August 16, 1899 is the
date most historians point to as the start of North America's adventure tourism
industry. It’s the day that Christian Hasler and Eduard Feus stepped off
Canada's newly completed coast-to-coast Canadian Pacific railway; seasoned
Swiss mountain guides imported to lead vacationing gentleman into the
unexplored Canadian Rockies.
Archived images of the
two dressed in woollen blazers and hobnailed boots make it an appealing and
enduring creation myth. But it’s wrong.
Guiding dates to the
earliest days of European settlement on this continent: First Nations guides,
French voyageurs, America's overland wagon train guides, and the celebrated
timber raftsmen. Our geographic and industrial history is forged by the
anonymous guide. However this history is about exploration and commerce, not
recreation or tourism. Hence the myth of the Swiss guide—while their role in
establishing mountain culture is undeniable, a substantial body of river guides
were working eastern rivers a generation before Hasler and Feus stepped off the
train.
At the end of the
eighteenth century, the only people with time and money for recreation were the
gentleman industrialists and professionals. This privileged class brought with
them their English sensibilities and ideals of sportsmanship: horseback riding,
trekking in the mountains, hunting for fox. These were considered noble
pursuits, character building and rejuvenating.
As sportsmen explored
outwards from the eastern seaboard's growing cities in the 1830s, they knocked
on fur trading post doors to request lodging and guiding down the rivers to the
best hunting and fishing. Homesteaders saw it as an opportunity and turned from
subsistence farming to outfitting, creating the backcountry lodge as we know it
today.
With this movement
towards outfitting came more and more guides—local woodsman and trappers could
supplement their income by bringing sportsmen along.
They shared their
previously unknown river running skills, such as poling up rivers and running
rapids. Unlike their industrial guiding cousins in the fur trade, these early
sports guides showed little fear of whitewater and enjoyed running rapids in an
era long before life jackets.
Outdoor tourism remained
more or less unchanged for nearly a century: affluent outdoorsmen hiring local
experts to safely guide them to the best places. Guiding reflected real
competency and intimate local knowledge.
All of this was flipped
on its head in the 1960s. Automobiles, highway systems and a burgeoning middle
class saw the rise of the vacation. Combined with an emerging environmental
awareness, total novices were now heading for the wilderness.
Outfitting became
mobile, with a new breed of guide anchored not to a place but to a particular
set of skills. Guides became technical experts and activity supervisors,
escorting tourists to places where they themselves where only visitors as well.
This
paradigm is still prominent today. First hand local knowledge and our value of
"place" has been shuffled aside and replaced by customer service
standards and the importance of the “experience.” But connection to place adds
richness to experience. Guides as tourists just commodifies the wilderness,
rather than making it the whole point of the adventure.
Of course this intimate
knowledge of place—what makes guided wilderness trips so valuable—can be
learned. To do so, we guides need to become students of the places in which we
travel, rather than just showing up imposing our skills upon them.
River guiding has a long
and honourable tradition, to which we can pay homage simply by immersing
ourselves in the places in which we travel. By striving to become the most
recent iteration of intimate local knowledge, we create real value in the trips
we run by attaching what our clients experience to a living, breathing
river.
Read online at Rapid Magazine https://www.rapidmedia.com/digitaleditions/rapid/RP201605/flash/resources/28.htm
