Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. I’m your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today, our guest is Caroline George. I’d say every active and want-to-be female guide should listen to this episode multiple times. Caroline’s voice was soft and comforting, but the words were incredibly impactful. The wisdom came from the essence she extracted from life events and decades of mountain climbing and guiding. The conversations provoked me to look into myself honestly and asked the ultimate question of “why.”

Caroline, an IFMGA mountain guide based near Verbier in the Swiss Alps, has faced many curveballs, but the mountains have always been her refuge—a place to find balance, reconnect with herself, and rekindle her inner light.

Most recently, she faced an unimaginable loss: her life and love partner, Adam George, perished in a helicopter crash in the Swiss Alps. Now, as the sole parent to their child, she is learning how to navigate the mountains in this new reality—both as a guide and as someone deeply connected to the peaks that have shaped her life.

Though the mountains remain unchanged, we experience them differently as life evolves. Caroline is discovering a new way of inhabiting this space, adapting to her shifting world while staying true to her passion. Guiding has become an anchor, offering both stability and a sense of normalcy as she forges ahead on this new path.

Now, please enjoy this episode.

Caroline’s Links:

• Into the Mountains (website): www.intothemountains.com
• Instagram: carolinewaregeorge

Quotes:

• On this journey of grief and healing and rebuilding, I can see that the mountains is a place of grounding for me.
• It’s like my life is constantly being forcing me to go deeper and deeper and to figure out the essence of my identity by stripping all the things that no longer belong.
• I think it’s a really hard place for women…it’s violent when you have to adapt so much to who you’re not just to get a certification.
• I feel like I have met that mold that whole time to really work myself into the ground…And now in my latest situation of survival, after having lost my husband and being the sole parent to my child, I’ve had to revisit how is it possible for me to be a guide.
• As guides, we can do a way better job to protect our own lives with our clients by empowering them.
• A good metaphor for that is all the technical skills you learn are a little bit like the walls and the roof and the bedrooms in a house unless they’re inhabited by people. They’re just walls, there’s no life to it.
• You can’t say no all the time just But with critical thinking and your gut feeling and your intuition, your experience and your knowledge all combined, you have to have the ability to step out of this situation and say no.
• I really want it to be a lifelong career should my body enable me…through that job, you’re forced to stay healthy, to have somewhat of a healthy lifestyle. And, it keeps you fit to be out there in the mountains. It keeps you smart and alert and not be a couch potato. So, on some form or another, I think I will always do that.
• I think in life it’s about finding passion, finding a community that feeds your soul and from there everything is possible.

Amber’s Links:

• Amber wants to share her writing with you! To sign up for her newsletter or to contact her, follow this link! https://linktr.ee/ambersaffirmations
• A personal essay from 2018 all girls Mount Baker climb: https://mountainmadness.com/blog/among-women-in-the-mountains-a-female-guideâ-s-learning-from-an-all-girls-climb

Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. This is your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today our guest is Amber Smith.

Amber is a femme-queer AMGA Certified Rock Guide with over a decade of experience. Most summers you’ll find her at the Yosemite Mountaineering School, climbing grandiose granite walls with her guests. She is passionate about playful, trauma-aware, and embodiment-focused instruction, and she views climbing as an opportunity for powerful personal transformation. If you go climbing with her, she will encourage you to craft a positive affirmation to hone your power.

Before landing in Yosemite, she guided throughout the western United States. She has led glacier mountaineering and alpine rock objectives in Washington’s North Cascades, ski descents in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, sandstone crack climbs in Utah’s deserts, and girls’ climate science research expeditions on Alaska’s glaciers. In 2016, Amber earned a degree in Geography and wrote her undergraduate thesis on what she called “Feminist Outdoor Leadership: A Guide to Facilitation Strategies for Inclusion and Participant Empowerment in Outdoor Adventure.”

I enjoyed my conversations with Amber. Her thoughtfulness was evident when listening to her reflections on her life journeys. She is also inquisitive and not shy about experimenting with new ideas. She is keen on exploring her inner voices to facilitate her own growth and be tuned to others’ needs. Now please enjoy this episode with Amber.

What We Talked About

• Amber’s current, past, and future plans
• Amber’s Affirmation on guiding – be safe, have fun, try your best
• Doubts and questions about guiding as a profession
• Engrossed in the outdoor leadership program in college
• Feminist outdoor leadership
• From Oregon to Washington, stepping into commercial guiding and keep her foot in outdoor education
• Transitioning to Yosemite and guiding full time
• Loved the Yosemite climbing community
• Yosemite climbing and work cultures
• Hosted a webinar about working in Yosemite
• Thinking entrepreneurial – mental health and mindset fields
• Learn to Lead with mindfulness clinics
• Experiments / Curiosities on grief and climbing and guiding
• Affirmation in life – exercise your weakness, leverage your strengths, don’t worry about the looks
• 
  

Quote:

• Keep my priorities clear. And its number one, keep yourself and your guests safe. If that’s all I do at the end of the day, nobody had a great time, but at least we were safe, then that was a successful day.
• I’d say that’s the whole journey of this industry for me is building the confidence in my voice, trusting myself and figuring out how to be myself in these spaces while also still sort of meeting some of the expectations of what your employers and your clients may want from you.
• I’m definitely not [the best climbers in the world]. But what I am good at is supporting people in their climbing goals. And that’s what the job is actually about..
• I think that’s really rad that I’m an ebike commuter to my rock guiding job.
• I think we get a lot of burnout when we’re not being intellectually stimulated.
• I’m basically not like ingraining negative association with the experience. I’m keeping my association with the process positive. and by having these positive associations, then I want to keep doing it
• One of the most important attributes of a guide is that you need to be intuitive with your guests. It’s very customer service type job. And we need to be intuitively listening to what they need all day.

... More

EP 52 – Amber Smith – AffirMATIONs – Female Guides Requested Podcast

Show Notes:

Lindsay’s Links:

• www.fixguiding.com
• https://alpinist.com/newswire/womens-expedition-explores-new-routes-in-indias-zanskar-range/
• https://amga.com/meet-amga-lindsay-fixmer/

Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. This is your host, Ting Ting, from Las Vegas. Today our guest is Lindsay Fixmer from Bozeman, Montana.

Lindsay Fixmer is an experienced alpine, ice, and rock climbing guide who has been guiding since 2006. She is on the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) Instructor Team, develops and teaches outdoor programming at Montana State University, and also instructs at indoor facilities. Lindsay spends her winters ice guiding in Montana and Wyoming, spring and fall at various rock venues in the western U.S., and splits her summers between Bozeman and the eastern Sierra. As an AMGA Certified Alpine and Rock Guide, Lindsay brings her passion for climbing to her work, inspiring her clients to excel, build confidence, hone skills, and meet their goals.

We dive deep into the interconnectedness among all different forms of climbing and how learning one can inspire the learning of others, and vice versa. I explored in depth Lindsay’s mission statement, how she emphasizes educating and inspiring people through patience and partnership. We talked about the balance of work and play, mentorship, and more. I learned so much from Lindsay, and listening to her describe ice climbing made me want to pick up ice tools again.

Things We Talked about:

• Climbing career started early
• Indoor versus outdoor climbing
• Potential side gig
• Lindsay’s mission statement
• A life-changing experience – 12 year old backpacked through Canyonlands
• All women’s trip to India and first ascents in Northern Himalayas
• Guiding and doing first ascents with Chicks Climbing and Skiing
• “Ice is my life” – Lindsay’s ice climbing journey
• The interconnectedness of rock climbing and ice climbing and all climbing
• Work/play balance
• Mentorship and Tom Hargus’s inspiring quote “the day I stop learning is the day I stop guiding.”
• Performance anxiety?

Quotes:

• If you enjoy watching people succeed and become more knowledgeable and more skilled, then it [guiding] is very rewarding work.
• I’ve been teaching ice climbing for a long time, but you’re always learning something new and the way that people respond to the words that you’re using and also the descriptors and the movement, you continually learn how people differently see things and respond.
• …even rock to ice. We say that they’re very different, but I don’t think that’s true because you’re either in or out of balance in life. So Our ergonomics don’t change. It’s just the medium.
• It is very much a partnership. you have to feel confident that your guide is with you and they can relate to you and understand and help you.
• Patience is a massive component of helping people succeed and opening that door to being more vulnerable and being okay with that.
• …when you really realize how small you are and how large the Earth and the universe is. And it was pretty amazing.
• Oftentimes you had to make adjustments based on the conditions and how to get off of something that you had climbed. It wasn’t always just V-thread really straightforward. There were some more interesting ways of getting off of things.
• Ice is always changing. It’s never the same. The routes always change, which is pretty cool.
• If you’ve shut yourself off to learning or just don’t want to do it anymore more. You’re on to something else in your life.