The House of Rock: Exum Mountain Guides

Outside Magazine April 2004

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The House of Rock (cont.)


	Co-owner Mark Newcomb (Kurt Markus)

TO FULLY UNDERSTAND LIFE as an Exum guide, you need to know something about the two guys who got the whole thing started. Paul Petzoldt came to Jackson from Idaho in 1924 at the age of 16 and, with no climbing experience, proceeded to pull off the fourth ascent of the Grand Teton wearing cowboy boots and toting two cans of beans, a quilt, and a penknife that he used to cut steps into the ice. Glenn Exum, who was also from Idaho, moved to Jackson in the summer of 1929 to play saxophone at the Jenny Lake Dance Hall. Unlike the disheveled Petzoldt, who looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a large potato, Exum was a mustachioed rake who bore a striking resemblance to Errol Flynn. The two men became friends and founded the Petzoldt-Exum School of American Mountaineering, offering to take campers to the top of the Grand for $23 a head.

Among their early clients was one of particular importance, a Scotsman named Sir Albert Victor Baillie, Dean of St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle—private chaplain to the King and Queen of England. The Dean of Windsor didn't climb, but he had such a good time hiking around the Teton's meadows and lakes, and dipping into Petzoldt's stash of moonshine, he invited both men to visit him in England during the mid-1930s.

Apart from being an amazing opportunity for two Idaho roustabouts in the midst of the Depression, the trips to England and Europe exposed both Petzoldt and Exum to the tightly regulated system of European mountain guiding, where guides chaperoned no more



	Senior guide Jack Tackle (Kurt Markus)

than two clients at a time and offered none of the instruction that might encourage clients to pursue the sport on their own. It left a poor impression on the two Americans, clashing with their philosophy of self-reliance in the wilderness.

Petzoldt passed away in October 1999, and Exum died in March 2000, but their thinking lives on. "Glenn and Paul were both of a very like mind," says Exum co-owner Peter Lev. "Their feeling was that this is simply not the way things work in America. Their idea was to teach people, not to make them slaves to guides who refused to part with their knowledge."

The protocol that evolved at Exum places unique demands on the guides, who must handle three or four people while simultaneously processing a stream of fluctuating data that includes, among many

As Exum has grown larger and more buttoned-down, the company has come under increasing pressure to shed its unorthodox past and conform to international standards.

other factors, the condition of the route, changes in the weather, and the progress of other rope teams on the mountain. All of which, the guides will tell you, is specific to the Tetons. This intimate knowledge of their home turf has helped cultivate an attitude of defiant independence and unassailable autonomy—qualities that contributed to a tradition of eccentricity and irreverence among legendary Exum characters from the past.

Chuck Pratt, a pioneer Yosemite wall climber, used to forbid clients from bringing Quaker Oats on climbs because, the story goes, he and Yvon Chouinard—the founder of Patagonia Inc. and also, briefly, an Exum guide—had once been forced to spend three days in an Arizona jail, where they were fed nothing but oatmeal. Willi Unsoeld, the alpinist who lost nine toes to frostbite during the bold 1963 first ascent of Everest's West Ridge, horrified his clients by pretending to fall off his own rappels, screaming the entire way down. And Gary Hemming, an American famous during the sixties for first ascents in the Alps and a daring rescue of German climbers on the Dru (and infamous for getting drunk and picking fights in bars), was beaten unconscious one night by three ax-handle-toting cowboys in an alley behind a Jackson bar. Hemming later died, in 1969, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head near the old Guides' Hill at Jenny Lake.

As Exum has grown larger and more buttoned-down, the company has come under increasing pressure to shed its unorthodox past and conform to international standards, particularly those promulgated by the American Mountain Guides Association, in Boulder, an affiliate of the Gstaad, Switzerland-based International Federation of Mountain Guides Association. This summer, Exum's helmet policy came into question. Clients have always been required to wear helmets, and in 74 years the guide service has had only three clients die on its watch, a safety record that is much better than industry averages. But guides can don helmets at their discretion, and the owners have grown uncomfortable with the laissez-faire rule.

One afternoon, the entire guiding staff gathers on the patch of grass outside the main office to debate the helmet policy. Jim McCarthy, a lawyer from Jackson and a past president of the American Alpine Club, has come by to see if he can talk some risk-management sense into the Exum gang.

"It is absolute madness for your employers not to require you to wear helmets all the time," he declares. "If there's a death and you're not wearing a helmet at the time, Exum will be sued, and you will be named. A single case will wipe out this guide service, and your livelihood along with it."

The pronouncement provokes a flurry of protest, especially from Tim Toula, who has been at Exum 14 years and who is so strong he can perform multiple one-armed pull-ups.

"Can we not all agree that we're leaders?" he demands, strutting across the grass and windmilling his arms. "Are we going to allow some guys who don't even know how to rock-climb to make this decision for us?"

Nods all around.

"Are we going to continue to use our judgment and freedom to make the right choices about safety, or are we going to just go"—Tula puts his head down and begins bleating like a sheep—"Baaaa-aaaa! Baaaa-aaaa! Baaaa-aaaaa!"

As his colleagues clap and laugh, Al Read, who has been listening without comment, stands up.

"All right, that's it," he says. "We're all going to have to wear helmets from now on."

The message is clear: Independence is fine, but it isn't going to trump corporate decree. Anyone who doesn't want to abide by the new policy is free to find work at another guide service.

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