As a guide, people look up to you to keep them and their families safe in an environment that's often totally hostile and unfamiliar to them. Don't let your ego get into your decisions and always err on the side of safety. Be able to come back another day. It's like all these Everest climbers who turn back 100 feet from the summit.

In general, the closer an athlete gets to his or her season or event, the more "sport specific" his or her programming should be. So 6-8 weeks out from the season, guides should be focused on training the specific fitness demands of their work - paddling work capacity, upper body push and pulling, grip strength, core or chassis integrity fitness, basic work capacity and endurance, leg strength.

We don’t take our time together for granted, because we have an annual four-month reminder that time is limited. We jam-pack the offseason with as much fun as possible to get us through those long summers.

The river culture is dramatically different from that of civilization. I am similarly affected when I travel to third world countries and see how people can live so simply and be so happy while thriving in tight-knit communities, only to be greeted home by the consumer-driven, fast-paced, individualistic society of U.S. culture.

Remembrance marks our time ‘out there’ as well as ‘in here’. It follows along with it our passions and dreams, losses and gains of power in slides and shifts. Remembrance, I have surmised, does not have to be only looking at what is lost. Remember what has been gained as well, both from those no longer with us and those that still sit across the campfire from us, teaching us their lessons.

I felt so rooted at the Taylor Ranch. I was exploring all these different little drainages - learning the characteristics of the hills and the plants and animals. In the process, I got to watch it all change. I developed this sense of place in the Salmon River drainage. But another huge thing was this class I took while there - Wilderness Area Management.

I learned so much about the Wilderness Act, and the Frank Church specifically. It’s such a beautiful act of Congress - all these intangible characteristics that go along with it, which have to be interpreted by forest managers. I guess I also developed this love of the human boundaries in the Salmon River Drainage.

I know this community often holds this reality closer than our culture as a whole. Guides don’t just understand death in the abstract, we feel it every time we row a flooding river or pack a horse through a tight switchback. It is part of the disclaimer we sign off as we sign in to this profession.

We’re locals. I’m fourth generation on one side and my grandmother is a Nez Perce, born on the reservation. She’s still alive, she’s almost 100 and she still lives right here in Whitebird. We’re as local as you can get. I love competition and think it’s a good thing. Sometimes other companies copy our straight up wording and to combat that I say, you can use the same words - but you can’t say you’re us. People like knowing we’ve been here forever. It’s cool because especially older folks really care about that. It’ll be really cool to show people things I’ve known about my whole life, especially up on those RZR rides.

As with any guide, you need to be a good people person. And then you second you need to be a very dedicated fisherman because steelhead fishing, it’s a persistence game. You have to put your time in. And within that time you have to pay attention to detail.

Before I started heli-ski guiding I was looking at getting a master’s degree in Snow Science and it ended up to where I had to choose between the two and I chose heli-ski guiding because I was looking at the future and I was thinking, "In 20 years what am I going to wish I had done?" I felt like I can always go back and get a master’s degree but you don’t get a lot of chances to become a heli-ski guide. I don’t regret that because I feel like its not better than a master’s degree but now I feel like I get to see so much snow in one day and touch so much snow in one day that it really provides a lot of opportunity for learning about avalanche science and snow stability.

To be a guide is to rarely work alone. To be a guide is to inherently understand your own shortcomings and rely on the family around you to get a job done. From hunting to mountain sports to river running, guides are the ultimate collaborators, knowing that our teamwork is not just a board room meeting but often a matter of life or death in dynamic, wild environments.

The honest truth is that I think guiding is a very hard thing to do long term. There’s very few people who make it that long, there’s no retirement plan. So you hope you can have a love for it that doesn’t die out. But it’s probably a stepping stone at some time. I haven’t set a timeline on when things are going to change for me, but I hope to always be involved in fly-fishing. So if I were to step on it would probably be something still within this sport that would cause me to move on. I’m not really sure. It's easy as a guide, you start thinking about the future, its very easy to get worried about what’s next. So I try to just live in the moment in that regard, while carefully thinking about options when the time comes.

I kinda look at it as the hard skills are pretty easy to learn, like, the technical snow science end of it. Some of the soft skills, the social skills, like with any guiding, whether you’re river guiding, ski guiding, hiking guiding, there are some soft skills that you can’t really train people to do. And the other thing I look for is that they’re a ninja in the kitchen. Cause on an overnight trip you wanna be able to you know, do it all, right? So the full package is what you want. But it’s also that lifelong learning. The people that I respect the most are the people that are definitely lifelong learners of the snow and the mountain, and not the kind of ‘been there done that’ kind of folks.

He got the last one [MF river permit] for $15 before they put a moratorium on them, not going to give no more out. So then he thought maybe he ought to get two of them. There’s a local guy, Cliff Hansen, a rancher here, that was an old friend of my dad’s. He told me the other day, was telling me that my dad had told him, says ‘Hey, you ought to go down get one of these permits, they’re only $15. They’re gonna be worth somethin’ someday.’ And Cliff said that he told my dad there’s no way in heck anybody will ever pay you to take them down a river they could just go do it themselves.

A river’s resiliency is not its most alluring aspect, nor its most visible. Glassy waves and big water often overshadow the river’s staunchness. It is steadfast. Dam or not, the river still runs downstream. As much as we try to bend it to our whim, in the long term, we never can. Through the ages before us and those after, the river teaches us passively. It does not beg for attention, nor does it force understanding. The river’s very being is its testament: it is here.

Taking care of yourself during a guide season is paramount for the health of your guiding career. Eat well, sleep and exercise outside of guiding. I tend to do a lot of yoga outside of guiding. It’s not as intense of cardio as rowing all day, but you need the addition of stretching. Take turmeric for your joints, wear protective clothing, and plenty of sunblock. Drink water and appreciate your profession. The second you walk into the shop to pick up your clients and you cringe at the thought, it may be time to take a break - you are not doing yourself or your clients any favor guiding in that state. Try to always learn new things about your profession, learning is life.

At one time or another, we are all likely guilty of thinking that our work culture is special: that if a guide can’t handle a little sexualized banter every once and a while, then they should find another job. But obviously for the NPS River District employees, what happened on the river did not stay on the river. We should learn from this incident as a cautionary tale of how not to let the little things slide trip after trip, year after year.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, growing up on the McKenzie River, I caught a 22” rainbow trout.  This guy comes by on a drift boat, I held up my fish and the guy told me how good it looked.  I asked him, “how many have you got?” He showed me his fish box and he had 4 or 5 bigger than mine.  It was Prince Helfrich who was kind of a pioneer of river guiding.  Prince used to own timber and my father was a forester.  My father was at a meeting and the two of them got to talking and turns out my dad says, “do you know who you saw on the river?” I asked him who and he said, “oh that’s Prince Helfrich – he takes people fishing and they pay him.” And I said, “oh really you can get paid to go fishing?!” So that’s probably really where it started.

I did take the last two summers off to work somewhere else and made a ton of money doing it. But the joy was draining from my heart and both years I came back to Idaho in the fall to get one Middle Fork or Main Salmon in. I had to come back. Happiness is more important to me than money. I am sure of that.