Your Job Description
You thrive in the wilderness. Connecting people with the natural world, providing outdoor adventure experiences while educating and leading is your thing. You strive to maintain high standards of safety, planning, and training with a friendly and knowledgeable professionalism.
What does good look like?
The role is simple: connect your clients with a safe and healthy wilderness outdoor adventure that they’ll remember fondly for years to come. Responsibly get them in and out of the backcountry and home to their loved ones.
Tasks
Seasonal Guiding opportunity for experienced lead guide only. Backpacking and hiking trips, the job also includes packrafting and sea kayaking trips, and rafting trips.
Prep and pack, backcountry cooking, and guiding clients, from novice to experienced guests in various regions throughout Alaska.
We have a gear and equipment manager who handles most of the trip packing and unpacking and gear repair. Approximately 50% of our clients do their own food.
Thanks.
Season typically runs June through mid-September.
Preferred Technical Qualifications
Recommended age 25 or greater with a minimum of 3 years trip leading experience including a diversity of terrain and routes. Maybe waived for exceptional candidates.
Wilderness resume showing a minimum of 50 days outdoor adventure per year.
Demonstrated ability to currently and safely lead off-trail routes and trips
Wilderness First Responder and CPR certification (both must be current)
Swiftwater rescue is preferable, 3 years experience, lead guide position.
Any other applicable qualifications like Avvy rescue, SAR, team management training.
Demonstrated ability in the following: wilderness travel, backpacking, camping, route-finding, navigation teaching and leadership, backcountry equipment (including backpacking, kayaking, packrafting, rafting), natural history, environmental consciousness, judgment and decision-making, improvised rescue, general outdoor skills.
Requires excellent people skills, solid organizational skills, and a strong knowledge of outdoor activities and outdoor equipment.
Preference will be given to Alaskan residents, and to candidates seeking multiple seasons of employment and who are pursuing further guide education and certification.
Excellent physical fitness.
You do well with our audience. Nearly all of our clients are adults; most are working professionals or recently retired, and many have children and spouses. What experiences do you have in relating to this audience?
Lead Guide Position
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What you will own and improve
1. Navigating wild and remote environments.
2. Eagerly informing people of place; theirs, ours, and this.
3. Planning, preparing, and organizing group trips with a safe and diverse team to provide exemplary service in the travel industry.
4. Sense of responsibility. -
What You Already Know
1. The importance of reliability, safety, congeniality, and education.
2. How to both follow objective protocols yet be flexible with an ever-changing natural subjective environment.
3. The difference between a delegated task and stuff that needs to be done.
4. LNT practices.
5. Have extensive backpacking experience. You have had hundreds of nights on the ground. Your gear is dialed. You know how to both use and look after it.
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What You Will Learn
1. Alaska backcountry travel practices and tools.
2. A thorough understanding of environmental and conservation matters crucial to Alaska.
3. Decision-making and leadership roles.
4. Systems and organizational management.
5. Communication skills for effective education and instruction to a diverse mix of clients. -
Instructor/Guide Related Expectations
- Respect and enjoy the mountain environment
- Enjoy people and teaching wilderness travel
- Demonstrate a high level of professional competence and ability to instruct sound wilderness and backcountry travel skills
- Aware of strengths and weaknesses; yours, your clients’ and our company’s
- Demonstrate sound judgment and decision-making skills
- Tolerance and patience for adversity, diversity, and uncertainty
- Be punctual and reliable
- Able to give and receive constructive feedback, sense of humor (important!)
- Maintain a high regard for client safety and client experience (critical!)
- Learn client expectations and strive to meet them
- Relate local knowledge including natural and cultural history
- Demonstrate and promote minimum impact practices and environmental awareness
- Provide leadership, instruction, and medical care during an emergency
- Inspect and maintain equipment
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Guide Administrative Expectations
- Review related client paperwork
- Prepare and plan trips
- Provide appropriate feedback to enhance future trips
- Report any gear and equipment problems and failures
- Provide thorough Trip Reports with the appropriate route and client feedback.
- Assist in marketing Expeditions Alaska, via Social Media, photos, and videos (as appropriate)
- Contact potential clients and sources of potential clients.
- Refer potential clients
- Support Expeditions Alaska reputation
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Benefits
Salary is commensurate with education and specific trip requirements. Base wage starts 200.00/day (day trips) or $275/day (overnight trips) for new guides (DOE) up to $375.00 / day over time. One of the best aspects of working at Expeditions Alaska is the experience you will have working in some of the greatest wilderness in Alaska and all of North America.
- A great opportunity to work for a grassroots yet established organization that has been a consistent early adopter and supporter of high standards since inception.
- A chance to visit wild and explore and come to know Alaska, including Gates of the Arctic National Park, ANWR, Katmai and Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks, Denali National Park, and Chugach National Forest.
- An opportunity to work with a reputable business and experienced backcountry guide service.
- Big discounts on gear through Pro Deal Accounts with most major outdoor gear manufacturers. Opportunities to shadow field trips backpacking, packrafting, sea kayaking, rafting, photography, and hiking.
Gear Manager
We are looking for a motivated, responsible person to help out with our outdoor gear packing and prepping and cleaning and maintenance. It’s a casual environment, but we still need to get things done. Your schedule is somewhat flexible, but must fit within trip dates; e.g., if a trip starts on July 1, you can pack for that on June 28, or 27, etc, but it needs to be complete and organized ahead of time, in a timely manner.
Additional tasks could include shuttling clients in our van to McCarthy and/or Glennallen if needed (maybe once or twice a summer).
Communication skills with our crew are critical. Organizational skills are equally so.
Pay starts @ $27/hr. In recent years this position paid nearly $10 000 in 3 months and it’s only getting busier. As an independent contractor, you pay your own taxes.
Hours are flexible, and often should be coordinated with guides and their trips. Morning seems to work well.
Requirements: clean gear, organize gear repair, some basic gear repair/patches (we can train you), pack for trips and decommission, clean, dry, and put away gear after trips. Additional things like manage inventory, order/purchase food and other items for trips,
Gear is mostly backpacking equipment and packrafting gear.
The location is in Anchorage in the U Med district.
You’ll need a driver’s license and a good driving record.
Contract runs May 15-Oct 10 (can vary).
- a mid-late Aug finish (if you have to return back to school, for example) does NOT work.
Thanks.
Operations Manager
This is a new gig we’re looking at going forward. We need a full-time generalist operator who holds the operational picture.
This is a new position. You would be the second most senior person in the company, operating as the owner’s right hand and proxy when he’s in the field. The core job is straightforward to describe and genuinely hard to do well: keep the operation moving, make the calls that don’t need Carl, and own the things we hand you completely.
This role looks different depending on the season. In the off-season, it’s hiring, scheduling, permits, systems, and project work. During the May–September guiding season, it’s running the ground operation: making sure every guide has what they need, every trip plan is solid, every logistical detail is confirmed, and nothing falls through the cracks while Carl is in the field. The operational stakes are real. Remote Alaska does not forgive loose ends.
EXPAK is growing. We’re adding photo tours, building out the guide team, and scaling trip volume. The person in this role will be part of making that happen, not just maintaining what already exists.
