Upland Guide School
AUGUSTA — Two former police officers are teaching Mainers how to start their own businesses right out of the woods…
Five years ago, Dave Tyrol and Michael Tuminaro started helping people discover the beauty of Maine’s outdoors as licensed guides and for the past two they’ve been teaching others how they can do it too.
Their three-day Augusta-based program, Maine upland guide school, has prepared over 100 students for their Maine guide license test.
Tyrol says, “We’re not teaching to a test. We’re teaching people where, maybe, they need to work to be prepared for what the state’s looking for in a registered Maine guide”.
Tyrol and Tuminaro are proud of the fact that over 80% of all of their students passed the state’s guide test.
Their program is broken down into four sections over three days.
The course focuses on navigation, hunting and trapping, recreation and fishing, and how to run a guide business.
Tuminaro says that although the course is meant for people training to become guides anyone can sign up.
“I love the people we meet”, says Tuminaro. “I love the interests they have and the things they plan on doing. You might think that everybody that comes to a guide school and who wants to guide for a living is somebody that wants to maybe back country people from the outdoors but it’s not the case. We’ve had surgeons through here, we’ve had professionals through here. We’ve had school teachers”.
The duo has gained so much popularity they will actually begin to teach courses at the Mt. Ararat middle and high school.
Heidi O’Leary, the Special Education Director of SAD 75, says that the program is called outdoor adventure school and will first be available to students with individualized education plans.
She says, “They’ll work on a series of different projects and activities that we’ve learned all throughout this whole entire weekend. You know, rope tying, about birds, about canoeing, about fire safety, about fly tying, all those kinds of things”.
To learn more about upland guide service and their school check them out on Instagram and Facebook.
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