Guiding & Certification
in the News
November
1999 issue, The Hard Way- This is an article about a Swiss canyoning
disaster. The goal of canyoning is to descend steep narrow mountain
gorges by climbing, rappelling, swimming and other means. In many ways
it is a lot like climbing using many similar pieces of safety equipment
such as ropes, harnesses, helmets and other technical climbing gear.
The article describes a terrible accident in which 21 people died possibly
as a result of inexperienced guides and a client to guide ratio which
was too high. Here is a quote from the article which proposes a possible
way to prevent more of these accidents from happening in adventure sports.
"More and more beginners are trying mountain climbing, caving, and kayaking, sports where proper training and experience are a matter of life and death. With skyrocketing participation, the number of fatalities also continues to rise. In Switzerland alone, 106 people died in the mountains in 1998. Adventure, by definition, entails risk, so some accidents are inevitable, but many others-including several recent, extremely well publicized disasters-have clearly been preventable. Which means that the onus falls on the industry itself to adequately protect nascent adventurers.
How? First, adventure companies must require that their guides be highly trained and highly experienced. There are no substitutes for miles in the mountains (or on the rivers or in the canyons). This combination of experience and expertise must be verified and certified. A paradigm already exists in the standards set by the International Federation of Mountain Guides Association. It takes three to seven years to become a certified IFMGA guide. It is as difficult as getting a college degree. You must log not hundreds of hours, but hundreds of days in the mountains. The best IFMGA guides become masters of all aspects of the alpine experience-downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, mountaineering, ice climbing, rock climbing, and glacier travel. Most important, they learn how to read the weather, how to read the conditions, how to read their clients, and how to know when-if any one of these factors is not right-to turnaround."