Hi, I'm an educator and new climber who's getting increasingly interested in outdoor education. I was looking for mountaineering guide schools and found the Patagonia Mountain Guide School http://www.mountaineeringtrainingschool.com/mountainguideschool.html. On its website it sounds great, stressing both technical skills and group leadership through lots of training and hands on experience with established guiding services. Graduates receive Wilderness Education Association Mountaineering Instructor Guide certification. Unfortunately I can't find any information about the school and very little about WEA certification. Does anyone know anything about the school or the certification? It's 2 years and $25,000 so this is no small undertaking, but if it's a good school and WEA certification is respected than it sounds like a great deal. I can't find any schools offering comparable programs including NOLS and the American Alpine Institute.

Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You should read this: http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php? ... 1#x6067928

Not that I'm interested in this, but I took a look anyhow. I can't imagine anyone would give them $25,000 up front. And then if you cancel within 90 days before the start of the "trip", you lose your entire $25,000. Plus they reserve the right to boot you if they see the need. Seems like a lot of risk to get that "certification".

The outdoor/climbing industry is standardizing on the Eurpean model, the IFMGA certification process. In the states that would be through the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA http://amga.com/). The process for becoming fully certified involves taking courses and passing tests for three certifications: Rock Climbing, Ski Mountaineering, and Alpine Climbing. Get all three and you are fully certified. The AMGA also offers other certifications such as Indoor Wall and Single Pitch rock climbing instructor. If you want to guide in the US or Europe, I would think anything other than AMGA or IFMGA certification will be like getting an MD from an offshore, tropical medical school. Yes you will have a certification, but no one will recognize it.

Assuming you already climb 5.10 (trad, comfortably), WI5, A3, M5 then becoming fully certified might take four years if you devote a considerable amount of time, travel, and energy towards that goal. The AMGA track would also be quite a bit cheaper than the Patagonia course, and courses are offered throughout North America. The closest to you would likely be North Conway, NH.

You mentioned you are an educator (not sure if you mean K-12 class room teacher) but you could chip away at the certification process slowly while you are improving your climbing ability. Maybe start off with the Indoor Wall or Single Pitch instructor certs. Don't forget you will need at least WFR (Wilderness First Responder first aid) and CPR. That is a 40 hour class. If you are doing any winter travel then avalanche certifications are a really good idea. Look for courses offering AIRE certs. There are three levels, 1, 2, and 3.

Bottom line, the WEA certification is not recognized many places and it is expensive. AMGA/IFMGA are recognized throughout the world as the bench mark for professional guides and it is more affordable.

Hey,
Thanks for the useful responses, as always. Damien, that UKC thread was hugely informative and I wonder why it didn't come up when I was googling the company. From what I've learned, the program is not designed to to be equivalent to IFMGA certification or even AMGA certification. In fact, while graduates leave with the WEA qualification, that seems to be completely ancillary. The real value is spending two straight years in the field learning and guiding. The American Alpine Institute has a mountain guide track comprising a number of its courses, but that's closer to two months than two years.

As for cost, if you consider that the course is almost one's total living expenses for two years (say it ends up being more like $35K with flights and everything) that's still pretty cheap living. The AIA mountain guide track is over $10,000 for a fraction of the time. For most people, I'd think one of the hardest parts of pursuing these certifications is getting the vacation time and spare cash while holding down a regular job to get sufficient experience in the mountains. The Patagonia school is a big up front expense, but then you can just focus on learning to mountaineer. Granted, you don't graduate as a Reinhold Messner, but fitting climbing into my normal life as I do now, it could be a decade before I have as many days on expeditions as the school provides and I'm trying to do it while living in one of the most expensive cities on earth.

For my needs, this program may be a bit much, but for that matter, pursuing IFMGA certification is probably a bit excessive too. Still, I generally like to be able to perform at a higher level than what I'm teaching and so being overqualified for a future outdoor education job sounds fine to me. Ultimately though, I would never decide to do something like this without talking to former students, current staff, and associated guide services. If all that checks out though...2 years of nothing but climbing sounds pretty good to me.

I don't know what you've already climbed, but if you haven't climbed much, I'd climb quite a bit more before thinking about trying to make a career out of guiding or other mountain instruction. There is a growing tendency I've noticed, not just in the US but also in the UK, for people with very little experience of climbing, particularly mountaineering, to right away want to be a 'guide', after only a year or two of climbing. That may work out fine, I'm sure some people have started that way, but mostly people need to do a lot of their own climbing before they can become truly good guides. There are companies out there who will tell you different, but they either want your money or your labor, and there are some quite well-known guiding companies exploiting this. There is no 'fast track', at least not to anywhere worth going.

For $35,000 you could spend two years living in Bolivia and Peru and Nepal. You could climb dozens of 6000m peaks. You could offer to work for free for 6 months for a Bolivian guiding company, to see what it is like to take clients up big mountains. If you racked up that kind of experience in-country, plus WFR cert, you could then get work for a Western guiding company operating programs in those countries. If that's the kind of thing you want.

If you want to just instruct climbing and other outdoor activities in the US, at a level much lower than AMGA, then you can probably just get a WFR cert and, if you have a reasonable amount of actual climbing experience, approach companies directly to do some work and see if you like it.

Yep, good advice there. I wasn't very specific about goals in my original post so I should clarify. I'm not interested in becoming a professional guide, but rather getting into experiential education and outdoor eduction for youth. I do educational design, game design and professional development training now mostly involving technology, but am finding that I am much happier/more interested in being outdoors and helping others get outdoors. I'm considering that I may want to start shifting my career away from technology-based education and into more outdoor education, but mostly using outdoor experiences as a means to teaching other ideas and skills. Just as I do computer game-based education now to teach everything from history to biology to team work, I think I could do similar things using hiking, climbing, etc.

I agree that there's no short cut to proficiency in any field, but I also know that doing something full time with skilled advisors and a knowledgeable community can have huge benefits that tinkering alone can never produce. I taught myself motorcycle mechanics in my garage for a while and then went to school for it, and then worked in a shop professionally, and while I learned a lot on my own and gave myself a good foundation, I learned vastly more from the other two methods (working in a shop especialy). As you say, though, there are lots of ways to get that kind of intense experience.

I am definitely far too new to climbing to consider trying to guide anyone anytime soon, and I need to better figure out what my goals are and what experiences will put me in the best position to accomplish them, but asking questions on forums like this (and going out climbing as much as possible) is all part of the process.

Thanks again for the advice.

Ah, that's quite a bit different then. Maybe contact NOLS or Outward Bound to see if there is anything there suitable. NOLS do some good stuff, including overseas and AK.

Another angle given your existing work is to create an educational product or program that people like NOLS, OB or others may use as part of their programs. Some kind of cross between a GPS tracking / trip-log / social-network thing based on and around a course curriculum. Having designed the course product, you could then get out in the field instructing its implementation. Many MBA programs also have outdoor components, with stints in Patagonia, AK or even Antarctica (Wharton). Creating a standardised framework for ordering, logging and reporting/sharing such activities could be a good thing to do, as it may encourage such programs to be a little more comparable between them, and thus eventually more useful. At the moment it's a bit ad hoc.

I can't really talk to the nitty gritty guiding certs., but I have done the 7 week school with Patagonia Mountaineering and had a blast and learned a ton!

Jaya and Ben are great instructors, and all around cool people too. The climbing outside of their location in Coyhaique is some of the most challenging, remote, and beautiful terrain I've experienced - and I'm sure would get anyone ready for guiding on large expeditions.

Very cool and low-key scene.

Cheers!