Climbing

Unsurprisingly, August was a busy time for The Mountaineers community. From the looks of these trip reports, it’s clear that we are all reveling in the ongoing late summer weather that affords such tremendous outdoor opportunities here in the mountains and waters of the Pacific Northwest. Read more…

Get to know this week's member spotlight! Read more…

“Almost 60 years after the first successful American ascent of Mount Everest, a team of U.S. climbers aims to make history once again on the world’s highest peak. Led by Phil Henderson, a former instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School and a veteran  mountaineer, this group, made up of athletes from across the country, aspires to be the first all-Black American expedition to reach the summit.” wrote James Edward Mills, Mountaineers Books Author and freelance journalist, in an article for Outside Business Journal announcing the project in late August 2021. Read more…

Steve Swenson and Scott Johnston, both 67, have a combined 103 years of climbing between them. Steve is still making first ascents in the Karakoram, and Scott is an active climber and co-founder of Uphill Athlete, a service that offers educational resources, training plans, and coaching to amateur and professional mountain sports athletes. Read more…

Jason Hardrath is an Oregon schoolteacher and an enthusiastic Fastest Known Time (FKT) participant. His passion for fitness began in middle school, where he set the audacious goal of achieving a sub-6 minute mile, and carried him into his mid-twenties as a runner, triathlete, and climber. Then a horrific car accident changed his life in an instant. He fought for years to recover, using the mountains as a place for motivation and healing. Read more…

When our volunteers designed our donor-funded Seattle Program Center (SPC), which opened in 2009, the goal was to create a top-notch instructional center to teach outdoor skills. As we've grown, we continue to add new features and spaces for experiential learning. In total, the Seattle Program Center has nearly 400 bolts around the building, and we've been able to decrease our trips into the mountains by 40%, decreasing our carbon footprint on our wild places. Read more…

Last Sunday, search and rescue teams responded to an emergency call from a popular early-season climb in the Olympic mountains. Two climbers slipped on a steep snowy slope while climbing The Brothers. One fell “into an opening in the snow and over a rock face with running melt water,” and sadly did not survive. This tragic accident has brought an annually recurring hazard back into the thoughts of everyone within the outdoor community: the danger posed by snow bridges.  Read more…

As Mountaineers, we are committed to learning from our experiences. We examine every incident that happens on a Mountaineers trip for opportunities to improve the ways we explore and teach. Our volunteer safety committee reviews every incident report and picks a few each month to share as examples of ‘Lessons Learned’. The trip report below describes what happened on this trip, in the leader’s own words, and outlines the lessons the leader has identified. In some cases, we offer additional key learnings from the incident. Read more…

While traveling solo to remote and wild places, I had been in some dicey situations. The risks were real, but I knew of no one else interested in exploring the nether regions of wilderness, nor the Himalayan front range from east to west, nor the ancient trade routes that connect Tibet to India through massive ranges, passes that cut deep, from north to south where borders often go unmarked – and so I had gone alone. Read more…

As Mountaineers, we are committed to learning from our experiences. We examine every incident that happens on a Mountaineers trip for opportunities to improve the ways we explore and teach. Our volunteer safety committee reviews every incident report and picks a few each month to share as examples of ‘Lessons Learned’. The trip report below describes what happened on this trip, in the leader’s own words, and outlines the lessons the leader has identified. In some cases, we offer additional key learnings from the incident. Read more…