Where There Be Guides

As you may know, my fixation with Glacier National Park has led me to guiding.

By description, “to guide” is to “show or indicate the way to someone” and a guide is the person who shows the way to and advises others. In theory, it’s a rather glorious position: the guides are the lucky few that get paid to hike all day and share the knowledge they have so studiously acquired from time on and off the trail. Ask any guide and they'll say guides are the folks held on a pedestal as the beautiful, athletic, free-spirited (and, sometimes, slightly crazy) people that even folks thrice their age will follow around like ducklings, no questions asked.

What those folks probably don’t know, or choose to ignore, is that it’s common practice for guides to lie about anything...

And everything. 

I admit it, I lied once. About a flower. I felt terrible about it afterwards. Sort of...

What a guide won't probably mention in their description is that they go for days without showering (unless you count swimming in lakes...), they can probably fit all of their worldly belongings into their car (if they even have one), they believe it is socially acceptable to wear socks and sandals together (guilty as charged..), and that they are often befuddled by the fact that trail-mix is not a legitimate food group (as I sit here munching on trail-mix whilst writing this).

So here I am, a guide in a park where all the trails are impeccably marked and groomed to a tee. I get paid to wake them with a smile, their favorite hot drink in hand, ease them into the day with a hearty meal, and take their photo beaming on top of passes they’d never dreamed of going to. I get paid to do a job that I would happily do for free (don’t tell my bosses!).

Those are all wonderful aspects of the job absolutely. As the season progressed though, I found myself wondering why anyone would hire a guide in a park where it is somewhat difficult to actually get lost on the trails.

Then I got cornered at the back of a pool at the base of a waterfall after an afternoon swim. Fortunately we had the forethought to carry the bearspray to where we jumped into the water rather than leaving it with our daypacks… Needless to say, the conversation goes something like this:

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“Look! Awwwwwwhh! It’s a bear…cub…. S***.”

(cub comes around the corner, walking upstream directly towards us)

“F*** Do you see the mother??”

 (momma bear comes into view, also strolling directly upstream towards us)

At this point, we don’t dare head towards our packs and realize our getaway, the trail, is pretty much directly even with the ambling bears’ progress upstream.  We quickly assess our other options, backing up slowly as the bears continued to make headway on us. They amount to something like:

“Get in the water! They won’t get us in the water! We can swim across”

“Yeah, right into the CURRENT from the WATERFALL that will sweep us DIRECTLY to the BEARS.”

“Oh.”

“Can’t bears swim faster than people anyways…?”

“….”

At this point, we back up as far as we can go. Rocky cliff wall on two sides, blue lagoon on one, and bears at the forefront. Someone hides behind a tree, determined not to be seen by Mama B (I mean, it’s not like she can simply smell us after we’ve been in the wood for three days… right….). Another, fueled by adrenaline, looks directly up at the rocky face and determines that in an act of dire desperation they could sure as hell maybe, possibly, potentially scale the wall. Meanwhile someone else fumbles at the bearspray.

“Spray it!”

“What? No! The bears aren’t paying attention to us!”

“SPRAY IT!!”

“NO. The breeze is headed towards us anyways. So, you want me to spray you like those Chinese tourist sprayed themselves last summer??”

And so on and so forth.

Fortunately for us, the bears have zero interest in us and the cub crosses the stream some fifteen paces away from the lagoon we had previously thought was paradise.  Needless to say, the folks walking down the trail just after the bears cross the stream are more than slightly baffled when seeing us thawing from our adrenaline-inspired positions that have us pressed against the back of the rockwall like wallflowers terrified to hit the dance-floor at a high-school prom.

If you hadn’t already guessed it, dealing with bears in Glacier National Park is what many of our guides have surmised to be the main reason folks hire us.

Yes, these guys:

Well, that and having a personal chef on the trail of course to provide the “no you won’t be losing 10 lbs on this trip like you secretly hoped” experience in the backcountry.

When guiding, one spends an exponentially disproportionate amount of time thinking about food. Did everyone get enough to eat? Let’s divvy the food out to carry. Does everyone have a food bag? Oh no, they’re not talking anymore… do they need a snack?? Should we take a snackbreak?? We should take a snackbreak. Oh shoot, it’s 5am, how long will it take to get ready for the day? Are my guests up? No, of course not. I should get up and boil water. Is there enough coffee to last all of them the whole trip? There has to be. There is. Phew. Is there enough food for breakfast? Why aren’t they eating? Oh, they’re eating. They were just stunned at the thought of having scrambled eggs and sausage breakfast burritos. Ok. Good.

And so it goes. All day, everyday for as long as you are scheduled to be out.

But that’s a topic for another time.

Summers in Glacier are phenomenal. Stupendously phenomenal. For a few fleeting months we work our tails off for the privilege of calling this little piece of paradise home.

At the end of the day, however, Pat Hagan still puts what we do best: