When Guides Fall

Dick Jackson (1950-2025), one of America’s Greatest Mountain Guides

When Guides fall, their passing echoes through the valley. 

Dick Jackson died peacefully at home the day before Thanksgiving, and within hours, everyone in the Roaring Fork had heard the news.  Within a day, Guides around the world knew that one of America’s greatest Mountain Guides had fallen.

When I was an aspirant guide in Chamonix in the early 1980s, Dick Jackson is who we all aspired to be: cool, competent, highly skilled on rock and on skis.  He was popular with both fellow Guides and admiring lady clients. 

Dick’s relationships with the leading European Guides enabled the AMGA to enter the IFMGA system in 1997. It was Dick’s leadership of the AMGA Board over the following decade that allowed us to drag the AMGA kicking and screaming into becoming a full IFMGA country.

Dick was a role model to young guides, and he exerted a profound influence on our culture.  Today, there are 191 IFMGA Guides in the USA, all certified to the international standard by the AMGA, all of whom stand on the shoulders of Dick Jackson and his stewardship of American mountain guiding.

Over the past three decades, Dick Jackson and I skied and climbed together all the time, all over the world, on his terrain and mine. We loved every minute of it and we loved each other. We represented the AMGA together at IFMGA meetings, and some of my best trips with Dick were to these events, where we ate and drank and skied and climbed with the head Guides of all the member countries.

My favorite memory of these was our visit to the Japan IFMGA meeting in 2007 where we climbed Mt. Fuji together in full winter conditions.  At that meeting, Dick and I proposed to host the 2010 IFMGA meeting in Boulder, and to our astonishment, the IFMGA Board agreed.

There was no prouder moment in Dick’s life than when he led the Guides Parade down Pearl Street at the front of the AMGA delegation with his daughter, Tashi holding the American Flag.

Dick Jackson was my friend, my mentor, my hero, and my fellow Mountain Guide for more than thirty years.  May his memory be a blessing to us all.