Mark’s clients are people who come from all walks of life and different age groups. They are of various nationalities and include American and British citizens.
Mark names among his clients people who have heli-skied with him in their late seventies. They include the first blind man to climb Mont Blanc, who incidentally was the first man to reach the summit after undergoing a heart by-pass operation.
Mark and his client Charles Sherwood made the second British guided ascent of the notorious Eiger Nordwand in 2007. Mark has guided various regiments of the British army including the Special Forces. He even guided his wife before he married her!
All of these people tend to be keen to be with a native English speaker, yet someone who also speaks the local language and is in tune with the local mountaineering culture, conditions, and conventions. His clients fall into two main categories:
- First, people who are keen (and often highly skilled) mountaineers and skiers but have limited leisure time because of work and family commitments. What they want is to maximise their free time and achieve as much as they can in the shortest possible time frame.
- Second, Mark is involved with people who often have no mountaineering experience yet have a dream to climb one of the great European alpine peaks in safety. During the skiing season, these clients are people who have perhaps skied a considerable amount, love skiing, but are becoming a little bored with piste skiing and would like to simply experience a uniqueness and exclusivity that is often elusive when confined to regular skiing holidays.
Partly as a result of interest generated by his Mark The Mountain Guide books, and partly because he has children of his own, Mark has considerable experience guiding young children on all sorts of mountaineering and skiing adventures. For example, all three of Mark’s daughters skied the iconic Vallée Blanche by the time they were five years old.
