May 26, 2020
Kurt has summited Mt. Everest 3 times and operates Sierra
Mountaineering International Climbing Guide Service in Bishop, CA.
Kurt and I talk about how he got started and what it's like running
an International Climbing Guide Service in a small town.
Show
notes
Let's
start out with your Facebook profile. It says Christian Husband,
Father, Foodie, Mountain Guide, Climber, Skier, Travel Junkie,
Foodie, and Goofy. Tell us about the Foodie Goofy Christian
part.
It
goes into everything else that I do, whether that's how I am as a
father, how I conduct myself as a husband or a mountain guide, or
everything else. In life and my climbing guide service I try to
follow those principles. So it all starts there. I'm a foodie, I
just happened to love food.
Your wife sounds like a great
cook.
She's
an amazing cook. Cool. Yes, it does help. I'm married well that
way. You know, they say behind every good man is a great woman. She
certainly does that wonderfully in many other ways besides just
cooking.
Tell
us about the goofy stuff.
I
feel like it's important to remember the humor and everything and
see the humor in everything that's out there. I think it's a
healthy trait to have. I'm one that sets a lot of people at ease
and it just helps you see the world. There's definitely a time to
be serious, but there's so much out there in the world that is fun
and loving and, that goofy part comes out a lot of times when I'm
guiding trips and if I'm out having fun with my friends. Whether
we're ski touring or climbing or whatever else we're doing. Whether
I'm with my family and my son. He's three years old and talks up a
storm and some of the things he says at three years old is just
precious and, and unforgettable.
I'll bet it helps you from a
guiding perspective. When someone is having a tough day or they're
struggling for whatever reason, they're tired or whatever, you can
bring a little entertainment, silliness to the situation, and
probably help them get up that trail or pass.
You're right. When you bring somebody out in the
mountains on a trip, they are many times coming out of their
comfort zone. And that takes a certain type of personality just to
do in and of itself, to put yourself out there, out of your normal
realm of life. You know, and many of the people that we take on
trips are wherever they come from. They are experts in their field
and they're used to being the ones that are being approached by
others and they're the ones that, you know, answer the questions
and such. And now they're going into our world in the
mountains and they're looking at this mountain guide for those same
questions and answers that they normally give. So, yeah, being able
to inject a little bit of humor and just to put everybody at ease
and let them know that, Hey, it's okay. Everybody has a hard time
with this particular move too.
Tell
us how you got into the outdoors. Your dad was an outdoor person,
right?
He
sure was. He was brought up going camping with the family and such.
He was born in 1928. And during those depression years and into the
war years, he was in high school and the family always went camping
for a couple of weeks every summer. And then as he grew into his
twenties, he got introduced to backpacking and then mountaineering.
And back in the early fifties he started climbing peaks in the
Sierra and going skiing in the backcountry of the Sierra. He was
well into that when he started raising kids. I got brought
up around that from a toddler. My mom hiked Mount Baldy in Southern
California two weeks before I was born. From there I was put in a
baby carrier. And back in those days, the baby carriers were made
by a company called Jerry. And everybody just called it the Jerry
carrier. It wasn't a baby carrier. It was a Jerry carrier. That's
what I got brought up on until I could walk.
Did you know early on that you wanted
to be a mountain guide?
No. I
grew up, you know, going to the mountains in the summertime. We'd
go every weekend in the Sierra and in the wintertime we'd come
skiing at mammoth and going backcountry skiing and such. When I was
in college was going to Cal State Northridge, getting a degree in
political science. And my original plan was I wanted to become an
environmental attorney. I love the environment and I thought,
here's something that could be a good way to make that passion
useful. But I took some time off after I graduated from Cal State
Northridge to go play, and have some fun. I applied for a job
guiding on Mount Rainier in Washington. At that point I'd been teaching classes
when I was in college through an outdoor store called
Adventure
16. Yeah, I'm an alum
there. We taught a lot of programs and backpacking and rock
climbing and navigation courses.
My plan was to get a job guiding at
Mount Rainier and have some fun for a few years and then go back
and figure out law school. While I was guiding ay Mount Rainier, I
met a lot of attorneys who came on our climbs. And after our climbs
they would invite me out to dinner with them and they'd want to
give me my tip over a couple of rounds of our favorite beverages.
I'd have great Face Time with these guys. And a lot of them were
really unhappy people and, sometimes I had better face time with
them than their own families. I talked to them about their line of
work. And the more of those guys I talked to, a lot of them were
overworked and unhappy. They're telling me all this and then at the
same time they're saying, well, can you take us to climb volcanoes
in Mexico? They want to go everywhere. Can you take us to climb
Kilimanjaro? And so as a matter of fact, it sort of falls under the
heading of life is what happens while you're making other plans. So
I just kind of pursued guiding in that direction and started a
climbing guide service.
When
did you start your Climbing guide service, Sierra Mountaineering
International?
I
started it in 1995, in December of 95 after climbing Everest the
first time in the spring of 95. I came back from that and opened my
climbing guide service that fall.
Were you, were you living here in
Bishop? How did you end up in Bishop?
I
moved here in 92 and that happened just after graduating from
college and going to Mount Rainier in the summer. I came back to
work one more winter at A16. I went back for a second summer on
Mount Rainier and then came back to Bishop instead. At the time my parents had just bought a house
up here but hadn't retired from LA, so I had a place to live and
everything. So from my home base and I realized that you
know, I'm enjoying Mount Rainier, but the Sierra has always been my
home and I always felt like I was coming back home when I came
here. So I started a climbing guide service.
When
you started you obviously had connections from the clients you
guided on Rainier. Did you also have any connections in Southern
California, how did you get started? What did you do?
Yeah,
it was, you know, people I've met on Mount Rainier who wanted to
climb in the Sierra and also people I'd met at in Southern
California over the years working at Adventure 16. Through the
outings program and customers in the store and the employees,
they're were referring people to me as well. So it was kind of a
double whammy that way. I had a couple of different streams of
people coming in and that's a great opportunity.
What
are some of the challenges of operating a climbing guide service in
a small town like Bishop?
The
Sierra in a lot of ways is an easy sell. I mean it's such a
beautiful mountain range and so much variety. You can spend a
lifetime just, or hiking or mountaineering, rock climbing, ski
touring, you name it. There's a lifetime of stuff to do. You’re
just scratching the surface. As many of us know.
What were some of the challenges of
being in a small town with limited services?
Yeah,
small-town living back in the mid-nineties was different than it is
now. There was no internet, there were no cell phones. One of my
biggest business expenses was my phone bill. You had a small town
carrier here who kind of raped you on the phone charges and, some
of the cost of living being higher like gas for your car was
higher, limited places to rent and things like that. There were a
few of those issues but at the same time, Bishop has enough
amenities that you don't have to get out of town much to get too
many things. Now, of course, it's a lot different. It seems like we
have to get out of town to get toilet paper, but that's a different
thing.
It's gotta be great to be able to
guide in your backyard.
I
just love it. And you're right, I call it my backyard all the time.
People ask me a lot because they know I've climbed on every
continent of the world. I've done the highest point in each
continent, the proverbial seven summits. I've been on hundred and
20 plus expeditions all over the world now. And they say, well,
what's your favorite place? And I tell them, well, the Sierra, this
is it. To be able to live here and to operate a climbing
guide service, be in our backyard, show people this beautiful part
of the world, show them how to take care of it, you know, try to
impart a lasting impression about what this place means to us and
therefore to them, I feel very blessed to be able to do that.
Your
climbing guide service is affiliated with the American Mountain
Guides Association, how does that work these days on the
certifications and all those things?
It's
sort of an ongoing evolving process and guiding in general in the
United States is still a pretty new profession compared to Europe.
If you go to Europe, you might find somebody whose great
grandfather was a mountain guide and then his grandfather was a
mountain guide and his father was a mountain guide. Now he's a
mountain guide and he's raising a son who wants to be one. You
walk, the city streets of a place like Geneva and you say the word
mountain guide and everybody knows what that is. It's a very well
known, very well respected profession. You go into a bar and say I
need to hire a mountain guide and everybody's head turns and looks
at you.
Yet I
still have friends in college who still don't understand really
what I do. They say I know this great that this guy Wedberg, he
owns a climbing guide service and climbs mountains for a living.
And they have no idea how that works. The American
Mountain Guides Association is also a new organization, relatively speaking.
They're still going through growing pains, getting their feet wet
and things.
I was working at a 16 when they had
that first formal meeting at the ski show back in 1985 I
think.
That's where they kind of recognized that there's this
guiding profession here and maybe we could try to standardize it
and grow it. Ever since then it has been doing that and they've
modeled a lot of what they do after the international community in
Europe. They've developed courses and exams and there are three
disciplines. Alpine guiding, Rock Guiding, and Ski guiding. I'd say
most of the guides in the United States probably pursue one or two
of those disciplines. A smaller percentage of them pursue all
three. That is what they concentrate on. Get the basics down
so you can see if we execute it. It's more geared to that versus
what I would call the soft skills. They don't talk a lot about how
to engage clients and be personable.
How
often do you do international trips?
I'm
doing about five or six a year personally. Our company, we'll do a
few more with some of my other guides leading them. But it's about
five or six a year and it depends on the time of year.
So in
the fall and winter we're heading to places in South
America,
Mexico's
volcanoes,
Aconcagua
in Argentina. That is usually a
December, January timeframe as it’s summertime down there. We'll go
to places like say
Mount Elbrus
in Russia, that's more of a
summertime thing cause their latitude is similar to the Northwest
here. We go to
Kilimanjaro
a couple of times a year and that
being an equatorial climate, we can go there more months of the
year. Some of the more exotic places like
Carstensz Pyramid
in Indonesia, which is always a
fun one to mix it up.
Do
you throw some new ones in there every year?
My
goal has always been to do one new international trip every year,
and I've accomplished that in all except maybe one year. The
rule of thumb with it is if I am doing a new trip, it's with a
client that I've already climbed with before and they know it's a
new place for me. We already have a relationship and we know we're
figuring it out together. I know their skills, they know my skills.
They know what I'm doing, part of the fun of it for them is seeing
how we get this figured out. Right. There's be some curveballs
thrown at us and that's okay.
Have
you had a pretty wild trip? Anything major, like bad weather or
something?
Oh,
sure. I mean weather-wise, you know, the weather is always going to
be an issue is when you're in the mountains guiding. For example,
we were pinned down on Aconcagua at 16,000 feet with winds that
were gusting to a good hundred miles an hour. You gotta build up
rock walls around your tents and get your tents guyed out well and
keep checking them all the time. Living like that for days until
the winds subside. So it's good that you know your clients you're
with. That you’re not gonna have issues with them. They're not
gonna have issues with you. We've had that a number of times and
I've had storms pin us down on other mountains around the
world.
I've
had other things get thrown at us. For example, I had some guys I
was going with to Turkey to climb
Mount Ararat
and at the very last minute
Turkey stopped issuing visas to Americans. These people I was
climbing with were actually from Australia and they were able to go
to Turkey, but I wasn't. We were chatting about it and we came up
with this idea of instead of going to Turkey, we would go to the
country of Georgia and climb a mountain called Mount Kazbek in the Caucuses. Cool deep remote mountain, 19,000 plus
feet high and not visited by hardly anybody. What ended up kind of
being a last-minute change of plans ended up being a really magical
experience. This spontaneous thing and sometimes those things end
up being a lot of fun. This certainly was, it was a
blast.
The
anniversary of your three
Everest
Summits were recent, right? It's
an incredible achievement. What were those like?
Each
one of them was different and unique. The first time was 1995 and
that was a special anniversary. This year is the 25th anniversary.
We had a zoom call or a reunion that was fun. It was a trip that we
planned in the sort of traditional style, you know, we weren't
guiding it and we weren't being guided. We were just a bunch of
friends who put this expedition together and went and raised all
our own money and all that and went on the Northside of the
mountain to climb the Northeast Ridge. We had 20 people, 12
of whom were climbing team members and the other eight were base
camp managers and support people, the team doctor, and such. Out of
the 12 climbers, eight of us got to the top. Honestly, pretty
successful actually.
The
other two trips were on the Southside through Nepal and I was
guiding both of those times which was different, different aspects,
a different perspective, different to be guiding it. I made a
decision early on in my guiding career that I did not want to run
big Everest expeditions and the only way I'd guide it is
one-on-one. So if I had one client who I knew I and climbed with
them before and I really felt he had an honest shot at reaching the
summit, I would consider it. Someone who would be honest with you
if he couldn't, cause there's already a relationship there, we
climbed together and such.
I did
the Southside twice, once in 2008 and once in
2012. The client I was with a neat guy who I climbed with on
several peaks, but at Everest, he got sick at base camp and coughed
so hard he actually separated the lining from his lungs, which then
got infected and he had pleurisy. So he had to be evacuated and
sent home. I ended up sticking around and climbing it on my own
because I was there and I could, I hadn't done the Southside yet.
That was my new trip for that year too. Then I went back in 2012
with another good friend of mine, Fred Simmons. We summited
together and that was, that was a pretty special experience.
You know, like any trip, when you
share that time together with people, it creates a bond of
friendship that you really can't duplicate in any other way. That
just gets magnified at a place like
Mount
Everest.
What
outdoor activities do you participate in for fun?
The
latest thing is mountain biking. I rediscovered that last year when
a couple of clients of mine who had climbed a bunch of the
California fourteeners with me in the Sierra knew I'd been
to
Kilimanjaro
many, many times. They were avid
mountain bikers and they came to me and said they wanted to
mountain bike Kilimanjaro. And they knew that since I've been to
Kilimanjaro so much, I could probably figure out the permitting and
how to get all that done. I said, well yeah, I could, I had all the
connections to get that done.
We
mountain biked it last October all the way to the top of that
mountain. What that required me to do, you know, they weren't
coming to me for my biking expertise. They were coming to me cause
I knew Kilimanjaro. So my job was just to hold my own on a mountain
bike. It was great. I bought a new mountain bike and spent all
summer here around Bishop going mountain biking to get in shape to
just get ready for this. I went to the top of White Mountain with
my mountain bike and went all over chipmunk Canyon. I mean there's
tons of mountain biking here. We did a variation of the standard, they call it the
Kilema/Marangu route. And
basically it combines the standard Marangu route with kind of an
emergency road the park service has set up. In case they need a
vehicle to pull somebody off the mountain. Being a dirt road we
were able to do a dirt road partway up. So it took five days or
so,
Do
you have any advice or suggestions for folks wanting to get into
the outdoor adventure biz or start a business?
I
would say in terms of the outdoor business in general, there are
lots of different avenues to take. For both you and I who have been
in this industry for so long, we know how special of an industry it
is and it attracts a certain type of people. Fun-loving people who
care about the environment and really share a common thread with
that, which is neat. It can take so many avenues. You can
get a job with a company, a manufacturer, you can get into land
management, forest service, park service, and administration kind
of a thing. There are retail shops, climbing guide service such as
myself. There are so many avenues to take.
My advice to people is to get to know
the industry a little bit. And if you're somebody still in college,
get a part-time job at a mountaineering store, there's no better
way than to learn the industry and learn about the customers that
come in and frequently and go to the outdoors. I think a lot of us
that have worked retail and have that experience, you don't really
realize it at the time you were working in retail. But afterward,
if you stay in the industry and you go back and you're designing
packs or you're in the media, or you're a guide you draw on that
experience daily, hourly, daily, every single day.
You
and I, knowing the company adventure 16 as we do, after 58 years
they hung it up and called it, the end of a long career. They had a
great run of it. And you know, one of the things that the
president, John Mead, one of his selling points to employees or
prospective employees is that, you know, use us as a stepping stone
to get into the industry. And I joke about it now because we're
familiar with the outdoor industry trade show that happens a couple
of times a year. And I've always joked that our ex-employees are
littered throughout that trade show floor. And anybody listening to
this who's from that alumni group, they would laugh at that because
it's so true. You know, you run into these guys in all aspects of
the business. Some of them are still operating retail stores, some
of them are presidents of companies, some of them have started
companies. And the reunions that have happened at those
shows of our ex-employees have been so much fun. You end up meeting
these great people. I worked there in 1978, somebody else who
worked there in 1992 and even though they never worked together,
all of a sudden there's this instant connection and they become
great friends. It's like meeting long lost brothers and sisters,
you just hit it off immediately right away. It's a great community.
It really is.
What is
your favorite piece of outdoor gear under a hundred dollars that
you probably bought at A16?
I'm
going to go with the
Bomber hat
which has been a great favorite of
ours. I'll tell you another one. A16 made these little Tri-zip
pouches, they made them in different sizes, I still have two of
them and they're about four by six and I still use them as my
climbing guide service repair kits. I'm also going to go with a
very obscure one here that, if our old friend Mike Wallenfels is
listening, he will laugh at this. Mountain Hardware made this little tent and it just looked like a mini
tent. It was about, I'm going to guess about two feet by two and a
half feet by two feet with a big door on it. I brought that with me
on my Denali expeditions and I put our stoves inside to melt our
snow for water. They were out of the wind and it was designed to be
a little mini tent for cooking. You had to be super careful with
these things cause you could easily burn it. I'm sure that any
stove manufacturer listening is just cringing knowing that we did
this with their stoves cause you had to be really careful. But man,
having your stoves inside this thing melting all this snow for
water, it was the difference of several gallons worth of white gas
on a Twentyone day expedition on Denali. They don't make them
anymore.
Mike shoot me an email, let me know
what the name of that tent was so I can put it in the show
notes.
How
about favorite books?
My
all-time favorite has to be the Bible because it's composed of 66
books written over a 1400 year time span, over 40 different
authors. And it covers everything from philosophy to
history.
More
traditionally, I read two books recently by an author named Greg
Laurie. He's actually a pastor of a big church down Riverside. He
wrote a book called,
Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an
American Icon.
Previous to that he wrote two other books, one kind of similar
about Steve McQueen. He was a little before my time as far as being
one of my idols. But I did grow up watching Steve McQueen movies,
the King of cool. That was an interesting book. And then he wrote
another one, he called Jesus
Revolution. And it
talked about that those days in the sixties when there were
long-haired hippies strung out on drugs just coming into churches
with cutoff Levis and no shirts.
How
can people reach out to you if they want to follow up?
We
have a website, Sierramountaineering.com.
You can find links to reach out to us by phone or email. Our Email
is: info@sierramountaineering.com
or our phone number is
(760) 872-4929 and we always love hearing from
people. Whether you're interested in a trip or just you want to
know conditions, what's going on in the Sierra. We're up there all
the time.
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