To understand the economics of the industry, there are a couple of key elements we will explore: the use of the day wage instead of an hourly wage and the costs of doing business on public lands. I will primarily focus on the Pacific Northwest region because I have access to the actual numbers for that area, but the market is generally the same nationally.
The Day Wage Structure
This has always been the way of it. Guides are paid a fixed rate each day regardless of the number of hours they work. This does a reasonable job of measuring the real wage of a guide as they work a day similar in length to most employees, around 8-10 hours.
The day wage model starts to fall apart when we consider overnight programs. It’s kind of crazy; most guide services don’t offer an increase in wages for an overnight program or only offer around $50. This means an increased workload from 8-10 hours to 24 hours is not at all reflected in the increase of pay.
This structure serves to obscure the real wage a guide is paid in a dramatic fashion. When you hear a guide makes $200-$300 a day, it seems like a respectable income. A 9-5 worker would have a salary of around $25-$37.50 per hour. For a day guiding trip, this is about accurate, but most guides are not day guiding; they are doing overnight programs.
Let’s look at two typical offerings, a 3-day summit climb and a 5-day climbing school. For a 3-day program, a guide will typically work around 54 hours, from 8 am on day one to around 4 pm on day three. For a 5-day climbing school, we are looking at around 102 hours.
- 3-Day Summit Climb – 54 hours
- 5-Day School – 102 hours
These hourly estimates are based on the legal requirements of workers in Washington State. Some companies insist guides don’t need to be paid while they are sleeping in the tent, but the state of Washington disagrees, as does anyone who does multi-way shift work like firefighters or nurses. A guide on call to deal with customer needs or mountain emergencies all night needs to be paid for that time too—not to mention the fact they are away from their home and family. It would be like telling firefighters they don’t get paid unless they are actually at a fire.
What Do Guides Actually Make?
A common wage for a new guide is around $180 to $200 per day. This means they have around five years of personal climbing experience but no professional experience. Most pay scales range up to around $350 or so per day after around ten years of experience or a high level of certification.
- 3-Day Summit Climb – 54 hours
- Entry Level: $600 / 54 = $11.11/hour
- Senior Guide: $1050 / 54 = $19.44/hour
- 5-Day School – 102 hours
- Entry Level: $1000 / 102 = $9.80/hour
- Senior Guide: $1750 / 102 = $17.15/hour
What About Overtime?
Overtime doesn’t exist in the guiding industry. Even though a guide might be working 102 hours in a week, they won’t be getting any overtime as is required by the law. It’s crazy to me that this has been the case for so many years; it seems to be a pretty blatant disregard of the law—we will look at ideas later about why this doesn’t change.
The Economics of Guiding
If you wanted to climb Mt. Baker with Alpine Ascents International or the American Alpine Institute—two of the largest guide services in the world—it would cost $1150 and be run at a ratio of three customers to one guide. The total cost of this trip would be $3450.
Guide Wage
The typical guide with 4-5 years of experience running one of these programs will make about $250/day for a trip total of $750.
Insurance
Running my own business, I spend $3500 per year on insurance at a $100,000 revenue bracket. This price increases with revenue. Generally, most companies will pay around 3-5% of gross revenue—I can’t say exactly how much they pay, but I think using 4% of gross revenue is accurate. This is to maintain insurance to a level required by federal land managers.
Permits
Permits from federal land managers, like in the National Forest, are generally 3% of gross revenue with a nominal application fee.
Group Gear
Group gear is generally provided on climbs, and this includes tents, stoves, and ropes. Other climbing gear is expected to be purchased by customers or rented (usually from the guide service). I would estimate, given the rate at which most of this gear needs to be replaced, that it probably costs for a group of four around $40 per trip.
Travel Expense
There are other associated expenses that various companies choose to undertake, such as vans, that are hard for me to estimate at a per trip value. But many companies seem to calculate that p roviding vans is more economically viable than providing their employees with a travel stipend, which is generally about $100 for these kinds of trips.
Marketing
Exactly how much is spent on this is tricky to calculate, but let’s estimate it at around 10% of revenue. So for this trip, advertising would cost $345, or about $115 per customer. I think for most companies it’s likely significantly less than this.
Admin Costs
This is a hard number to speculate on for every company as well. For my own business, my time working on all administrative tasks other than advertising amounts to around 2% or my revenue if I bill it at the $20/hour that is typical of what an administrative assistant working in the industry gets paid. This number will scale to be significantly less with a larger business, we will use $69.00 for this number.
This category could also include other costs like payroll tax and workman’s comp insurance. These come out to be about 7% and 5% of payroll expense or $90.
| Costs | ||||
| Guide Wage | $750.00 | |||
| Insurance | $138.00 | |||
| Permits | $103.00 | |||
| Group Gear | $40.00 | |||
| Travel Expense | $100.00 | |||
| Admin Costs | $159.00 | |||
| Marketing | $345.00 | Revenue | Profit | |
| Total | $1759.20 | $3450.00 | $1690.80 |
From here, we begin to get a picture of the industry. While the guide is making $750 for a three-day climb, with a real wage of around $13.89, the business is bringing in $1974. Let’s keep in mind, the minimum wage in Washington state is just over $16.00/hour and requires overtime pay if an employee works more than 40 hours in a week.
Of course, there are many different programs with different real wage numbers, but generally, a three-day climb is most favorable to the real workload of the guide, with shorter programs, especially day trips, being the most advantageous, and longer programs like Denali being the worst. Most guides working on Denali are making around $6-10 per hour.
To put it into perspective, if you spend ten years working at Alpine Ascents International—which could likely be the biggest guide service in the world—you would max out their pay scale at about $350 per day. This is a real wage of $19.44/hour on the most common program, the standard 3-day summit climb.
I’ll say it again, if you spend a decade of your life in this career, you will not make a wage of more than $19.44/hour.
Look for Part 2, where we will explore why these kinds of working conditions are tolerated and what effect it has on the demographics of the guiding industry.