Tejas’s “guide to glide” program gave him the opportunity to paraglide off of many mountains
The task of being a mountain guide is a challenging one. It involves acquiring experience and in depth knowledge of selected mountains, developing wisdom and applying techniques. A guide must have people skills, a sense of responsibility towards others and put others’ well-being ahead of his own goals.
For all of the freedom of the hills that comes with the job and even being acknowledged as one of the best in the world at what you do there is also not a tremendous amount of money to be made. Guides do not work 365 days a year, or fifty weeks of the year with two weeks of paid vacation. For the most part, theirs is seasonal work, so the odds of becoming wealthy are lower than in almost any other profession. It is a true labor of love.
In many cases, being a mountain guide can be a short-term career, much like that of a professional team sports athlete. Even then, only a small percentage of guides develop a wide reputation where new climbers seek them out.
Compared to all but a few people worldwide, Vern Tejas has kept his guiding career going much longer, by many more years, than other mountain guides. He has also been able to perpetuate his reputation, particularly on Denali, and on many of the Seven Summits peaks so that citizen adventurers seek him out.
During his decades of guiding, Tejas has also added a storehouse of knowledge to draw upon, so he lends expertise to the routes being climbed on several of the world’s most important mountains. When it comes to the Seven Summits, he knows his stuff and the climbers know he knows his stuff. In a high-risk profession, which can be a short-lived career, Tejas has maintained his health and stamina.
When it comes to the climbers and citizen adventurers who sign up for trips, I have learned it is human nature to think you are in better shape than you are. I’ve seen it over and over again. The bane of guiding is to have climbers who believe they are ready to go, but they are not. It’s what we do as humans.
We make mistakes, and many of those mistakes could be avoided by doing our homework and training. They can be avoided if the people really work hard to prepare. But they have family responsibilities, a boss that demands they work late. So they skip the gym. They skip it a few times, and then they are off their training regimen. But they have paid in advance for the trip, so they are going to go anyway.
They underestimate the mountain and overestimate their preparedness. It is classic. It happens so often. We want people to be as fit as they can be. Sometimes they are not. The percentage of people who are not that fit almost exactly reflects what our success rate to the summit is. The seventy-five percent who come fully prepared represent the summit success stories and typically succeed; the twenty-five percent who don’t recognize the trip is going to be harder because of that training failure are the others.
This is where good guiding comes in. How much weight am I going to carry of theirs? A lot of guides don’t carry weight. In Europe, especially, the guides have the attitude, “If you’re not fit, don’t come.” In America, where we value the dollar, I’m going to try to give you the best I can give you. I can’t fix everything. I can’t make you healthy if you get sick. I can’t make you strong and fit, but I can help you with your load.
Carrying someone else’s pack weight is a generous move by a guide. Usually, it is appreciated, and I see that in a return in tips. I helped the weakest guy on a recent trip, and he knew I helped him the most and gave me a good tip. Mountain guides do not make much money, so tips are welcome. I will carry excess weight. I make sure somebody gets a meal closer to their preference than somebody who is on another team. I go out of my way to customize a trip the best I can, but personal fitness is an important element that can make or break a trip.
Things do not work as well if the person who is not in shape affects the group and makes the whole team suffer. You find out fast if somebody did not do what was necessary to get ready. You do a reality check. I have said to someone, “Before I ever take you on another mountain, you’ve got to lose twenty pounds.” They come back and I look at them and say, “You didn’t lose twenty pounds, did you?” They go, “Well, I lost ten, but gained back two.” Reality catches up to them on the mountain. Either I turn them back, or I work extra hard carrying a bunch of their weight. That’s my training. This seems to happen with a higher percentage of climbers on Aconcagua than it does on any other mountain. Climbers might say they have done Denali, which is a high mountain, but Aconcagua is almost 3,000 feet higher. The way you feel on the top can be very different.
As the group leader, I spend a lot of energy ensuring the safety of my team. An example of this was when we changed the route on Mount Vinson in Antarctica. When we climbed the older way, we worried. There were always hanging glaciers on both sides of the old route. I called this place the Valley of Death. If you were in the valley at the wrong time, you were dead. That was in the 1990s. We guides frequently talked about the hazards of the route.
We changed our course in 2000. A year earlier, there was an avalanche that spewed ice all over the place. There was a huge wind blast, and debris was sent everywhere. Friend and fellow guide Dave Hahn of New Mexico suggested a creative solution by installing a fixed line up a nearby ridge. We all got on board and his idea made the route safer. In fact, it also made it a little bit quicker.
A big aspect of guiding is anticipating problems and mitigating them before someone gets hurt. As a guide, I always start out with a plan when we begin climbing a mountain. I try to put the building blocks together for success. Sometimes we have to adjust. Sometimes things happen or the weather is bad. That said, I have a ninety-nine percent success rate on Vinson. Not so on less predictable mountains like Denali, Aconcagua, or Everest.
You can get the worst weather. You are freezing your butt off, plastered by the wind. You have every inch of skin covered, so that you won’t get bitten by the wind. I have been in minus-forty with high winds on a climb, and we have received four feet of snow. You don’t move. There is no reason to go for a summit on a severely windy day when it’s cold. If you have wind, snow, or whiteout conditions, it is going to impact your chances of reaching the top. If you have two of those going on, the chances are reduced to about fifty-fifty. If you have all three, you don’t even think of going. The wind gets in people’s faces and blocks the vision from their goggles. You get wind burned, snow blinded, hypothermic, and frostbit.
On Vinson, you regularly have temperatures at minus-thirty or minus-forty, but the weather has been warming up the last five years. Some climbers get frost nip and walk around with these little white patches on their faces. I tell them it makes us both look bad. The wind can rip your face off. People can get frostbite and lose skin. The fact that I have never been turned back on Vinson is amazing to me. Everything has to go right, and for that to occur, you have to be patient.
Sometimes people turn back before we have really started because they are caught off guard and can’t take the cold. A few years ago, an Australian guy took off his gloves while we were setting up the tents. A few minutes later, he was in the warming tent complaining about the loss of feeling in his hands. Game over. He just blew it. He froze his hands right away and couldn’t go on. Frostbite doesn’t get better. It gets worse. It was a failure on my part to not watch him like a hawk. It was a failure on his part not to watch himself. These days, that’s a $40,000 mistake. That’s a lot of money for a few minutes of cold exposure. You can’t really watch everybody that closely. It is cold out there. Welcome to Antarctica. He had never been in weather like that before, never had that threat before. He lives in a place where it doesn’t freeze, so he doesn’t know what to expect or really how to prepare. Though I had warned the team to protect against the cold, it wasn’t enough. I failed to anticipate his needs early in the climb. I do stress self-care with my team. It is crucial for each climber to be responsible for taking care of himself. I teach the importance of consciously being aware of having enough oxygen, hydration, calories, and the right clothes.
This is a process that requires hourly input. If they cannot do all of those things, they will soon be a liability. Be selfish and take care of yourself first and then you can contribute to the team. The classic rookie mistake is pulling into a new camp site with everybody being in a rush to put up tents. If they put on some warmer clothes and eat and drink first, they will be able to complete the task comfortably. If they forget to take those self-care steps, they set themselves up for hypothermia. It happens way too often, and what starts out as a minor problem can quickly mushroom into a life-threatening situation. So the best thing for the team is for everyone to take care of the basics—oxygen, water, food, and clothing.
I do give pep talks at the start of climbs. It’s a little John Wayne-like. “Listen up! This is the first day of the rest of your life. It’s your choice to make it a good one or a bad one. How would you like to begin the rest of your life?”
They’re all saying, “Let’s go climb a mountain.”
“Yes,” I say, “but let’s do it safely.”
When we get to base camp, sometimes before that, I am a joker. I have already gone over the gear list with them. We have already gone out to dinner. I want to make things fun at that point. I tell them to make it a good day, to make good choices. That gets the group thinking about things. There is humor involved. I learned from Jim Hale way back that humor helps people relax.
I go over my game plan for pressure breathing, my particular method for getting more oxygen. Pressure breathing is when you exhale forcefully, and it’s very disturbing to anyone around you because it sounds as if you are ready to blow up. I think it is one of the most basic things to learn about altitude climbing. It doesn’t matter in rock climbing. It doesn’t matter on low mountains. But when you get up on the big boys, on the continental high points, you had better have some techniques to help yourself through. You literally blow your cheeks out as you are expelling air. For me and many others, this works. I tell the climbers that if they are with this particular guide—me—to humor him. Pressure breathe and laugh at his jokes.
With repeat climbers, they know the punch lines of my jokes before I get to them. That’s one thing, but the pressure breathing a technique they can count on. I tell them they don’t have to embrace it, but if they’re gasping up high, I’m going to teach it again so they might as well learn it right away. I tell them that if they know of a better breathing technique that they should teach me, but no one has tried that recently. I’ve had many people come up to me after they climbed the mountain and say, “That was the best thing.” I don’t know exactly how it works, but it does. People tell me they used it on other mountains after learning it from me and it worked. That’s the kind of feedback I like.
Team building is important for safety and enjoyment also. I start off easy with talking about how we are all reliant on one another and how it is in the best interests of all of us to look out for each other. That requires good, open, two-way communication. Before we go anywhere, we need to know how everyone is doing. Typically, I will ask each member how they slept and how they feel. I also encourage the climbers to ask each other. If someone is having a bad day we need to know. We can help out by going slower on the trail or carrying some of their pack weight. We are a family and we move together and help each other.
One of the most delicate of balancing acts is to get strangers of different abilities to work together as a cohesive unit. The melding of individuals into a team is the guide’s masterpiece if done right. The ideal situation is that everyone completes the climb as friends after having a great experience together.
I have had a sixty-five-year-old man and a sixty-five-year-old woman both make it to the top of Everest on different trips. That’s not bad. How did they do it? They employed good pacing and plenty of oxygen. They did not have the kind of extensive mountaineering background I did. I tell them what I have learned. I tell people that if they come away from the mountain knowing how to pressure breathe, I have done my job because every mountain you climb from now on, it can help you out.
Believe me, with a thousand samples or more to choose from, I know slower can be better. I may be slower ascending than some other guides, but I have a better success rate as a team leader. There is a better outcome, with less frostbite and fewer headaches, fewer people wadded up in a ball in pain, broken from the climb. I have watched faster trips on Denali where the guides took people up and the climbers did not feel as well as my climbers. Slow is beautiful. Everything improves from the oxygen intake, to digestion, to staying warm and avoiding hypothermia. The basics don’t change.
It is very important for the guide to take care of himself, too. If I am not healthy, I can’t help other people. I have traveled in the mountains for a long time. I have lost too many friends to accidents. I have been very fortunate to avoid accidents, stay ambulatory and still be able to climb in high places when I am in my sixties. I know one guy who guided Everest at seventy, and, although I don’t think I will be doing that, I can say that I am still strong. Call sixty-four the new forty-four.
However, many years ago, in 1982, I did have an accident that hampered me for a long time. I was rock climbing in Yosemite and I had a crash landing that injured my ankle. It hurt for weeks, but when I got it examined, all they could do was put it in a cast. About five or six years later, I was paragliding in Hatcher Pass, north of Anchorage, and I landed hard against the hill. I was trying for a flat spot, but slammed into a hill with my right ankle.
I killed cartilage in my subtalar joint. It was an issue for years. Finally, in 2010 I had surgery. The doctors put bolts in the top and bottom of the joint, pulled it apart, and injected stem cells into the cavity where the cartilage used to live. They became cartilage, and now I can run again. It was a first for those doctors. They had done knees before, but not that joint.
They seemed pretty surprised I had been climbing mountains on it for all of those years. In the past, they just would have fused it. I couldn’t deal with that. Screw that. I had to be mobile. Sometimes it bothered me. I could complain or whine, but it would not do me any good. I might be out walking with friends in New York City, and they would notice. “You’re limping again.” That’s when I decided I needed to do something about it. Probably walking on all of that concrete in New York was the worst thing I could do for it. Dancing all night was pretty tough, too
I knew I was really in trouble on Denali when I got to the place high up that they call the Autobahn. It is a severe slope from high camp to Denali Pass. You have to crank your ankle. You have to align your foot with the angle of the slope. It really tweaks your ankle. The injured spot had atrophied over time. When I crashed and the cartilage disintegrated, it became bone on bone. That’s why I limped. I had no padding. There was no lubrication between the two bones. It also threw my hips off when I walked. Norman Vaughan had fused his ankle, and it threw his knee off, and ultimately he needed hip replacement surgery. I did not want to fuse my ankle. I needed mobility. I needed to be able to flex my foot in all directions. If I had it fused, I would have had to retire from guiding. I just tolerated the pain it until I heard about an alternative surgery seven years ago and had the operation. The surgeon cut into my right ankle and drove in bolts in the spot.
For a couple of months after the operation, I wasn’t very happy. I was on crutches and I had bolts going through my foot. You really have to keep the bolt holes clean so you don’t get an infection and have the bone start rotting. It was a real drag to have the operation, and it kept me out of commission for a couple of months. My first expedition back guiding was to Antarctica, and it did not stress the ankle at all. When I did the South Pole traverse in vans, I arrived there with a cane. I spent hundreds of miles flexing the right foot on the gas pedal. It was good therapy.
Tejas’s “guide to glide” program gave him the opportunity to paraglide off of many mountains
From what I understand, this procedure was a Russian medical invention, not by a doctor, but a veterinarian, who applied it to sheep with broken legs. The trick was to slowly jack the break apart while it heals in the correct position. In my case, it was my subtalar joint, but the principle was the same as that applied to the sheep. It grew and grew until cartilage took hold. It’s really kind of a miracle that they can do it. They can re-integrate instead of disintegrate. My life got better from this operation. And since then, I have had crippled ballerinas and basketball players call me up to ask how my surgery worked out.