On the way down from the summit of the Grand Teton, some Exum mountain guides point their clients to a helpful granite knob, shaped like a well-fitting ski pole grip, that they call “the world’s best handhold.”
When guide Jessica Baker led a blind woman up the peak — the first blind woman to climb the 13,775-foot-high mountain — the client discovered a mountainside of the best handholds.
Baker had climbed the Grand Teton route numerous times and figured she knew where all the good grips were. But Nancy, her blind client, found more.
“She found a bunch of them,” Baker said. “She found ones that I didn’t even know about.”
Nancy employed “an echolocation style way of finding things for herself,” Baker said. “Oh wow,” Baker recalls saying. “I’ve never even seen that hold. That looks like a great hold.”
To guide Nancy, Baker had to learn about her client’s sensory abilities and also build a system among other guides. “She did it through good communication,” Baker said of her client’s summit climb, “essentially on her own.
“For years after that experience, I was still in awe. To do it without sight just blew my mind. That will always stand out in my career as something very, very special.”
“A good guide can read people. They have a sense of how people are acting.”
Jessica Baker
The extraordinary climb proved that a mountain guide needs more than fitness and climbing chops, Baker said.
“It takes a lot of patience. You have to be willing to work with people through their process, and you can’t expect immediate results.
“You have to empathize with where people are coming from and what their experience is. You have to be pretty socially adept. You have to entertain.
“You have to be able to talk about things, be interested in topics. You have to be intellectually, like, interesting.
“A good guide knows how to pace,” Baker said. “They know how to pace the day, the objectives, the climb, the conversation. A good guide can read people. They have a sense of how people are acting, reacting, how to adjust according to their emotions.”
Mountain sense
“The more obvious side of it,” Baker said, “is a good guide is very skilled in the mountains. They have extremely high, like high-level mountain sense. Very, very tuned into their environment.”
Baker began acquiring that sense as the oldest of four daughters raised on a farm — collecting eggs and everything else — in northern Idaho. “My grandparents were skiers, my parents were skiers, and then I’m a skier and my kids are skiers.”
After a successful high school racing career, she chose college and went to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, an institution with top academic and ski-team credentials. A geology degree seemed to connect her to land, earth and nature, she said. Her first job out of school landed her in Jackson Hole, where she worked as a hydrologist for the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
“I moved to Jackson to ski for sure,” she said. “That was probably goal number one. But it was under the guise of I’m also going to be a geologist.
“It’s kind of a pinnacle place to be a skier,” Baker said. For the Forest Service, she studied the health of rivers and compared untouched waterways with those that had been degraded by grazing, roads and other things. She also coached young ski racers and gave lessons.
Budget cuts under the George W. Bush administration started affecting the Forest Service program, and Baker moved on from river health to ski instruction at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, building a list of enduring clients. Associates goaded her into competing on the Freeride World Tour, where in the early 2000s she became the U.S. and North American women’s free skiing champion.
“The prize money was much less for women,” she said, “with the exception of one competition in Crested Butte. They had it right from the beginning.
“I just wanted to prove myself,” Baker said about the pay disparity and why she focused on skiing. “Once I’m good,” she said of her thoughts, “then I can speak up a little bit more.”
“I don’t think I was wise enough nor bold enough to stand up for my rights,” Baker said. I was just trying to prove that we were good enough in the first place, before even asking for anything else.”
Guide qualities
A trip with the late, legendary skier Doug Coombs to the testing ground of La Grave, France, brought Baker into the alpine realm. “I came out of that trip knowing that I wanted to delve deeper into these higher technical things,” like how to be a rock climber and alpinist.
She began helicopter ski guiding in Alaska and also skiing “all sorts of crazy lines” in the Tetons, including down the Grand Teton. An owner of Exum Mountain Guides in 2006 invited her to train with the guides.
“They want you to come well prepared,” she said. “You have to come with an excellent resume. They want you to be at the top of your game.”
That included time spent climbing in Yosemite. “It’s just one of those rites of passage,” she said of the crack climbing on towering walls in the landmark valley.
“Mountain guiding requires an extremely high level of fitness. If I get hurt, who’s helping my clients? And if they get hurt, how much stronger do I need to be to help them … to lift them, to raise them, lower them, scoop them, whatever it would take?
Baker lifts weights, climbs hills and cycles. At work, “we do 20,000 vertical feet commonly in a week up and down mountains.”
She established The Ski Diva, a guiding, ski-camp service and online community for women that’s going on its 20th year. She’s the executive producer of “Going Greenland,” a film about pioneering steep ski lines.
She wants a feeder system that will bring more women into the guiding profession in the Tetons. “People now recognize that not only are women guides very desirable but also just having that balance in the decision-making spaces is really important,” she said.
“We might tune into something just a little more subtle that cues our hackles, that cues our hazard rating, that cues our decision-making,” she said. “I like to discuss it more,” she said of a risk or hazard. “The conversations start to get more varied and diverse, and more voices get heard. I think that difference can actually save you in the balance.”
Kids and Wyoming’s future
If Baker needs patience to be a guide, she also needs it to raise her two daughters, even when teaching about the concept itself.
“They’re like, ‘What do you mean patience? That’s like not in my vocabulary, nor do I understand that concept.’”
“I think they’ve taught me a lot of patience,” Baker said. “I am certain at some point that I will have taught them about patience, but I’m not sure I’ve seen the full fruit of my labor.”
“I think we’re already falling, and we need the net. We need the net sooner than later.”
Jessica Baker
Young women in Wyoming may need a mountain guide’s fortitude when facing their future in the Equality State.
“Wyoming has always been or has tried to be rooted in freedom — freedom of choice … freedom to be in your space, freedom to have space. I have always appreciated that about Wyoming. It’s not so much that Wyoming is rooting for women, but rather Wyoming is rooting for the freedom of humans.
“We’re kind of in free fall right now,” she said of women’s lot in Wyoming. “Women’s healthcare is extremely compromised … not being supported the way it should be in Wyoming.”
Some groups are trying to take away women’s freedoms, she said. That’s “completely backwards … and completely against what Wyoming should stand for.
“Wyoming is on the edge right now, and I think we can recover, but we better do it quickly because I think we’re already falling, and we need the net. We need the net sooner than later.”
