Episode Intro:
Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. I’m your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today, our guest is Caroline George. I’d say every active and want-to-be female guide should listen to this episode multiple times. Caroline’s voice was soft and comforting, but the words were incredibly impactful. The wisdom came from the essence she extracted from life events and decades of mountain climbing and guiding. The conversations provoked me to look into myself honestly and asked the ultimate question of “why.”
Caroline, an IFMGA mountain guide based near Verbier in the Swiss Alps, has faced many curveballs, but the mountains have always been her refuge—a place to find balance, reconnect with herself, and rekindle her inner light.
Most recently, she faced an unimaginable loss: her life and love partner, Adam George, perished in a helicopter crash in the Swiss Alps. Now, as the sole parent to their child, she is learning how to navigate the mountains in this new reality—both as a guide and as someone deeply connected to the peaks that have shaped her life.
Though the mountains remain unchanged, we experience them differently as life evolves. Caroline is discovering a new way of inhabiting this space, adapting to her shifting world while staying true to her passion. Guiding has become an anchor, offering both stability and a sense of normalcy as she forges ahead on this new path.
Now, please enjoy this episode.
Caroline’s Links:
Quotes:
- On this journey of grief and healing and rebuilding, I can see that the mountains is a place of grounding for me.
- It’s like my life is constantly being forcing me to go deeper and deeper and to figure out the essence of my identity by stripping all the things that no longer belong.
- I think it’s a really hard place for women…it’s violent when you have to adapt so much to who you’re not just to get a certification.
- I feel like I have met that mold that whole time to really work myself into the ground…And now in my latest situation of survival, after having lost my husband and being the sole parent to my child, I’ve had to revisit how is it possible for me to be a guide.
- As guides, we can do a way better job to protect our own lives with our clients by empowering them.
- A good metaphor for that is all the technical skills you learn are a little bit like the walls and the roof and the bedrooms in a house unless they’re inhabited by people. They’re just walls, there’s no life to it.
- You can’t say no all the time just But with critical thinking and your gut feeling and your intuition, your experience and your knowledge all combined, you have to have the ability to step out of this situation and say no.
- I really want it to be a lifelong career should my body enable me…through that job, you’re forced to stay healthy, to have somewhat of a healthy lifestyle. And, it keeps you fit to be out there in the mountains. It keeps you smart and alert and not be a couch potato. So, on some form or another, I think I will always do that.
- I think in life it’s about finding passion, finding a community that feeds your soul and from there everything is possible.
