VUE

right at the last minute, I changed it and I thought, "Wow, I don't actually want to be a doctor." So I did a total U-turn and applied to art school. My parents didn't bat an eyelid—they were supportive. at in itself was an incredible blessing, that my parents didn't want to interfere in switching from Oxford to study medicine to go 500 miles away to study art. Looking back, that was probably the best decision I've ever made. How does one become an IFMGA mountain guide? I imagine it's quite an intense process. A lot of people do it now where I live in Chamonix. But there's maybe only 300 guides with this qualification in all of Britain. It's internationally recognized everywhere: France, Switzerland, Ger- many, etc. To do it, you have to climb and ski at a high level; you need a really profound amount of experience in high alpine terrain before you even apply to train. It sounds ridiculous, but it liter- ally took me 10 years to get the pre-re- quirements to start training to become a guide. Once I started, it's about a four- year training course. You train how to guide people in any kind of rock terrain. From there, you move on to guiding people in icy terrain at a high level. I had to be able to navigate in the most terrible weather that Scotland has. e last two years were all in the Alps doing ski touring, avalanche assessment, avalanche management and then guiding people on alpine climbs from the most modest, to practically anything you can imagine. ere's not many people that go through it without being mentally scarred. At the end of it, it's quite liberating because it allows you to work in whatever field you want. Whether you specialize in ice climbing or ski touring, you can do that in Europe, Canada, Japan—all over the world. V U E N J . C O M 87

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