EWES Wilderness Guide Course - Level 1
Over the course of 2024 and 2025, Bob attended a Wilderness Guide Course with the Spanish organization EWES. The course consisted of three weeks in Spain and Andorra in September 2024 (the main module), two weeks in Norway (Cold Module) in February 2025, and one week in southern Spain (Arid Module).
On this page, he will share the ins and outs of the course and talk about his experiences.
Motivation
After completing my master’s degree in Educational Sciences and working as a teacher in schools and a consultant in offices, I realized it was still too early to settle. I wanted to explore the possibility of turning my outdoor hobby into something more professional. Guiding seemed to check all the boxes—it allowed me to work in the outdoor industry while still maintaining a connection to my degree in Educational Sciences.
There are quite a few organizations that offer courses to become a wilderness guide. Many of them require you to travel multiple weekends to a specific location, where you gradually learn the theory over an extended period. In the end, I chose to go with EWES. They offered a compact yet intense program, consisting of three long, immersive trips where you learn all the basics to become a Level 1 Wilderness Guide. This was the perfect fit for me, as it allowed me to balance training with my job without completely breaking the bank.
What does it have to offer
The EWES Level 1 Wilderness Course works as follows: You attend a three-week trip in Spain, where you learn all the basics of guiding. This includes developing leadership skills, ensuring group comfort, and mastering various hard skills like navigation and fire-making.
After completing the main course, you must choose two out of three elective modules. I chose the Arctic Module in Norway and the Arid Module in Spain. There is also a Wilder Module in Romania, which focuses on sustainability and wildlife. During these modules, you apply the knowledge acquired in the main course to different environments and conditions.
For who
Looking online, you can find quite a few wilderness guide courses. While they all cover similar subjects, the focus of each course can be very different. It’s often hard to determine the exact focus just by reading a website or brochure.
With EWES, the emphasis was definitely on soft skills, meaning a lot of time was spent teaching how to provide participants with the best possible outdoor experience. This doesn’t mean hard skills weren’t covered, but don’t expect to become a hardcore survival expert. Instead, you’ll learn the basics needed to start practicing on your own.
This is something to keep in mind when choosing a course. If your goal is to become a bushcraft expert and teach hard skills to others, you may want to look elsewhere. But if you want to offer great experiences in the wild, EWES is the place to go.
Personally, I wasn’t sure which type of knowledge I wanted to gain the most. In the end, I learned a lot from the soft skills and gained enough hard skills to continue improving on my own, both at home and on other trips. I left the module very satisfied.
If you’re still unsure whether this trip is for you, here’s some context to consider. What do you think will happen when you put 12 strangers—each aspiring to become a wilderness guide—into an intensive three-week course? None of them know each other, yet they’ll be together from early morning until late at night. On top of that, many participants want to take charge, as they’ve come to Spain to develop their leadership skills. Additionally, you’ll be thrown into unexpected situations where you’ll have to rely on each other—whether you like it or not. The chances are high that anything you think could go wrong will happen at some point. But that’s also exactly where most of your learning will take place. If you dislike the idea of so much focus on human interaction and just want to build tarps and fires, this might not be the right course for you! If you think there is a lot valuable lessons to be learned in this context, go and sign up!
On separate pages, I will provide more information about the different modules I attended. I won’t go into too much detail, as part of the experience is learning to deal with the unexpected. Covering every aspect of the course in advance would leave you too prepared and take away from the learning process.
However, I will give you an overview of the course so you can decide whether EWES is the right fit for you!