Chris took his first training course from the American Mountain Guiding Association in 2001 and in 2003 set the goal of becoming an AMGA Certified Alpine, Rock and Ski Guide.  2011 is the tenth year that He’s made a living guiding, and but more excited about what the future is bringing.  He’s moved back to Seattle with his fiance Patsy, and joined the fantastic team at Pro Guiding Service.  Business relationships and friendships with the guides at Sierra Mountain Center, Timberline Mountain Guides, Pro Guiding Service, and the Northwest Mountain School mean he can offer his clients virtually any trip on any peak from Joshua Tree to Mt Baker.  He’s getting ready to join the Certified Guides Co-op, a group of AMGA and IFMGA guides that are pooling resources for affordable insurance and public land permits, enabling more guides to go more places - even overseas.

The Adventure Chronicles caught up with Chris to touch base and see what keeps him going in the office in the Mountains.

What energizes you as a professional mountain guide?

Beyond the mountains themselves?  Watching someone climb a pitch, reach a summit, or finish a ski run with a look of complete wonder.  Its practically written across their foreheads in magic marker, "I can't believe I'm here.  I can't believe I'm doing this.  I had no idea this was here.  I had no idea it would be like this.  THIS IS SO COOL!!!"

Over the years you have been on a number of expeditions and mountains.  What is the one mountain/picture that will always stick in your memory?

I'm really struggling to come up with just one!  OK - still my favorite trip, hands down, that I'm most likely to repeat:  ice climbing in Sichuan Province, China, in January and February 2006.  With no information except some advertising photos, my girlfriend and I flew to Chengdu where we teamed up with a friend (who spoke fluent Mandarin), and arranged to travel to Rilong for two weeks of ice climbing.  It was my first trip to China to boot.  The people were friendly, the food was incredible, and we had the adventure of a lifetime.  The ice was phenomenal - we counted more than 50 possible routes, and some were incredibly long!  We stopped one such climb after six 60-meter pitches because of the time - the ice kept going!

The biggest challenge is to find the balance between work and the rest of my life.  Its really easy to be myopic and make everything about my guiding, my climbing, and my skiing.  But the guides that I respect the most have also become active community members in their towns, have friends and family that they manage to spend time with too.

I've lived out of a van and on the road for five years - it was a great experience and I'm certain I could do it again, but now I'm looking for something that can be more of a home base.  With a garage for a work bench.  Obviously, it has to be in the mountains.

What has been your biggest career accomplishment?

Guiding succesful ski descents of Mt Vinson in Antarctica and Mustagh Ata in Xinjiang, China, certainly are any list of mine.  And it is winter right now, so most of my thoughts are about ice climbing and skiing.  I'm sure that my answer would be different six months from now!

This trip is definitely a career highlight.  I'm writing to you from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, where I just returned to after guiding a team of five geologists for 35 days in a very remote mountain area, the Neptune Range of the Pensacola Mountains.  We climbed peaks for rock samples, skied glaciers to set ablation stakes, and drove snowmobiles dragging radar equipment to measure glacial strata.  All of this will be combined to give an accurate idea of the extent of the glacial maximum in the area 15,000-10,000 years ago, and how much and when it retreated since.

This same group is heading back next year too, to conduct a similar study of the next range south, the Patuxent Range.  In addition to gathering as much data as we can there, we'll be spending a week back in the Neptune range measuring all the ablation stakes we set out this year.  Expeditions like this are a huge time drain, so I try to limit myself to only one or two a year - call it 2-4 months total.  But this is certainly the definition of adventure. The Neptune Range has been visited only seven times since their discovery in 1958 - next years goal has seen even less.  No one had ever skied there before (or at least no one wrote about it), so every ski was a first descent.  Most of the peaks were unclimbed, and on only two ascents did we find any sort of marker or register.  In both cases we were the third team to tag the top, since the FA in 1963.  Trips like this - huge travel times, logistical challenges, uncertain outcomes - set the bar for big adventure for me.

I rarely look farther ahead than the next six months when setting out climbing or skiing goals, and this year I'm hoping to take my AMGA Ski Mountain Guide Exam, so my goals are all focused on that.  So I have ambitious plans to ski the Ptarmigan Traverse in the Cascades, the Wapta Traverse in the Canadian Rockies, and a out-and-back tour of the High Sierra and the Monarch Divide ski traverses.  Reality check:  if I get one of these done, I'll be happy with the winter.

What is the one thing that you never leave home without when working in the mountains?

Its a cliche, but I've become a true native of the Pacific Northwest and I'm addicted to coffee.  At home I have five different ways to brew it - cowboy, turkish, espresso, french press, drip.  Running out of coffee on any trip is poor style  For this expedition I brought enough for four of us, and I have still have a pound left.

These past ten years have been geographically scattered - I've had eleven different mailing addresses in seven different communities from Wyoming to Washington to California.  I'm looking forward to having a home, for longer that 12 months, in one place.

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