Working for Fun but Not Profit: Outdoor Guides at the Center and on the Margins

Outdoor guides have long been central to American leisure practices, and they earned reputations as heroic experts.  One journalist happily described her Colorado River boatman as laconic and tough.  “Like every other river guide I’ve met over the years,” she wrote, “he’s got Clint Eastwood cool in the clutch.”  Guides like this one stayed busy setting up camp, wrangling gear, keeping clients happy, and cleaning up after them.  As much as they recalled western masculine ideals, they also functioned as modern-day service workers.  How have guides understood their work and reconciled these two competing identities?  A coherent class identity seems antithetical to the nature and status of guiding work, but the stakes have grown larger since World War II.  Professional guides have supported Americans’ growing interest in outdoor recreation, wilderness, and now adventure tourism, but economically they remain on the margins; an ever larger group of heroes without retirement benefits or health insurance.  My comment will examine guiding labor since World War II and the ways guides have negotiated their identities as both experts and service workers.  A growing variety of professional guide associations and schools suggest that guides have become highly professionalized as a special kind of service worker.  The value they place on the wilderness however—on protecting it as a resource but also enjoying it as a direct benefit of their jobs—has directed their political actions toward environmental issues rather than labor.  So when clients continue to expect but also overlook guides’ service work, choosing to see Clint Eastwood instead of hired help, they are in some ways supporting guides’ own conflation of labor and landscape.  In the end, I would suggest, guides’ cultural power and their economic marginality are mutually dependent.