Hello Everyone,
I am officially back to work and my first tour of the season is behind me. This is my 16th tour season and my second working for Incredible Adventures here in San Francisco. I had a great summer working for Incredible last year, one of the best I’ve had in my career in fact, and I’m looking forward to another great season to come. I will still be running tours for Exodus and Intrepid, two of the brands I have guided for many years now, and will continue to run short Incredible Adventures tours as well.
The start of the summer tour season is always exciting. It is full of possibilities and just thinking about the places I will visit and the people I will meet puts a smile on my face. I know it will be exhausting and things won’t always work out as planned or as hoped, but I also know I am up for the challenge. Over the winter I visited an old friend of mine, Brett, at his home in western Wales. Brett came on tour with me many years ago and he asked me while I was there if my guiding personality is the same as my real personality. I told him that the only way to be truly happy and successful in this job is to be yourself. The more you try and be like someone else or act in a way that isn’t reflective of your own personality, the more people will see through you and it will always backfire in the end. That being said, I also told him that while when I am guiding it is absolutely me that people are seeing, I also believe that it is the very best version of me that there is. It’s the version of me who is outgoing and confident and an absolute expert in my field. I think three steps ahead and change my plans based on each individual group I take out. There are a lot of unknowns in this game from traffic to the weather to the individual personalities and expectations of my passengers and being able to think on the fly and make things run smoothly is a real skill. Being a good guide doesn’t just happen overnight. Like any other profession it takes years to hone your skills, but it’s so worth the effort when you do. I’ve been turning people’s dreams into memories for the better part of two decades, and I’m thrilled that this is the skill I have to offer the world.
After I left you last week, I had one more day in the office which I will spare you the details of. I had to go grocery shopping to feed 12 hungry people for the weekend which is always a challenge. Thankfully I got all of that finished at a reasonable time and was able to take a nice long walk around downtown San Francisco and then tuck into a good book to refresh my knowledge of Yosemite and still get a good night’s sleep. I was up early on Friday as I had to get to the office, hook up my trailer to my van, load my coolers and get back downtown before 8am. I picked up my group on time and we headed out to Yosemite for the weekend.
Yosemite is pretty wild right now with all of the snow melting into the rivers and pouring over the edge of the cliffs and into the valley below. The waterfalls are crazy and there are even waterfalls flowing that I’ve never seen before. The river has overflowed its banks and the meadows have turned into lakes…