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In 2025, the AMGA commenced a 5-year strategic plan that will provide direction and focus for the organization through 2029. The plan drives mission-driven initiatives that will increase public land access for guides, advertise the value of AMGA training and certification to the public, review and evaluate AMGA risk management practices, improve accessibility to AMGA courses and exams, establish financial practices that support long-term AMGA financial health, and modernize AMGA Mountain Guide Program curriculum and educational practices to meet the evolving needs of students.

AIARE was created to solve a serious problem. 

When my partners Jean Pavillard, Karl Klassen, and I co-founded AIARE in 1998, the number of avalanche fatalities each season in the United States had begun to climb drastically. Just a couple of years before, a sidecounty avalanche at a resort in our home state of Colorado resulted in multiple burials and four people dead—four families and an entire community grieving. Sadly, a version of this story was repeated numerous times in the mountains each winter.

Steve House sits down with Kyle Lefkoff, a rare figure who has lived at the intersection of serious alpinism and venture capital for nearly four decades. From discovering his "mutant gene" for rock climbing as a kid in Atlanta to surviving K2's deadliest season in 1986, from co-founding Array Biopharma (acquired by Pfizer for $12 billion) to serving as founding chairman of AIARE, Kyle shares how the same principles—luck, timing, patience, and pattern recognition—govern success on both big walls and in boardrooms.