy eyebrows; Matt, who deals in derivatives on Wall Street; and Mark, a South African software consultant who spent the last year working in Kuwait.

Pierce pulls up a chair and gathers his clients around. "This is an advanced ice-climbing course," he says, "but it's not an easy walk in. Our route objective is the North Ridge of Mount Baker, a very serious mountain. We're working with five days of food, so we need to lose all the weight we can." Pierce sorts through everybody's gear piece by piece, stopping periodically to deliver mini-seminars on ice-tool handles and Windstopper fleece.

"We call that a 'what?' stove,'" he says when Matt holds up MSR's mountain-blaster XKG stove.

"A what?" Matt says.

"A 'what?' stove,'" Pierce repeats. "Because when it's on you can't hear anything."

A trip like this one is Alpine Ascents' bread and butter: Four clients, six days, $950 each. Since it's a full trip (the brochure promises a four-to-one client-to-guide ratio) the company will probably realize a profit—not much, but enough to make it worthwhile. Nobody's getting rich in this thin-margin business; even owners of some of the country's biggest mountain guide services, like Exum's Al Read and RMI's Peter Whittaker, run side businesses in the off-season. As in any service-related enterprise, attracting and keeping clients for the long haul is the name of the game. On bigger trips, to the Himalayas or the Karakoram for instance, one extra client can mean the difference between losing money and edging into the black.

Once upon a time, starting a guide service was a laid-back affair. Burleson launched Alpine Ascents in 1986 with a VW van and a $14,000 loan. When Glenn Exum passed his company on to Al Read and three colleagues in 1976, the new owners found the business records so vague they couldn't even tell when the company had been incorporated. Things are casual no more. Over the past decade, the agencies that oversee the land on which guide services operate—state governments, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management—have reined-in commercial access in the name of conservation and natural-resource management. "The permits," says one veteran guide, "are gone."

From the guide services' point of view, it's as if they were playing musical chairs and the tune stopped for good. Those holding permits flourish; those without may perish. Permits available on the cheap a few years ago are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. "When I started ten years ago, the Forest Service gave out permits for free," says Lori-Ann Murphy, the 42-year-old owner of Reel Women Fly Fishing Outfitters in Victor, Idaho. "If you wanted to buy a permit on the South Fork of the Snake River now, it could run $300,000." At some national parks—which have historically favored long-term exclusive contracts with one or two local companies—an outfitter's very existence is based upon its permit. In terms of net worth, Exum is "really nothing but a name and a permit," says Read; the company owns one of the precious two existing guiding permits in Grand Teton National Park.

The competition for those permits is only getting more fierce. Take, for example, the situation on Mount McKinley. It isn't exactly a bonanza for the six guide services that operate there; it's hard (and expensive) to get to, the weather is notoriously fierce, and the climbing season is short. But the mountain is the logical next step for clients who've climbed in the Cascades or the Rockies and are considering the high peaks of Asia. "When you summit your clients on Denali, they're ready for the big mountains," says one industry insider. Translation: McKinley equals more money down the road. So when Fantasy Ridge Mountain Guides in Telluride, Colorado, got out of the McKinley game a couple of years ago and quietly shopped its permit among competing companies, the asking price was a stiff $200,000. It was ultimately bought by Alpine Ascents International at a price the company will only say was "close to that."

Jamie Pierce's career path began in 1986 with a plane ticket and a white lie. "I went to Colorado for a ski vacation when I was 18," he says. "My parents thought I'd bought a round-trip ticket, but it was one-way. I called and told them I wasn't coming back." The last part was true: Pierce never moved back to the suburban flatlands of Elgin, Illinois.

Armed with a Hummingbird ice ax, a rack of secondhand Hexentrics, and a copy of Royal Robbins's Basic Rockcraft,Pierce embarked on the dirtbag's path to enlightenment, climbing in the Rockies every day and cooking chicken dinners at a guest ranch every night. After a few seasons on the crags he picked up work as an apprentice guide with the Colorado Mountain School, but his big break came when a scientist friend suggested he look into winter work with a locally based but improbably named company called Antarctic Support Associates. "He said they were looking for folks like me who weren't in the nine-to-five life," Pierce recalls. He ended up spending four summers in Antarctica, assisting scientists at the U.S. government's McMurdo and Palmer research stations and later leading a climbing expedition into the mountains that rise up against the Weddell Sea.

This is the required entry exam for aspiring guides: Get yourself out there on nothing but your own guts and cunning. "We have experienced climbers calling up all the time, saying, 'I really want to guide Cho Oyu,'" says Gordon Janow, program director at Alpine Ascents, referring to the the world's sixth-highest peak, in Tibet. "Well, I'm not going to pay for your trip to Cho Oyu, and I'm certainly not letting you guide it if you've never been up it! Tell me you've done it two or three times, or have led Mount Baker 30 times, and we might consider you."

A few larger services hire apprentice guides, but many won't even look at an applicant without five to ten years of outdoor leadership experience. "We never had to recruit—ever," says Karen Dickinson, who co-owned Mountain Madness with Scott Fischer, the veteran guide who died on Everest in 1996. "I had a regular spiel for when the guide wannabes called up. I told them they were dreaming. They might have the physical ability or the people skills, but they need to have amassed an incredible volume of wilderness knowledge on top of that. And sometimes that means starving for several years as a rock rat. If they spoke fluent Nepalese or had been to the Himalaya seven times, then they'd catch your ear."

Exum, which employs such stellar names as big-wall specialist Rolando Garibotti, extreme skier Doug Coombs, and Yosemite pioneer Chuck Pratt, doesn't even take applications. "We don't take people we don't know," says Read.

At most mountaineering outfits, female guides find themselves outnumbered ten to one, which isn't too surprising, considering how hostile the climbing culture has been toward women over the years. (The Corporation des Guides—the Chamonix-based old boy's club of European mountain guides—admitted its first female member only in 1980.) But the recent outdoor boom has brought with it an influx of women clients who climb, fish, kayak, and raft just like the boys. The upshot? Women guides are suddenly in demand. Colorado Mountain School co-owner Ed Crothers says he and his partners are actively recruiting within the Boulder climbing community and among their former colleagues at Outward Bound. "We're trying to get out the word to women climbers that we're interested, drop us a line," he says. "If that doesn't work we'll take the aggressive route and start advertising."

"When I started out ten years ago, if you were a woman guide you had to be better than everyone else," recalls Lori-Ann Murphy of Reel Women. "There wasn't any room for mistakes, because everyone was watching, everyone knew who you were." Now Murphy employs four women and two men. In addition to tutoring Meryl Streep on the set of The River Wild,she took Martha Stewart into the Wind River Range in 1995 and taught her how to tie her own woolly buggers. "We've had tremendous support from the other outfitters and guides," she says. "But we had to earn it." This year, in response to surging demand, Murphy established a weeklong women-only guide school in Idaho.

You can't get a Ph.D. in guiding—yet. As the popularity of the outdoors continues to grow, however, more colleges are offering serious wilderness-oriented courses and degrees. The Association for Experiential Education, based in Boulder, Colorado, lists more than two dozen universities offering outdoor education and adventure programs. Colorado State University's Department of Natural Resources, Recreation, and Tourism boasts that it turns out more national park superintendents than any other school; you can receive credit at the University of Utah for selected courses taken at the Lander, Wyoming­based National Outdoor Leadership School; and Cornell University offers a course called High Adventure 101. But for full immersion, nothing comes close to Prescott College, an alternative liberal arts school in Prescott, Arizona, that offers a degree in what it calls adventure education and presents itself as the answer to every eggheaded dirtbag's dream: a place with just the right balance of academics and cragging. "During the spring and fall, Outward Bound and NOLS come on campus to recruit, because they know the product that Prescott is producing," says the Colorado Mountain School's Bruce Andrews, a Prescott alumnus.

Some guides will admit to getting their start with chancy, youthful stints at "bootlegging" or "bandit guiding"—in other words, going it alone with no training, no certification, no permits, no liability insurance. Bootleggers occupy a complicated position in the guiding world; they undercut the prices of legitimate guides and have driven some services out of business entirely. Yet it's difficult for many mountaineers, who stake their professional reputations on boldness and self-sufficiency, to completely condemn them. It may be how they got started in the business themselves. "I started out working with a bunch of Warren Miller photographers, then began guiding more film groups around the Canadian Rockies," says Steve Kuijt, a 38-year-old backcountry ski guide based in Fernie, British Columbia. "I didn't have a clue. Once I got trained, I looked back over my shoulder and went, 'Holy shit! I took those people there?'"

Of course, once they get in the door, it's not unheard-of for guides to work well into their sixties; George Hurley, a 64-year-old New Hampshire climbing guide, still takes clients up 5.11 rock and grade-five ice in the White Mountains. But in most cases, by their early forties guides are looking for a soft landing. "I love Alpine Ascents to death," Pierce says. "But I've got to be realistic. There's no retirement plan." He'd like to start his own guide service someday. He's starting small, leading his own trips to Antarctica and Africa in between Alpine Ascents jobs and being careful not to solicit any of his employer's clients. "I have to create my own niche," he says. "Look at Todd [Burleson]. He had a niche: Everest. That's where Antarctica and Africa come in for me."