Editor’s Note: In this series, Off the Beaten Path, we’re telling the stories of outdoor guides and how they spend their time off, inpidually experiencing the very places they uncover for people every day. We’ll take you on their personal journeys — unearthing natural wonders and calling out the gear they use along the way.
“What do I do on my days off? Some days, I Gorilla Glue the holes in my surfboard,” says Jerry Phillips. Sure enough, his board sports three freshly patched holes, punched last night when Phillips and another guide went surfing after work. “I fell on the first wave, and was floating right in the boneyard when the rest of the set came through,” he says.
Phillips is a guide for Santa Barbara Adventure Company in Channel Islands National Park, a series of five rugged islands rising just off the coast of California. Though the islands can be seen from LA on clear days, their relative isolation from the mainland has allowed them to remain undeveloped and makes them collectively one of the least visited National Parks.
Phillips is just twenty years old. But he’s an assistant manager and respected guide out here. His path to Santa Cruz, the largest of the Channel Islands, has been dense with wild experiences. “As a kid, I didn’t like the outdoors that much. But I liked trout fishing, and that got me outside. Then I liked climbing, and that got me outside even more,” he says. In the middle of a ranger-guided tour in Denali, a match struck in his head: “I looked at the guide and realized I could make a career doing that.”
He was studying psychology at UC Santa Barbara and planned to go to Yale for grad school. “I went surfing for the first time less than a week in. And I remember saying to myself, ‘I’m probably not going to go to Yale.’” He became an active member in UCSB’s Adventure Program, leading backpacking, kayaking and climbing trips, and spent a summer volunteering as a junior interpretive ranger in the Yosemite.
