Why Choose Outdoor Link?

Background

When you need a specialist you go to one who has been trained and then examined before his or her peers. Contractors - doctors - teachers - lawyers all have a mandatory training and certification process. For outdoor instructors this is not the case. But why would you trust your safety or that of a loved one to someone who has no formal training or evaluation?
Because for over twenty years we have done good, solid work, providing safe top-quality outdoor programs that are completely customized for a wide variety of individuals, private schools and organizations from around the world.

Skills

Our expertise is in multi-day camping-based outdoor programs that include rock climbing along with general outdoor exploration and team building for schools and organizations. We are also leaders in rock climbing instruction, guide training, and, through Sierra Mountain Center, Sierra ski mountaineering tours. Outdoor Link founder Todd Vogel is an American Mountain Guides Association certified (Rock and Alpine) mountain guide with over twenty years of experience working with individuals and groups in mountain environments.

Personalized

At Outdoor Link you will know right from the very beginning of working with us who your Outdoor Link team will be and what their qualifications are. There is no guessing or mystery as to who will be showing up to work your program or why they might be qualified to do so. Most our programs are for group sizes of less than twelve people and on these trips Todd Vogel is usually the sole staff person. On those trips where we need a larger team we utilize the skills of some of the top people in the field, putting together a leadership team that addresses the needs of the program.

Professionalism and safety

You will be hard-pressed to find a more experienced instructor of group rock climbing programs than Outdoor Link founder Todd Vogel. Todd has led some three hundred programs for schools or other organizations in California alone, and several hundred more at various locations around the world.

When you need a specialist you go to one who has been trained and then examined before his or her peers. Mechanics - doctors - teachers - lawyers all have a mandatory training and certification process. For outdoor instructors this is not the case. But why would you trust your safety or that of a loved one to someone who has no formal training or evaluation? In the world of outdoor education, rock climbing and mountaineering instruction, American Mountain Guides Association training and certification is the only program for evaluating outdoor professionals in the US.

We define lead instructors as any individual who has unsupervised responsibility for a group. On our climbing programs all our lead instructors are AMGA certified. On these programs we maintain a lead instructor to maximum student number of 1:12. We strongly recommend you use this criterion when choosing a climbing instruction team - anything less is not up to the industry standard.

Medical training: the current industry standard for outdoor leaders is Wilderness First Responder (WFR), an eight to ten day course. All our lead instructors have current WFR training.

What we don't do:

We don't do huge groups. If you have more than thirty or so folks in your group we're not for you.

We don't low-ball our prices. The aphorism "you get what you pay for" certainly holds true in outdoor ed; we pay professional instructors what they are worth and strongly recommend that you hire programs which supply professional instructors.

We don't do programs that we don't know how to do. If you want to go on a river or tall-ship sailing, we're not for you.

We don't put unqualified people on our teams - each person on our staff meets the highest professional standards for the job they are being asked to do. If we put a partially qualified person on the team they are there as an apprentice - and are not counted towards our guaranteed staff to participant ratios.

We're not all scientists or credentialed teachers though our staff have extensive background interpreting the environments in which they work.