Understanding the Mountain Guiding Industry in the United States
Supporting independent guides gets you a better experience and supports a more professional inclusive workforce.
Effects of poor wages and large guide services dominance in the Industry
In many ways, the most significant thing the larger outdoor industry can do to improve inclusivity is to pay its employees better. In an industry where “fun and pro deals” are worth a 30% pay cut, only the privileged endure. In mountain guiding the problem only grows worse.”
As a guide if you spend ten years working for one of the largest guide services in the world, your wages will top out at less than around $22/hour, with no overtime, no benefits, and the job security of a seasonal workflow.
Read that again and consider who will be able to pursue a career in the American guiding industry.
The realities of making a living as a working guide in the United States is shown in two overarching themes. Most guides will be young and most guides will come from financially privileged backgrounds.
Unsustainable Work Means Young Guides
Because guides make so little money, they must work an unsustainable amount to make ends meet. Many guides might spend upwards of 20-25 days a month in the summer sleeping in a tent.
Not only do they have no chance to have a work life balance, being unable to spend time with their communities or with their families, but to make a living, they must endure significant physical strain, making it extremely difficult to stay in the industry for more than 5-7 years.
This is unfortunate because it means the majority of guides never have a chance to truly develop as professionals. As soon as they begin to excel at guiding and offer exceptional experiences to customers, they are too burnt out and leave the industry.
For consumers, this is troubling, as the mountains are a dangerous place. People do get hurt and die in the mountains. Having older more experienced guide is to your benefit just as much as having an older experienced doctor.
Imagine preparing for a procedure that could kill you, and your doctor walks in, a 22-year-old who has taken one or two week-long courses. I’d prefer someone who is at least 30 with a proven track record. Especially because there is no regulation of who can be a mountain guide–in this industry the doctor doesn’t even need a license.
The reality is very few guides make it much past 30 years old before they are forced to leave the industry.
Poor Wages and Working Conditions Mean No Diversity in the Workforce
Another significant impact these working conditions is the lack of diversity in the workforce. With such poor prospects for long-term returns on investment, only people from privileged backgrounds can consider becoming guides.
If you want to have a family or ever buy a home and are not willing to move seasonally for many months at a time, you won’t be able to consider the industry. These factors contribute to the reality of the industry: most guides are white men under 30.
In an industry where “fun is part of the pay” you tend to attract people from financially privileged backgrounds who can afford the pay cut.
Poor Diversity in the Larger Outdoor Industry
This issue of diversity is one endemic to the larger industry. In an industry where “fun and pro deals” are worth a 30% pay cut, only the privileged endure.
The outdoor industry at large has made diversity a key part of its mission. Many outdoor companies have admirable initiatives to make the outdoors a more inclusive place, but while these are great steps in the right direction, they need to put their money where their mouth is.
In many ways, the most significant impact the larger industry can make on inclusivity is to pay its employees better.
Consumers should be cognizant of this and selective with where they choose to spend their money. From an altruistic sense, but also a practical one. Having a young, overworked and underpaid guide is not in your best interest.
If Illegal wages are so widespread why is no one doing anything?
If many guides services pay their guides less than minimum wage, how come no one has done anything about it?
This has a lot to do with the nature of the workflow making it easy for guide services to avoid needing to take actions against complaining guides that would be seen as “retaliatory”.
A guide service does not need to fire a guide to be able to punish them. Workflows are already very irregular in a seasonal industry and its very easy for a guide to just “stop getting as much work because business is slowing down for the season.” It’s already hard enough for a working guide to make ends meet and if their workload begins to decrease, it’s very quickly untenable and they need to quit and find something else. In this case they chose to quit, the guide service didn’t take any retaliatory action against them.
If a guide files a complaint with the state labor board that will effectively be the end of their tenure at that company and likely any other company with similar practices as they would not be inclined to hire someone who might question their own business practices to the labor board.
Perhaps a guide could consider hiring a lawyer and arguing that they were retaliated against with the decrease in work volume but thats a heavy lift for a guide making $14 bucks an hour. In reality they get burned out after a few years and leave the industry.
The reality is, if you seek fair wages you will find your self in the practical sense black listed from the vast majority of the industry. You either leave, or you start working independently.
The Economics of Guiding
If you want to get into the weeds we can look at some specific numbers to help understand the economics of the industry, there are a couple of key elements we will explore: the use of the day wage instead of an hourly wage and the costs of doing business on public lands.
The Day Wage Structure
This has always been the way of it. Guides are paid a fixed rate each day regardless of the number of hours they work. This does a reasonable job of measuring the real wage of a guide as they work a day similar in length to most employees, around 8-10 hours.
The day wage model starts to fall apart when we consider overnight programs. It’s kind of crazy; most guide services don’t offer an increase in wages for an overnight program or only offer around $50. This means an increased workload from 8-10 hours to 24 hours is not at all reflected in the increase of pay.
This structure serves to obscure the real wage a guide is paid in a dramatic fashion. When you hear a guide makes $200-$300 a day, it seems like a respectable income. A 9-5 worker would have a salary of around $25-$37.50 per hour. For a day guiding trip, this is about accurate, but most guides are not day guiding; they are doing overnight programs.
Let’s look at two typical offerings, a 3-day summit climb and a 5-day climbing school. For a 3-day program, a guide will typically work around 54 hours, from 8 am on day one to around 4 pm on day three. For a 5-day climbing school, we are looking at around 102 hours.
3-Day Summit Climb – 54 hours
5-Day School – 102 hours
These hourly estimates are based on the legal requirements of workers in Washington State. Some companies insist guides don’t need to be paid while they are sleeping in the tent, but the state of Washington disagrees, as does anyone who does multi-way shift work like firefighters or nurses. A guide on call to deal with customer needs or mountain emergencies all night needs to be paid for that time too—not to mention the fact they are away from their home and family. It would be like telling firefighters they don’t get paid unless they are actually at a fire.
What Do Guides Actually Make?
A common wage for a new guide is around $180 to $200 per day. This means they have around five years of personal climbing experience but no professional experience. Most pay scales range up to around $350 or so per day after around ten years of experience or a high level of certification.
3-Day Summit Climb – 54 hours
Entry Level: $600 / 54 = $11.11/hour
Senior Guide: $1050 / 54 = $19.44/hour
5-Day School – 102 hours
Entry Level: $1000 / 102 = $9.80/hour
Senior Guide: $1750 / 102 = $17.15/hour
What About Overtime?
Overtime doesn’t exist in the guiding industry. Even though a guide might be working 102 hours in a week, they won’t be getting any overtime as is required by the law. It’s crazy to me that this has been the case for so many years; it seems to be a pretty blatant disregard of the law—we will look at ideas later about why this doesn’t change.
The Numbers
If you wanted to climb Mt. Baker with Alpine Ascents International or the American Alpine Institute—two of the largest guide services in the world—it would cost $1150 and be run at a ratio of three customers to one guide. The total cost of this trip would be $3450.
Guide Wage
The typical guide with 4-5 years of experience running one of these programs will make about $250/day for a trip total of $750.
Insurance
About $3500 per year on insurance at a $100,000 revenue bracket. This price increases with revenue. Generally, most companies will pay around 3-5% of gross revenue—its impossible to say exactly how much they pay, but using 4% of gross revenue is accurate. This is to maintain insurance to a level required by federal land managers.
Permits
Permits from federal land managers, like in the National Forest, are generally 3% of gross revenue with a nominal application fee.
Group Gear
Group gear is generally provided on climbs, and this includes tents, stoves, and ropes. Other climbing gear is expected to be purchased by customers or rented (usually from the guide service).Given the rate at which most of this gear needs to be replaced, that it probably costs for a group of four around $40 per trip.
Travel Expense
There are other associated expenses that various companies choose to undertake, such as vans, that are hard for me to estimate at a per trip value. But many companies seem to calculate that p roviding vans is more economically viable than providing their employees with a travel stipend, which is generally about $100 for these kinds of trips.
Marketing
Exactly how much is spent on this is tricky to calculate, but let’s estimate it at around 10% of revenue. So for this trip, advertising would cost $345, or about $115 per customer. I think for most companies it’s likely significantly less than this.
Admin Costs
This is a hard number to speculate on for every company as well. For one small business ,working on all administrative tasks other than advertising amounts to around 2% of revenue if bill it at the $20/hour that is typical of what an administrative assistant working in the industry gets paid. This number will scale to be significantly less with a larger business, we will use $69.00 for this number.
This category could also include other costs like payroll tax and workman’s comp insurance. These come out to be about 7% and 5% of payroll expense or $90.
The Margins
From here, we begin to get a picture of the industry. While the guide is making $750 for a three-day climb, with a real wage of around $13.89, the business is bringing in $1974. Let’s keep in mind, the minimum wage in Washington state is just over $16.00/hour and requires overtime pay if an employee works more than 40 hours in a week.
Of course, there are many different programs with different real wage numbers, but generally, a three-day climb is most favorable to the real workload of the guide, with shorter programs, especially day trips, being the most advantageous, and longer programs like Denali being the worst. Most guides working on Denali are making around $6-10 per hour.
To put it into perspective, if you spend ten years working at Alpine Ascents International—which could likely be the biggest guide service in the world—you would max out their pay scale at about $350 per day. This is a real wage of $19.44/hour on the most common program, the standard 3-day summit climb.
I’ll say it again, if you spend a decade of your life in this career, you will not make a wage of more than $19.44/hour.