Mountaineer Magazine

Lovers of wild places owe a lot to the year 1968. That fall, Congress gave us three key conservation victories: the establishment of North Cascades National Park, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Trails System Act. Read more…

The first time I tried my hand at astrophotography (shooting the stars, as opposed to shooting stars) was on a clear night just outside Mount Rainier National Park. I was renting a cabin with my wife and her family, a trio of sisters from Colombia who spoke frequently about the possibility of seeing wildlife. I left them for the pitch darkness down the road along the Nisqually River. Read more…

For Mountaineers member Matt Ray, the most transformational experiences of his life happened at a summer camp in the North Woods of Wisconsin. Part traditional sports camp and part old-fashioned sleepaway camp, PorterCamp offers a safe space for campers and staff to build a better understanding of who they are, while learning to develop healthy relationships and having a lot of fun in the process. Matt attended as a boy, and has since committed over half of his life volunteering to ensure today’s young campers experience the same magic he did more than three decades ago. Read more…

I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. It’s a hard trek during winter. My best friend and I took on the challenge last spring, breaking trail for a full mile through fresh powder with heavy backpacks. We felt breathless as we snowshoed four miles to one of the highest points in Tahoma State Forest. But with every crunch beneath our snowshoes — and between the sounds of our groans - the top of Mount Rainier became more and more visible. Read more…

Our family has hiked together since our 12-year-old daughter was a newborn. I remember our daughter’s first decade as a series of literal peaks and valleys, many of them in the Olympics. I can picture her chasing butterflies over Marmot Pass at age five, and searching for fairies in old growth cathedrals along the Dungeness River. When she finished first grade we backpacked into Grand Valley, then clambered up Grand Peak, a perch with majestic views into the heart of the Olympic wilderness. Read more…

White, male and “midcareer,” Seattle’s Charles Beall in a lot of ways is the face of the National Park Service that turned 100 on August 25, 2016.

He also may be the best hope the agency has for changing that face to match the diversity that is rapidly transforming this country. And the reasons essentially start out the same: Because he is white, male and “midcareer.” Read more…

Perhaps it was the splash of the shy platypus as it swam away after a close encounter with us on the trail, or the snarl of Tasmanian devils feeding on carcasses and biting each other at a sanctuary near the start of our trek. Or maybe it was the zzzzzzzzip of a big, black currawong bird unzipping a backpack and helping itself to the snacks in our backpacks, or the THUMP of the Bennett’s wallaby jumping away with a joey in her pouch as we watched from our hut. One thing was certain: we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Read more…

I was not stoked to write this column, not stoked at all, bra’.

When I hear someone say how stoked they are to get on with whatever it is they are getting on with, I get wistful at the lack of context.  Read more…

The Mountaineers first met Tyrhee Moore in The Adventure Gap, a book we published chronicling the first all African-American summit attempt on Denali. Tyrhee was among the youngest of nine climbers, ranging in age from 17 to 65, to attempt the climb America’s highest peak. Since the 2013 expedition, his outdoor resume has grown to include Grand Teton, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Aconcagua. His experiences and challenges in the outdoors have garnered national attention, and he’s risen as an advocate for increasing interest and advocacy amongst black youth in outdoor spaces. Today Tyrhee speaks around the country on topics regarding the adventure gap and conservation leadership, and is a champion for increasing diversity in the outdoors. Read more…

Sarah Lange is an outdoor recreation planner for the U.S. Forest Service. She’s also a former Mountaineers staff member, working as the Public Lands Program Manager from 2010-2013. At the 2017 Mountaineers Leadership Conference, Sarah was part of a land manager and partners panel and discussed ways that Mountaineers leaders can integrate stewardship and low-impact recreation into their trips and activities. Heading into the busy summer season, I caught up with Sarah to better understand her perspective as a land manager, and to learn more about how our leaders can encourage and inspire others to be responsible stewards of our public lands. Read more…

My only purpose in life is to live.

Is that too egoistic?

Maybe too amoral? Read more…

Eastern Washington’s third highest summit, 7,257-foot Mount Bonaparte rises all alone in the Okanogan Highlands. Bonaparte is a monadnock (also known as an inselberg) — a geological term taken from Mount Monadnock, a popular southern New Hampshire mountain memorialized by 19th century writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The word monadnock is of Abenaki origin translating to isolated mountain. Monadnocks are lone isolated mountains standing above their surroundings. They have fared better than their environs in surviving the agents of erosion. Broad lofty Mount Bonaparte indeed stands alone, and with a 3,500-foot prominence, is distinguishable from quite a distance away. Read more…

As a Mountaineer with summer objectives, you may already have a solid exercise program that includes a weekend adventure, weekday trainings, and weekly strength and flexibility workouts. But a healthy lifestyle is more than your exercise routine. If you’re like a lot of people I know, you may be cutting corners on sleep, stressing about work or school, eating in the car to fit everything in, and skipping social commitments with friends. Read more…

I started climbing about twelve years ago, in the mountains of North Carolina in my mid-20s. Climbing did not come naturally to me, and I still constantly fight the cognitive dissonance of wanting to ascend higher and master moves while facing a petrifying fear of heights. Through the years I have experimented with ways to manage this fear, which has made room for this activity to make a positive impact on my life. I’ve used climbing as a vehicle for travel and exploration. My closest friends are those who’ve tied into a rope with me. And climbing is the activity I most enjoy teaching to new and aspiring Mountaineers. Read more…

The wilderness was vast and seemingly empty, but as I motored along I was nestled in a glowing cocoon of technological magic. Not one but two Garmin GPS chart plotters silently communed with the satellites overhead. My radar system could penetrate the thickest of fogs, though the day’s clear skies and sunshine made the prospect unlikely. My depth-sounder pinged sonar pulses off the rocks below, and I even carried something called, in bureaucratese, an Emergency Position Indicating Rescue Beacon, or, more jauntily, an EPIRB. Supposedly it would, at the panicked touch of a button, supply my coordinates and credit card information to the nearest helicopter rescue service. Read more…

High Country News recently published an essay by Ethan Linck, “Your Stoke Won’t Save Us,” questioning the efficacy of outdoor recreationists and the outdoor industry as advocates for conservation. In a sense, Linck is right, stoke alone won’t save us, and the most unimpeachable personal conservation ethic won’t either. Read more…

Judy Sterry remembers the exact day she joined The Mountaineers. It was her 14th birthday, the minimum age required to become a member at the time. By 16, she had climbed all six of Washington’s major Cascade volcanoes: Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Olympus, and Mount Rainier – 65,640 feet in total elevation. Read more…

Ruth Nielsen has practiced law in Washington for 30 years, specializing primarily in sports-related personal injury defense and outdoor product liability defense. She has successfully defended claims involving many of the activities that we lead at The Mountaineers - including skiing, rock climbing, mountaineering, and backpacking - and she is a frequent presenter at The Mountaineers annual Leadership Conference. Read more…

When worlds collide, it’s usually a bad thing. But when geology and botany come together for Mark Darrach, he’s as happy as a Polystichum lemmonii on an ultramafic substrate. Read more…

It’s no surprise to any of us who have been hiking and adventuring in our wild places since the days of heavy luggedsole boots, knee high cotton socks, and external frames that in the words of conservationist Rick McGuire of the North Cascades Conservation Council and Alpine Lakes Protection Society: we are currently facing a human tsunami on our trails. And if we’re to stay true to this metaphor, a tsunami inundating our wild places isn’t going to leave them in good shape. Read more…

In each issue of Mountaineer magazine, we feature two lovebirds who met through The Mountaineers and share a passion of the outdoors. In this column, we talked to Wendel Brown & Roberta Spiro, who met in 1980 and recently celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary. Read more…

One of my favorite places in the outdoors has multiple trails, several different habitats, and offers spectacular views of a major snow-capped peak. There is an old-growth forest where, among the mossy trees, you are serenaded by the rat-ta-tat-tat of pileated woodpeckers, hoots from barred owls, and screeches of Stellar’s jays. There also is abundant shoreline, where rabbits bound, beavers sun, and bald eagles, kingfishers, great blue heron, osprey, and otters nab fish. Read more…

Within five minutes of meeting Charlie and Carol Michel, it’s clear that they care very deeply about three things: sea kayaking, The Mountaineers, and our collective carbon footprint. Read more…

As a teenager in the 1950s, I was a voracious reader fascinated with several books that became the classic accounts of the so called “Golden Age” of Himalayan mountaineering. Among this treasure trove was K2: The Savage Mountain, the unforgettable story of the 1953 American K2 expedition. It stirred a fascination with K2 in me which has lasted a lifetime. Read more…

In each issue of Mountaineer magazine, we feature two lovebirds who met through The Mountaineers and share a passion of the outdoors. In this column, we interview Sharon Dietrich on her 37-year marriage with Chuck Potter, after meeting on a hike in 1978.  Read more…

Each week we bring you a personal story from one of our members. For our member profile this week we talked to.... Read more…

With the sun about to kiss the horizon, Liz Thomas, trail name: “Snorkel,” has places to go and needs the last rays of the day to illuminate her path. She is ascending and descending steps in Seattle, one of the hilliest and most publicly staircased cities in the country. This is not a task to be executed, at her pace, in complete darkness. Read more…

Tom Unger has been hiking, climbing, skiing, paddling, and sailing up and down the west coast for 25 years. He’s widely praised by students and participants for his outstanding communications, group facilitation, instruction, and collaborative leadership. In the summer of 2017, Tom led a two-week trip with The Mountaineers around Cape Scott with Barney Bernhard, Esther Ladwig, Marty Mayock, Charlie Michel, and Karen Cramer. In this interview, Tom discusses how he intentionally brought his group together around common goals, expectations, and trip styles. Read more…

"Protecting wild places has been a part of The Mountaineers DNA from the very beginning. Our members were foundational in the establishment of Olympic National Park and the passage of the National Wilderness Act. We published the book that inspired President Ford to designate the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and another that chronicled the removal of the ELWAH River Dam. For more than a century, we’ve helped generations fall in love with the outdoors. We get thousands of people outside every year, and in doing so we create strong, authentic connections to these landscapes. These personal connections empower us to defend our public lands." Read more…

To get the most out of your pre-season training program, think about the outdoor activity you would like to prepare for the most and the fitness components that are important for that activity. Below is a handy chart to help. Aerobic exercise works large groups of muscles over longer periods of time. Anaerobic exercise involves short bursts of 10-60 seconds hard work with longer recovery time of up to 3 minutes. Read more…