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 high life: clockwise from top left, fourth-year guide Chris Bassett at the Lower Saddle; Grand Teton weather; guide Jim Williams; inside senior guide Jack Tackle's cabin (Kurt Markus)

ONE MORNING TOWARD THE END of July, I arrive at the Exum office, a pitched-roof cabin surrounded by aspens and firs, just down the road from Guides' Hill. The base is buzzing as younger guides pull up in their battered pickup trucks and brightly painted vans while a few veterans mill around, introducing themselves to clients and gearing up for climbs on Symmetry Spire and in the Wind River Range.

Over the last month, Morris has sailed through his audit climbs and quickly been dropped into the teaching-and-guiding rotation. Today he's taking me and two clients who have enrolled in Rock School for a session on a crag near Hidden Falls. Dressed in Patagonia river shorts, a pair of well-beaten Nike Air Exum approach shoes, and a blue ball cap, he looks the part and converses with his new clients about their climbing experience, hometowns, and professions. But once class begins, he's all business—even when client Mike Cloyd, a 33-year-old accountant from upstate New York, tries to get him to open up.

"So what's the biggest mountain you've climbed?" Cloyd inquires.

"Well, I guess that'd be Everest," Morris replies. "Now show me how to tie that bowline knot again, my friend."

"Many of our clients are exhausted and at the limits of their abilities," a guide reminds his peers. "This means they are trying to kill each other, kill themselves, and kill you."

For the next two days, Morris will patiently walk us through a range of rudimentary climbing techniques—rope handling, knots, rappels, and top-roping. The aim is to teach clients these new skills and then apply them on the Grand in the "caterpillar" system, a method unique to Exum, in which clients belay one another in turn as the team works its way up the mountain.

Later in the morning, I catch sight of Jack Turner, a senior Exum guide who put up pioneering routes in Colorado and Yosemite in the 1960s before becoming a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. Turner, who is also an acclaimed author (The Abstract Wild; Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range), is standing about 20 feet below us, winding up an elaborate lecture on the origins of belaying to a group of 16-year-olds.



	"Stellar dude": Jack Turner outside his cabin at Guides' Hill (Kurt Markus)

"I'm told by education experts that you kids have an attention span of about five seconds," booms Turner, who wears a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat and sports a close-cropped white beard. "Well, your attention span has to be more than five seconds here, because when you yell down and tell your partner it's OK to climb, I consider it a moral contract that you're going to do nothing but watch out for that person until she gets to this ledge and says, 'Off belay!' Because if you don't, if Johnny here decides to start picking his nose while his partner is climbing"—Turner energetically drills into his nose with his index finger—"then it's like Sally here is getting pushed out a window of an eight-story building, and she is going eight floors into the deck."

Turner pauses for emphasis.

"Does everyone here know what that means? It means that when Sally hits the ground, she will look like Alpo. Everybody here know what the inside of a can of dog food looks like?"

The kids laugh.

"It's not funny, right?" barks Turner. "Anybody here think that's funny?"

The kids clamp their mouths shut and shake their heads no.

"As I explained earlier, this is very different from European guiding, where you are basically just baggage that the guide is hauling up the mountain. Here, you have a responsibility, which is an American way of doing things . . ."

The kids stare up at him quizzically until Turner continues with something they can relate to a little easier.

"And failure to take that responsibility means that Sally's going to look like what?"

"Alpo!" comes the chorus.

At the end of the day, as we're boarding the boat that will take us across Jenny Lake and back to the Exum office, Morris tells me about the past few weeks. "The person I probably learned the most from, at least in the schools, was Turner," he says. "What amazed me about Jack is that he's got a bunch of people standing around, and you have to keep them entertained for the entire day but also present this information so that they're going to remember it in days to come. It's pretty important that you teach the stuff well, because these people are going to go up the Grand and be using these skills and hopefully not killing each other, right? Jack will kill me for saying this, but watching him teach is kind of like hanging out with your grandfather. He's a stellar dude."

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