The House of Rock: Exum Mountain Guides

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Outside Magazine April 2004

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The House of Rock (cont.)


	The signature spire of the Grand Teton (Kurt Markus)

ABOUT SIX MILES PAST the southern entrance to Grand Teton National Park, a narrow dirt road turns off of Highway 191 and dead-ends in front of a large, green meadow framed by sawtooth peaks and dotted with 11 Park Service-brown plywood cabins. This tiny community is known as Guides' Hill, and it serves as home to Exum's tribe of legendary climbers, who gather each summer for the brief ten-week Teton high season.

Inside each 10-by-20-foot cabin, ice axes, carabiners, and racks of climbing protection hang from the ceiling, competing for space with cookware and battered mountaineering parkas. The walls display a hodgepodge of maps, totems, and prayer flags that the occupants have fetched back from Patagonia, the Karakoram, and far-flung points in between. There's no indoor plumbing, so residents must share showers and washing facilities at a wooden bathhouse next to the parking lot. At the center of the enclave are several picnic tables and a fire pit where vets and rookies gather to chow down and talk shop on rope techniques, route conditions, and other alpine esoterica.

The cabins are occupied by senior staff, while newcomers like Morris must fend for themselves. Chris and Kim plunked down next to Jackson Lake in "the Discomobile," a 1983 Chevrolet Land Yacht RV with orange shag carpeting, dark paneling, and a yellow mood light in the shape of a cross. "We had a killer setup," Morris told me. "I'd



	First-year Exum guide Chris Morris (Kurt Markus)

get home, drop my pack, hit the water, and sea-kayak for an hour, and then Kim would meet me at the door of the Land Yacht with a plate of food and a can of cold beer. It was paradise." Other guides bunk with friends in Jackson or, as a last resort, camp discreetly throughout the park, moving every week or two to avoid getting booted by the rangers.

Cantankerous, colorful, and roiled by clashing personalities, this eclectic confederacy of dirtbags, freebooters, and aristocrats represents the crowning ambition of working guides all across America. Thanks to an invite-only policy, however, it's considerably easier to break through the doors of an Ivy League university than to get tapped by Exum—an honor generally reserved for those who combine exceptional achievements (first ascents, new routes, exploratory trips overseas) with the patience and poise necessary to chaperone couch potatoes out of their comfort zones and up into challenging vertical terrain.

Exum Mountain Guides is a private corporation that holds the longest unbroken climbing concession in any American national park. Since its founding in 1929 by Paul Petzoldt, a pioneering young Tetons guide from Idaho, it has grown from a tiny mom-and-pop operation that barely generated enough cash to cover the owner's bus fare home each fall to a flourishing business that runs a mountaineering school and leads more than two dozen established climbs in the Tetons each summer, plus expeditions throughout Wyoming's Wind River Range.

Last summer, Exum hosted approximately 5,000 clients, about 1,000 of whom ascended the Grand, its showcase climb. Depending on the number of climbers in their party and the difficulty of the route, individuals pay between $400 and $600 apiece for the experience. Exum draws all kinds, from boldface names—Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, Robert McNamara, Tom Brokaw, Jerry Spence, and Jordan's Queen Noor—to Boy Scouts, high school teachers, and Rotarians. Today the corporation is owned and operated by a group of seven people. Al Read, 65, the president, and Peter Lev, 64, the financial officer, have both been with the company for 43 years; 69-year-old vice president Rod Newcomb's tenure stretches back 40 years, and technical supervisor Tom Hargis, 56, has served as a guide since 1977; Read's wife, Susan, is the office manager, while Cyndi Hargis, Tom's wife, manages reservations. The youngest owner is Newcomb's 37-year-old son, Mark, a 15-year guide who is being groomed for a leadership role.

Together, this group controls corporate policy and divvies up profits among themselves while sharing considerable decision-making power with a group of 19 senior guides who, in most cases, have been with Exum a quarter-century or more. Regardless of title, each of the 73 working guides is paid on the same scale, and guides who commit to the entire summer typically gross between $7,000 and $18,000, including gratuities.

It may seem strange for someone like Chris Morris, who ran his own guiding company in Alaska for 12 years, to be enlisting with a group that requires him to undergo a potential ten-year apprenticeship before he can even be considered for the position of senior guide. Why run this gantlet? Because joining Exum is like hitting a trifecta on the mountain-guide circuit: a well-paying gig with a blue-chip company, unimpeachable prestige, and the chance to spend the summer networking with peers who run successful off-season operations and private trips all over the world. If Morris survives this tryout season and beyond, it will take his career to a level he never dreamed of touching as an obscure, overworked entrepreneur humping through the mud and mosquitoes of Talkeetna.

"There are lots of other great guide services out there," Morris told me, "but none with the depth and the knowledge that Exum has. They've been around forever. The Tetons are some of the most beautiful mountains anywhere. And you're working with the best. Even the people you don't click with, you still have great respect for, because everybody is so accomplished. I've done an awful lot of guiding. But when you get that letter of invitation, it's like you've arrived."

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