Livin' La Vida Local

Trip Reminds of the Joy of Guiding, and Rekindles Love of a Place

By Ken Wright, 6-01-06

	National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection

I took a trip last week, and I although I never got more than 100 miles from home, I found a whole new world right inside my old one.

I’d gotten this 8-day gig with an educational tour company out of the Front Range that was taking a group of 8th graders from San Francisco around the Four Corners for a combination of service work, education, and adventure touring. They ran a river, climbed a mountain, worked with the Forest Service, stayed with an Indian tribe, worked on archaeological sites, went to a powwow, and more. A sort of rite-of-passage into high school for the 26 students. I was solicited as a guide to the area, drawing on my experience as a regional writer and journalist, former park service volunteer, long-time commercial river guide, and well-traveled unprofessional region-wide wanderer.

I think it was mind-expanding (at times mind-exploding) for the kids and their chaperone teachers. And for myself, it was quite fun, and needed. Since last fall, I’d been hunkering down hard in my little office, doing in a sort of financial penance following a summer-long road-trip adventure my family took last year. So when I enlisted for service on this grand cultural, social, historical, geographic and geologic exploration, I was seeing less the work and more a paid-for vacation, even if it was right in my backyard.

To my surprise and pleasure, I also soon realized how much I’d been missing my backyard. And how good it felt to wander around it again.

I was also somewhat taken aback by how much guiding around this place I know so well invigorated both my mind and my body, and also re-invigorated my intimacy with the land and people and stories that make the Four Corners a Place, rather than just a another place, for me.

Guiding – the skill, the act, the task -- did that. Because “guiding,” when done with heart, isn’t so much about the delivering facts to those being shown a place, but is more about the guide providing access to a relationship with that Place. True guides have the ability to share the relationship they have with a place; if they’re good, they can conveying that relationship; and at their best, a guide will actually conjure a sense of that relationship in the group in the guide’s trust.

For me – and it’s the reason I guided for so long, on so many of the same trips, down the same stretches of rivers I love so much -- the real reward for the guiding comes when that conjuring in turn re-ignites the energy, the enthusiasm, the perspective, the affection in myself, as well.

While it’s certainly nice to get paid for this joy of guiding, this skill need not be practiced in some professional format to work its magic. I think of a recent insight: watching my 11-year-old daughter getting to lead her city cousin from downtown Chicago around Purgatory ski area for a few days this winter, repaying a week-long cousin-led urban adventure last year. In the evening, Every evening, my daughter would excitedly share the itinerary they’d explored that day, and enthusiastically outline the agenda of cool runs and views and secret paths they’d visit the next day.

Sitting through those displays of developing guiding skills (not surprising, perhaps, given that my wife and I were both commercial guides), my wife and I grew more and more impressed with her intimate knowledge of her home mountain, surprised at the depth of her personal relationship and perceptions of the place we’d shared so much time wandering around together, and touched by her sincere affection for what she clearly had claimed as her own.

A Place. A place that had become more of a Place when she shared her love of it with others.

So, why stop there? Sitting on our front porch in the evening light last night, sharing with Sarah these thoughts on my regional venture the week before, she interrupted with an idea she’d been chewing on lately: Let’s take in a foreign exchange student, she suggested. She elaborated on her rationale: It’d be giving a great opportunity to some traveling student; it’ll be good for our own kids to be exposed to some cool kid brave enough to do this kind of thing; and think about how fun it would be to show them the mountains, take them down the river, go to some festivals …

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