Review of Guided Trips with Andrew Skurka
I participated in a 5-day trip in Sequoia National Park in late September 2017 guided by Andrew Skurka and Mike Clelland and another 5-day trip in Rocky Mountain National Park in late June 2018 guided by Skurka and Buzz Burrell. Here’s the lowdown…
The Reason
I know what some of you are thinking. I hate being guided too…usually. I’m no expert, but I’ve been backpacking a fair amount, am comfortable outdoors, and can usually learn what I need through self-study.
However, it’s not often that you can learn directly from someone with as much experience as Andrew, Mike, or Buzz, and I thought it would be a good way of accelerating my learning curve in backcountry travel.
Two other factors also influenced my decision:
- I was just learning some of the techniques to lighten my pack and Andrew offered guidance in rebuilding my gear list as part of the trip.
- Andrew’s express goal in these trips is to take people a little (or a lot) beyond what they might attempt on their own. In my case, I’d been hiking off trail before, but the routes were more ambitious than I would have been comfortable with on my own.
The Cost
First a little housekeeping. The cost of the trips was about $1,400 not including travel, pre/post trip lodging, etc.
On the one hand, this amount could buy a lot of granola bars and backcountry camping permits. On the other hand, for 80 waking hours of real-world learning from two world-class experts, it’s comparatively cheap. Consider what level of access to a comparable level of expertise you could afford with $1,400 in other sectors:
- $1,400 will buy you 3.5 days with 10,000 of your closest friends getting pumped up by Tony Robbins
- $1,400 will buy you tickets to a couple of games of the NBA finals
I don’t know what it would cost to book LeBron for a week long basketball camp with me and eight buddies, but I’m pretty sure I can’t afford it.
The Prep
Andrew spends a lot of time planning these trips, and it shows. He selects the locations, plans the route (although that can change), gets the permits, coordinates food, and — perhaps most importantly — arranges for each participant to take part in a trip that matches his or her abilities.
On our part, in addition to a few administrative formalities, Andrew has his participants research the conditions we’re likely to encounter — flora/fauna, daylight, water sources, navigational aids along our intended route, likely weather, etc. This was a little stressful for the first trip, but needn’t have been. He just wanted us to take our part in the planning so that we could do it again on our own. It also served as a good jumping off point for our gear lists. We each were responsible for our own gear (although Andrew had a good bit of demo gear that we could borrow as well), but Andrew reviewed all of our lists both on paper and at the trail head. This was one of the most valuable parts of the trip. I learned a lot from Andrew and from the others who were part of the same group (many of whom were more experienced than I was), and it helped me to slim down what I carried without feeling like I was missing anything important to safety or comfort.
I figured if Andrew said I didn’t need to carry it, I didn’t need to carry it.
Conversely, when the weather forecast for the Sierra’s called for nighttime temps in the low teens, Andrew was quick to advise us to add a layer or two without gram-induced guilt.
The Route
Both routes were a mix of on and off trail travel. For a number of reasons, the route was mostly on trail in the Sierras but was off trail for much of the time in RMNP. We waded through marshy meadows, crawled and bushwhacked down blowdown-strewn wooded valleys, traversed fabulous open ridges, rock hopped over talus fields, boot skied down late season snow, and strolled through a lot of exquisite subalpine.
What made the routes even better was that we got to choose them — at least within parameters. Andrew had covered the terrain before and so could present options for where we could go and what we could do given our timeframe and the composition of the group.
The Effort
I signed up for a trip with the highest level of intensity that Andrew offered. When I first booked, I was apprehensive about keeping up. I’ve done a lot of running and hiking, but am rather ordinary athletically. So I stepped up my training over the summer of 2017 and the result was that I was solidly middle of the pack. The mileage was not the issue. We averaged between 10 and 20 miles a day. It was the elevation and the vertical that proved the most challenging. The biggest daily vertical gain between the two trips was 6k feet and we averaged about 4k per day. This might not seem like much (I had climbed that amount in a few hours on my long trail runs), but put the 4k gain between 10k and 14k elevation and it gave us all a good workout. Off trail adds another qualification to pace. In one section below Mt. Ida in RMNP we were actually going downhill through fairly dense forest but with the up and down along the creaked, the brush, and the one-legged squats getting over blow downs, we might as well have been ascending.
It never felt like a death march, though, and (perhaps due to past experiences pushing people too hard) Andrew is considerate of how everyone is doing. Every group’s going to have a fastest and slowest person, but Andrew’s work finding the right trip for each applicant pays off when everyone feels worked but no one feels dead (nearly dead is ok).
The Instruction
Andrew, Mike and Buzz covered a host of backcountry topics, sometimes formally and sometimes informally. We’d stop along the trail and do a mini course on navigating with map and compass, then pause periodically from then on to take bearings, examine our route, and plan the next section. We covered campsite selection, the elements of route finding, mountain safety, snow travel, and many other topics. Mostly lab with short lecture.
In many ways, I found the informal training to be the most informative. Andrew’s been in the backcountry enough to have valid intuitions and it was helpful to simply watch his gut reaction to changing environmental conditions. Andrew had a feel for whether we were following an elk trail or a human use trail and (importantly) could explain the rationale behind his intuition.
The Guides
Andrew, of course, has had extensive experience throughout most of North America both on and off trail. But the others I’ve met who guide with him are experts in their own right. Both Mike Clelland and Buzz Burrell (in addition to being highly entertaining) probably have more mountaineering experience than Andrew and never failed to have a nearly unbelievable story from some far-flung location to make whatever point they were making stick. Watching Buzz (who’s in his late sixties I think) demonstrating ice axe self-arrest by repeatedly flinging himself down on a steep snow slope was itself arresting.
The Takeaway
Andrew is sort of a spreadsheet guy. He personality is pretty serious, and I’ve never heard anyone accuse him of being a hippie. By his own admission, if he had not ended up thru hiking, he would probably be working in finance. This temperament lends itself to a certain analytical approach to the planning and execution of group backpacking trips.
I asked Andrew about this one time — after all, if you plan too carefully, aren’t you reducing the level of adventure? His response was that careful planning allows you to go further and do more than you could otherwise. The mountains are always going to be unpredictable, so the level of adventure is not a factor of preparation but rather of how far your preparation can take you. For some, this approach is probably an acquired taste, but I really appreciated the precision and attention to detail. It’s allowed Andrew to cover a lot of ground on his own and while leading a lot of safe yet ambitious group trips.
My own experience is that after a trip with Andrew (and especially after two), I feel like I’ve compressed years of learning by trial and error into a couple of weeks and am much better prepared — and much more eager — to seek out adventures of my own.
Highly recommended.
