Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Billy Rankin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Billy , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

Over the years working as a guide and outdoor educator in high risk environments I have seen several emergency situations and until you experience real situations it’s challenging to best prepare for them. Treating serious patients in the backcountry or managing real avalanche hazards on slope with clients, provides valuable experiences that help you learn to make critical decisions and develop solid judgment. I take my life experiences and develop my curriculum and teaching style to prepare students for real life situations. My students appreciate the diversity of my experience and the context I bring to the classroom and the curriculum. It’s challenging to teach decision making and judgment, but my classes give students opportunities to start developing these important skills.

Billy , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have been an outdoor professional for over 30 years! I started as a raft guide in 1992 and immediately learned the importance of proper training, skills, and decision making. Instead of a sophomore year of college I took a year off and did a 90-Day semester course with NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) which was a pivotal experience for me at the age of 19. This course exposed the outdoor industry and the different opportunities there were for making a living in the outdoors. After this course I moved to Crested Butte, Colorado where I continued to acquire outdoor experience, skills, and certifications. I took a Wilderness EMT course, my first avalanche course, and started doing extended trips into the backcountry in both summer and winter. I started working as a ski guide and avalanche course instructor for Crested Butte Mountain Guides. I was also working as an EMT for the local fire department and was a volunteer for the Crested Butte Search and Rescue Team. These were very important early career experiences where I saw my first real patients and began learning the art of guiding and education. I began working for the Colorado Outward Bound School (COBS) in 1994 and worked for them for over a decade working 23-83 day courses in Colorado, Utah, California, Mexico, & Alaska. Working for Outward Bound was amazing and was responsible for teaching me so many valuable risk management skills working hundreds of days with students in all kinds of high risk environments. I got my introduction into mechanized ski guiding when I got hired with the Old Irwin Lodge in 1998 working as a snowcat ski guide. This was a dream job at the time, and I was skiing a lot of untracked powder guiding off the snowcat and was my introduction to avalanche mitigation work with explosives. Unfortunately, the lodge closed in 2002 though that opened the door for working with the Crested Butte Professional Ski Patrol. This led to almost 10 years on ski patrol which was a great combination of emergency medicine and avalanche mitigation work. During the same time, I began avalanche forecasting for the Crested Butte Avalanche Center which was in its infancy stages. This was a new experience and I enjoyed writing public bulletins for our public users and since we have such a prolific backcountry community it was a great service and experience being involved at this level. In about 2009 I started working for Irwin Guides and Eleven Experience where I helped restart the Irwin snowcat operation. I spent over 10-years as the guide manager and snow safety director and helped manage a world class snowcat operation and oversaw the avalanche mitigation and explosives program. This was the perfect job at the time putting my years of experience to the test, training other guides, overseeing snow safety, and snowcat ski guiding. I still work for Irwin Guides and Eleven Experience and enjoy the benefits of working for this world class company skiing lots of powder, meeting and guiding wonderful clients, and a little bit of exotic travel. The job took me to the Alps where we have a chalet in France and multiple seasons in Iceland where I worked guiding helicopter skiing out of our Deplar Farm in the Troll Peninsula. During much of this same time I was teaching avalanche courses and training other avalanche instructors as well as teaching wilderness Medicine. I taught for many years for NOLS wilderness medicine teaching WFR (Wilderness First Responder) courses and have been teaching shorter first aid and CPR courses locally in Crested Butte for many years helping the community members with their training and certification needs. I currently teach wilderness medicine for Desert Mountain Medicine and am a provider for their WFR courses. I also currently began working for AIARE (American Institute for Avalanche Research & Education) where I train up and coming avalanche instructors and teach professional avalanche courses for avalanche workers. With all these different venues of professional work and course offerings I created Intuition Consulting my own umbrella business to host a plethora of wilderness medicine and avalanche courses. I also offer risk management consulting services to outdoor schools and companies looking to improve their risk management programs. It’s been a great journey and I love what I do and share my expertise, skills, and passions with others.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I teach real, engaging, and dynamic courses that focus on real content and curriculum. My courses and curriculum are backed by 30 years of experience managing risk from the top of Denali to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I am an effective educator who knows the importance of keeping students engaged and hands on, not just reading out of a book and lecturing.  I am passionate about everything I do, and this comes through in all my classes and guide work and my students and clients appreciate it.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I have spent thousands of days in the backcountry in many diverse environments both personally and professionally. I spent 8 summers in Alaska and have partaken in several mountaineering expeditions in the Chugach, Wrangels, and the Alaska Ranges. Living and working on glaciers, in the cold, and at high altitudes gave me a fair bit of perspective and the importance of a solid expedition mentality and behavior. Managing risk minute to minute, day to day is of the utmost of importance. On the other side I have been on 7 private Grand Canyon expeditions from 14-24 days in length. These trips also teach you resilience with tons of daily exposure to hazards. Not only running big rapids day after day but doing long hikes, canyoneering missions, and even caving. I have been involved with several rescues both professionally and personally from calling in helicopters to fallen climbers to carrying a partner on my back for 10-hours getting out of a remote slot canyon, to being caught and carried in a large avalanche. Experiences like these are not easy but help develop critical thinking and judgement that allows me to become wiser over time and I can share these experiences and lesson with my students.

Contact Info:

• Website: intuitionconsulting.org
• Email: intuitionconsultingcb@gmail.com 
• Phone: 970-275-2745 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/intuition_consulting_cb/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IntutitionConsultingCB