HIKING WILDERNESS MENTOR GUIDE
Learn the skills to guide guests on more than a physical journey.
A life of exploration and purposeful journeys, where you share the wilderness with people from around the world. This is more than a dream. For a hiking guide, it’s real life.
In our comprehensive wilderness hiking guide training, we prepare you to live and work in the wilderness as a hiking guide. Our experienced instructors, who are wilderness mentor guides themselves, will teach you crucial wilderness skills and the mentality to work in nature at our ranch and train you through hands-on learning activities. Then, you’ll practice everything you just learned as you embark on a multi-day hiking trip into remote wilderness.
BEYOND BASICS
Our hiking wilderness mentor guide training does more than answer the question of how to become a hiking guide. It trains you in a broad range of wilderness skills that will prepare you to turn your dreams of living and working in the wilderness into a reality. In addition to the traditional skills that every hiking guide needs, we also teach you how to lead horse supported hiking tours. This specialized skill allows you to lead trekking tours where a pack horse carries your gear, freeing you and your guests to explore the wilderness without a heavy backpack. This additional component to our guide training opens the doors to more job opportunities within the guiding and wilderness tourism industry. Throughout this course, each hiking wilderness mentor guide student receives hands-on training in the following skills:
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Navigation along wilderness trails
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Camp preparation and management in remote wilderness locations
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Wilderness first-aid
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Identification of local flora and fauna
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Trail procedures
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Range management
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How to create transformational experiences for guests, focusing on involvement and reflection
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Wildlife safety, with a focus on bear safety
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How to handle and work with pack horses
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Care of pack horses: shoeing, packing and securing horses for the night in open meadows
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Nature Connection, Conservation and Stewardship and Personal Development
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Responsibility, initiative, contribution, connection and positivity
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Sharing the richness of nature every step of the way.
There’s something truly special about exploring the wilderness under your own power. The sense of accomplishment you feel at the top of every mountain makes the views more powerful and the air a little sweeter. As a hiking guide, you get to enjoy and share this experience every day.
Why become a wilderness hiking guide? For us, the answer is simple. Becoming a hiking guide allows you to explore wild and wonderful places as you share the power of nature with people from all walks of life. And as you journey into the wilderness, both in your guide training and throughout your career, you’ll find that personal development and leadership training naturally accompany all of your encounters with nature. The realities of the wilderness and unyielding laws of nature draw out confidence, purpose-driven actions and personal accountability to a degree that no other setting can match.
That’s why we keep preparation for remote back-country trips and high level wilderness skills at the core of our guide training. Our goal is to empower you to explore nature to the full, and to safely lead others on authentic wilderness experiences where they can learn from nature, too.