Guide at Work

Can you imagine a job where you get to hike every day in your favorite places and share them with people from all over the world? We get a bit of that as volunteers at Mt. Rainier. Shaun gets to do it for a living.

I love this picture of him. Why is he puzzling over that map? That was the day we were climbing Beinn Dampf. It was extremely foggy, and I believe Shaun was verifying how much farther it was to the top since we couldn't see it from there.

The perfect guide, Shaun learned quickly how far to push each of us. On that day, I was dragging. I would have been happy to give up and wait down the mountain. Shaun knew I could go farther, and when I just couldn't handle another bit of up, he set us up for a safe and comfortable wait while the others claimed the peak. Here they come back down again.

And below getting pictures of each of us at the waterfall on Beinn Eighe--another part of the job: official photographer for the trip (until he met me and my camera.)

Part medic (here he's making quick use of his first aid kit--we won't mention who stabbed herself in the knee) and part mountain goat checking the trail ahead.

He knew just when to guide us to the tea shop--TEA? that's hot chocolate and an awful lot of whipped cream.


And when his family stopped  in the area and he got a visit with his dog, we got to see a different side of Shaun. He misses the kids and the dog when he's out on a guiding job.



Shaun was guiding us for Walkabout Scotland on this trip, and has his own guiding company TreadinGround where he specializes in really tailoring the trip to the group. If you want an outdoor experience in Scotland, you can't go wrong with either of them.