"How much farther is it?" Matt asks.

"I'd say an hour, hour and a half. You're doing great, man. Can I take a little weight from you, that rope maybe?"

"No, no, that's all right."

"All right, man. I know, these packs are murder."

"Yeah!" adds Jim, the anesthesiologist. "This thing's killin' me!"

It's a simple conversation, but deceptive, for behind it lies the key to the guide's Inner Game. In a few well-chosen sentences, Pierce has let his client know: (1) I've got you covered. (2) I'm on your side. (3) No shame in easing your burden. (4) We're out here to have fun. (5) We're all in this together. (6) Hang in there, bro, these packs are heavy for me, too, and I'm a pro. The exchange underlines a core truth: Guides are not in the climbing or rafting or fly-fishing business; they're in the care-and-feeding business.

"The psychology of it is one of the biggest parts of the job," Pierce later explains. "You're thinking about the route and the climbing, and at the same time you're pulling this information out of your clients: what their skill level is, how hard they can push, what they want out of the trip. On the first day you may go from a beautiful walk to an epic weather situation. You need to get them comfortable in that situation, get them to trust your judgment, stay motivated, upbeat, and happy when the weather's really bad."

Put another way, a good guide, says Peter Whittaker, "is always on the verge of paranoia." As brutal as the physical work can be, it pales next to the mental game. "It should always look easy," says John Fischer. "But if it feels easy, you're not doing your job. While I'm chitchatting with my clients, I'm also looking at the line of thunderheads coming at us, estimating their speed of approach, calculating whether they're going to hit us or miss us to the west. Are we low enough to be safe, or should we seek shelter right now? Can we still go over the top today with the storm coming in, or should we downclimb immediately? The epitome of the professional alpinist is being able to do all that and make it look like nothing's happening at all."

Five days later, as they near the summit, Pierce and his four clients run into the worst storm the guide has seen the whole year. Rain hammers the mountain all day. Eighty-mile-per-hour gusts knock the climbers off their feet. Ice cakes so thick on their clothes and packs that it becomes a burden. While his clients focus on stepping and breathing, Pierce calculates the risk factors. Avalanche? Low. Hypothermia? High and rising. Six hundred feet from Mount Baker's 10,778-foot summit, Pierce calls a huddle.

"What would you guys do if I wasn't here?" he asks.

Go down, the edgy clients admit.

So they go down.

"That's what I wanted to hear," Pierce says later. "I wanted them to step out of this guiding situation for a second and think about what their decision would be, on their own. You always want to get people out of that summit-or-die mindset."

Turning a client around—persuading him that today is not the day—remains one of the toughest parts of the psychological game, just as getting him to the top remains the job's finest reward. Ask a guide about his most satisfying feat and few will mention a personal first ascent. Instead, like Burleson, he'll tell you about the 70-year-old man he led up Russia's Mount El'brus. Or if he's Jamie Pierce, about the cancer survivor he led up a peak near Mount Kenya. Which is to say, great guiding isn't about being the strongest climber or the toughest hombre on the trail. It's about deflating your ego, subsuming your success into other people's, mastering the Inner Game. If you can do that, the trade will probably still not reward you with a comfortable living. But it will give you a hell of a life.

Contributing editor Bruce Barcott wrote about the capture of a bear poacher in the October issue.