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A guide service built around a harder question

Heather Hansman’s “Moxie” starts with a question that sounds simple but lands as an indictment of a lot of mountain culture: what would guiding for good actually look like? The article follows veteran guides Sheldon Kerr and Kristin Arnold as they build Moxie Mountain Guides in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains around an answer they could not find in the industry they had spent years working in. They did not set out to become entrepreneurs for its own sake. They did it because they were tired of a model that could deliver big days in the mountains while still leaving guides underpaid, clients unheard and too many people feeling like the sport was not built for them.

That framing is what gives the story its force. Hansman is not profiling a startup because it is new. She is using Moxie to ask what backcountry guiding values when no one is pretending that powder and summit photos are the whole point. Kerr and Arnold still care about excellent ski days, steep terrain and hard-earned competence, but the article argues that those outcomes are inseparable from the social structure around them. The larger claim is that a guide service reveals its ethics long before anyone drops into a line. They show up in who feels welcome, who gets listened to, who gets paid properly and whose discomfort is taken seriously before it becomes a problem.

Safety that includes the social side

The article’s sharpest idea is that inclusion is not an accessory to risk management. It is part of risk management itself. Arnold and Kerr argue that clients make better decisions and speak up sooner when they feel respected and safe enough to use their own voice. Hansman treats that not as branding language but as an operational philosophy. Moxie’s version of a guide day begins with small, practical efforts to reduce intimidation and uncertainty: clearer communication before the trailhead, more attention to what a client wants from the day and less attachment to a preselected objective simply because it looks impressive on paper.

That shift matters because it reframes what a good guide is for. In the old caricature, the guide is the expert who delivers the client to a line. In “Moxie,” the guide is still highly skilled, but the skill set is broader and more relational. Kerr and Arnold want to help clients move through consequential terrain with more confidence, but they also want them to feel seen in bodies and identities that have often been treated as outside the default mountain template. Hansman is especially good at showing that this philosophy is not soft. It is rigorous. It demands more preparation, more self-awareness and a better understanding of how fear, hierarchy and exclusion can distort decision-making in avalanche terrain just as surely as weather or weak layers can.

The article also makes clear that this perspective came from experience rather than abstraction. Both women built serious credentials in guiding and avalanche education, yet they were not taught to think much about body inclusivity, gender identity or the broader ways people move through the mountains differently. So they had to seek that education elsewhere and fold it back into their own practice. Hansman presents that work as part of professionalization, not mission drift. The result is a portrait of guiding that takes people more seriously without lowering the standard of mountain travel.

The business model is part of the argument

Where the article becomes more than a values profile is in its attention to money and labor. Moxie is not just trying to create a more welcoming client experience; it is also trying to make guiding more sustainable for the guides themselves. Hansman shows how closely those goals are linked. If guides are underpaid, burned out or treated as disposable, then the industry trains people to normalize precarity in a profession where judgment matters. Moxie pushes back by trying to pay living wages, compensate work more fairly and build conditions that make retention possible.

Hansman also spends useful time on the company’s sliding-scale pricing. In a thinner story, that detail would read like a feel-good aside. Here it becomes evidence for a larger point: the economics of outdoor recreation are often treated as fixed when they are really choices. Moxie is betting that some clients can pay more, some need to pay less and transparency can produce a healthier balance than pretending everyone arrives with the same resources. The article does not claim that this solves every contradiction. It does suggest that the usual industry assumption, that equity and solvency naturally pull in opposite directions, is often more ideological than factual.

By the end, “Moxie” lands as a story about institutional design as much as individual idealism. Hansman portrays Kerr and Arnold as ambitious guides, but the deeper interest is in the systems they are trying to change: how trips are framed, how risk is discussed, how guides are compensated and what counts as professionalism in the first place. The article’s closing takeaway is that better backcountry culture will not come from rhetoric alone. It will come from organizations willing to build their ethics into daily practice. In that sense, Moxie is compelling not because it promises a gentler version of mountain travel, but because it argues that fairer, more inclusive and more sustainable guiding may also be the most serious version of it.