Guiding & Instruction

Southern Arizona offers excellent year-round rock climbing. The weather, rock quality, and variety of climbing available here yield amazing opportunities for adventure. The climbing season is year-round, and the climbs range from single-pitch roadside sport routes to long, scary, backcountry routes.

For its astonishing amount of climbing, there are relatively few guide services in Arizona. I am proud to be associated with one of the best. I work for Arizona Climbing Guides in Tucson. Why? ACG is insured, permitted, and run by Jeff Fasset, who has operated for years as the only certified guide in southern Arizona.

Arizona Climbing Guides is one of only two guiding services in Southern Arizona with guides certified for multipitch climbing.

If you're looking for a climbing guide for Cochise Stronghold or Mount Lemmon, this is the place to go. For further information or to arrange a booking, go to http://www.climbarizona.com or contact me using the contact link above.

Who can benefit from a certified guide?

Anyone! Whether you're a beginner or have been climbing for 30 years, you can always learn something to make you a better climber.

Instruction for Beginning Climbers

For the beginning climber, learning the right techniques can save hours of frustration, help avoid dangerous situations, and reduce the chances of getting hurt. Over thousands of days of climbing, I've seen a clear difference between beginners who learned from a certified guide and beginners who learn from their friends.

Learning to make placements, lead, build anchors, belay, route find, rescue, and manage time, rope, and transitions are critical to climb safely and efficiently. Teaching these skills well requires a completely solid knowledge base, a careful, logical approach to teaching, and a massive amount of experience. Very few recreational climbers possess such qualifications. A certified guide, however, has undergone rigorous training and examination to demonstrate competence in both climbing and instruction.

Bottom line: while there's an investment in taking classes as a beginner, you'll be a better climber for it.

Instruction for Advanced Climbers

Even for people who have been climbing for years, there is always something to learn. In 11 years of climbing, I have watched thousands of people climb. A few of them have been excellent - great movement skills, a wide array of technical skills, and a good sense of when to apply them. The vast majority, however, have had obvious weaknesses that are slowing them down, putting them at increased risk, or just making their climbing less enjoyable.

I put together a quick self-test below. These questions are geared toward traditional multipitch climbing, but many of the skills are applicable for basic toproping.

Honestly ask yourself these questions:

Do you know how to read a topo?
Do you know how to use a cordalette?
Can you build a multi-directional, equalized anchor?
Do you know what "extension" in an anchor is, and the reason it's a concern?
Do you know what the effective range of your cams are?
Do you know what types of rock features accept cams vs the types of rock features that accept chocks?
Do you know when it is appropriate to extend a draw on a piece of gear?
Do you know how much force is generated in a typical lead fall? How much force is generated in a toprope fall?
Do you know there's a much better option to tying in with a daisy chain?
Are you able to belay two people at the same time while keeping the station organized?
Do you know when it is appropriate to belay off the anchor vs from your harness?
Do you know when it is appropriate to belay with an autolocking device vs a plaquette device vs a plate device?
Can you escape a fully loaded belay without unloading it?
Do you know how to quickly and easily extend the master point of your anchor?
Do you know when to use hip/shoulder belays vs terrain feature belays?
While belaying a second to an anchor, could you set up a rappel and have yourself on rappel before your second arrived?
Do you know how to back up a rappel?
Do you know how to back up a lower?
If your partner were injured on a multipitch climb, could you smoothly and efficiently get him down, even if he is large and unable to assist you?
If you had to lower someone 350 feet with two joined ropes, could you do it smoothly and confidently? How about if your partner was unable to assist you by unweighting the rope?
If your partner was injured on lead beyond the halfway point of the rope, would you know how to get them him down?
Using a mechanical advantage, could you raise a second up a pitch if the circumstances demanded it?
Do you know how set up a tandem rappel? Do you know the advantages and disadvantages of tandem, simultaneous, and counterbalanced rappels?
Have you practiced these skills in the last month? In the last 6 months?

This is just a short list of things you can learn from a professional guide.

You might be asking if you really need to learn all of this. My answer: even if you never need to rescue someone, having a broader skill base equips you for bigger, better, more fun climbs. In climbing, greater skill leads to greater adventures.

Guided climbing for beginning or advanced climbers

Of course, guides are not only good for instruction. Ever been to a great climbing area for only a day or two? Or have you been eyeing up a remote, challenging climb but need help getting to the top? In either case, a guide is just the right person to help.

For guiding or instruction in southern Arizona, the place to go is Rocky Mountain Climbing School. See www.climbarizona.com for further information.

Certified!

In April 2008 I passed the week-long AMGA Certified Rock Instructor exam.

This certification is for guiding routes up to Grade III 5.10a, teaching multipitch climbing and its associated skills, and teaching the AMGA Single Pitch Instructor course. The Rock Instructor Certification is one of two tiers of rock guide certification; between both there are about 170 certified guides in the country, only three of whom are in Arizona.

The week-long exam is mentally and physically challenging, but really a lot of fun, too. Each examinee guided two "clients" - an examiner and one of the other examinees - on various multipitch routes. We often linked up routes in order to get climbs of sufficient length to assess our guiding ability in a variety of terrain. This assessment extends far beyond movement skills in 5th class terrain. It also includes technical systems, rescue, risk management, terrain assessment, instructional technique, client care, and professionalism.

Preparing for the exam was a huge commitment of time and energy. To qualify for the exam, participants must build a significant climbing resume and complete the Rock Instructor Course. Between the course and exam, we had to complete additional guiding days, more long climbs, and dial in the skills we learned in the course.

Often I'm asked why I've pursued certification. After all, it's not a requirement to guide in most of the US. There are several reasons: it has made me a much better climber and guide, it gives credibility to me as a guide, and it's great fun.