Guides Course done....

I completed the ten day AMGA Rock Instructor Course yesterday. This was a great experience. I have a host of new rope tricks now and am certainly a better guide. I am also happy to have spent an extended amount of time with the course instructor Alain Comeau. Alain's Yoda like presentation, his sense of humor and deep knowledge and love of guiding was inspiring.

Much of the course was about fine tuning techniques that I have been using for quite a while, both guide and recreational climber. The short roping, short pitching and the rescue scenario are largely new. I continually find myself shaking my head about the years of climbing that I had never practiced belay escape much less rappelling to an injured climber and initiating a rescue of them. It always was more fun to get out and do the moves than play around with all that. It is amazingly good fortune that I never needed these skills on the Diamond or on Canon or a host of other places I've visited where things can go very wrong. Pursuing this guiding discipline has been an eye opener.

"Both climbers and youth are inclined to self-absorbed obsessions. I developed mine to the fullest. For over twenty years, until well into my thirties, all that mattered was the next crag, the next route, the sheer thrill of movement. It was a joyous ignorance, and I look back on that period with a shake of my head and a pang of envy.

Through prolonged exposure to some extraordinary two- and four-legged animals encountered in my climbing lifestyle, I belatedly developed into a worthwhile human being. It could have all been different in other company. Climbing is a potent formative experience for those who give themselves entirely to its power, forging changes within us of which we are barely in control and helping define our engagement with the world. In a time when 6.5 billion people share the same increasingly crowded planet, our individual responsibilities have become greater than ever. By itself, climbing means nothing. How it influences our lives beyond the crags means everything."-Johnny Woodward. Profile.