Guiding & Certification
in the News
October
1999 issue, rapstation article, Guiding in the U.S.- Jorg Wilz is
one of the most highly trained and experienced guides working in this
country. He is a fully certified International Federation of Mountain
Guide Associations (IFMGA) mountain guide trained and certified in Germany.
He comes from a European guiding background where thousands of guides
have been through the IFMGA's rigorous and demanding training and certification
process to become certified mountain guides. He comes from a truly professional
background. By comparison, here in the U.S. where the guiding profession
has yet to become organized, only five guides have successfully completed
all the exams required to become an internationally certified mountain
guide. The article is mostly concerned with the problems he has had
in obtaining permits to guide on public lands due to all the paperwork
and bureaucracies involved as well as the reluctance of land managers
to allow more guiding. But, he also addresses what he sees as some problems
with American guiding and the American certification program. Here are
a couple of paragraphs from that article.
" In my search for allies, I turned to the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA). In November 1997, after a lengthy approval process, the AMGA was accepted into the International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations (IFMGA or UIAGM). This means that the AMGA guide certification program has been recognized to meet international standards. Ironically, any American mountain guide who passes the complete AMGA certification program may now legally guide in Europe, Peru, Canada and New Zealand, but is still prohibited from taking clients into the nearby national forest without a difficult-to-come-by-commercial-use permit.
In spite of this boost for the AMGA certification program, there is still substantial opposition within the association to campaigning for broader access to public lands for independent certified guides. Over four-fifths of the 640 members of the AMGA are currently not certified and tend to see the program as a threat. Many of these guides have been doing excellent work for decades and see little point in opening themselves to the scrutiny of an AMGA examiner when the market has been recognizing them for decades. Beyond that, some of the large guide services now hold valuable and exclusive concessions for renowned national parks, and they could care less about changing the status quo. In short, it's a tough environment for an independent guide, and much will have to change if guiding is ever to emerge from its current image as a onetime summer job to become a true profession."