Jobs in adventure travel range from becoming a hiking guide to planning tourist-friendly adventure vacations. Professional mountain bike guides can travel the world showing tourists the best trails and techniques for riding them, just as professional hiking guides can. Piloting a helicopter into the mountains to drop off skiers or leading those skiers down the slopes as a ski guide are examples of adventure travel jobs. Tourists can be guided up the best climbs while learning proper safety precautions and climbing techniques from climbing guides. Other jobs that fall under the category of adventure travel include guide training, backcountry medicine training, and search and rescue.
Many adventure travel jobs are low-paying, but they allow a person to travel across the country or around the world and participate in thrilling experiences that he or she would never have at home. Photographers, for example, have access to parts of the world that most people will only read about in magazines. According to the assignment, the photographer must capture current events, the local flavor and day-to-day life of a location, as well as other specific subjects. A travel photography job could put a photographer in danger, such as photographing a war zone, or it could land them on a tropical island to capture stunning sunsets and indigenous people. Pay varies by assignment, and while some people can make a decent living from their earnings, others may do it for the experience rather than the pay, which may or may not be very lucrative.
Among the adventure travel jobs, guiding is probably the most common. Guides are responsible not only for their clients’ safety and well-being, but also for educating them about the sport they are participating in, the environmental impacts that surround them, and local customs, history, and background information that can help them better understand their surroundings. A guide is a multi-talented individual who must be prepared for any situation, including emergencies. The majority of guides are trained in first aid, CPR, backcountry rescue, and medicine.
Working as part of a world-traveling ship crew or as a skills instructor for a variety of adventure sports or activities, such as surfing, skiing, skydiving, cycling, wilderness survival, search and rescue, mountain climbing and guiding, or any other adventure sport in which one can specialize, are other adventure travel jobs.