Let’s start with the simplest: we are proud of our company, and it shows in everything we do, to the point that one thing we love to do the most with each of our passengers is to show them what happens at AMG during the season through a tour of our logistic depot. When we put it like that, it may sound like something unremarkable, but believe us: it is not, even to them. This tour is the best way to understand the complexity of an infrastructure that moves tons (literally) of supplies and equipment in over four months, and also coordinates more than one hundred people 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout an entire climbing season. Without this tour, our passengers would never understand all the added value that being a Mendoza local company that organizes expeditions to Aconcagua brings. For us, it is essential that they know the faces and infrastructure that is set up in that “behind the scenes” since it takes a small army of workers set in motion for someone to uncork a bottle of champagne at the end of their expedition.
But before we dive into any operational process, let’s go back to the question that brought us here: Does being a local company have any relevance? Yes. It does to us. For example, a company that organizes and operates expeditions — one the size of ours — has different work teams distributed from the city to our camps on Aconcagua, and besides carrying out specific tasks, they are also in charge of representing our values and what we stand for. It may sound like a cliché, but the reality behind each member of these teams is the same, given that local companies benefit a much larger and more complex community than the very limited context that an expedition can show, and whose sum of small individual efforts accomplishes all sorts of miracles in logistics and service. Behind each bottle of wine that our expedition members drink when celebrating a summit, first, there was a local winery that produced it (with all the work that this means for viticulture in our province), and then, a staff in Mendoza that bought it, packed it, and took it from the city to our logistics base in Los Puquios, muleteers who loaded it and transported it on mules to the base camp, a team of base-camp staffers who unpacked it — recycling the cardboard and the packaging paper — and served it to our climbers. This same process is repeated with everything we take to the mountain to deliver our services. Being local — among a thousand other things — also means that the seamstress who makes the jackets for our cooks has all their sizes before the season begins, in order to make the handcrafted uniforms of our chefs.
Aconcagua Mountain Guides as a Local Company in Mendoza
Aconcagua Mountain Guides was born and founded in Mendoza by local people, and is ran by people from our community. But one of the most remarkable characteristics of AMG, is that it provides work, on average, to about 130 people per season: guides, porters, muleteers, packers, and staff in such diverse areas as base-camps, logistics in Los Puquios, transportation and logistics, administration, and sales and customer service. We love what we do, and we work very hard so that whoever chooses us leaves our province with the best possible experience, in a season that is short, but sometimes insanely intense.
All of this, and perhaps a few more things that we still have yet to tell, is what it means for us to be a local company.
Comments are closed.