Mountaineer Magazine

This August, while backpacking through the Hoover Wilderness in California with my husband and brother-in-law, I ran into a woman about my age. She was headed down the trail in our direction so we hiked together a few miles, chatting about our work, her Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike the previous summer, and our mutual love of solo trips. She was a teacher out on a three-day trip before the school year started back up. I told her about my work with Outdoor Alliance and our efforts to bring together the outdoor recreation community to protect public lands.  Read more…

Just try to get journalist Greg Johnston to stop talking about the allure of Washington’s Pacific Coast: the wild headlands, windswept beaches, and salmon-rich rivers.  Read more…

In each issue of Mountaineer magazine, we feature two lovebirds who met through The Mountaineers and share a passion of the outdoors. This fall, we talked to Damien Scott and Dandelion Dilluvio-Scott.  Read more…

For over a century, The Mountaineers has inspired conservation and stewardship of our public lands through our outdoor education programs and books. Today, we build on this tradition by taking responsibility for protecting the places that inspire, excite, and challenge us. The Mountaineers is uniquely positioned to define and grow the modern conservation movement by providing powerful outdoor experiences that enable people to gain special connections to these places and the desire to protect them. We instill stewardship and Leave-No-Trace wilderness ethics through the educational components of our courses and provide opportunities to learn and engage in conservation issues – practices that ignite passion and action in current and future generations of conservationists.  Read more…

My generation thought it had a pretty good notion of what stewardship meant the first time we got a look at the pictures of earth taken by the astronauts.  Read more…

I heard the buzzing first. As we were placing our signatures back inside the summit canister, an unfamiliar noise tickled my eardrums. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I could see the hair on my partners’ heads rising to the sky as if to kiss an invisible balloon. I spun frantically searching for the source when it dawned on me: it was us. We were buzzing. Our ice axes and skis and the metal zipper pulls were vibrating in unison. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew it was time to move, and fast. Read more…

John Davis’ imprint on Seattle is inspiring. In addition to being the founder of Davis, Wright, Tremaine law firm in 1944, John served on the boards of many nonprofits, including Whitman College, the Pacific Science Center, and the Seattle Symphony. The Mountaineers was also a recipient of John’s strong commitment to giving back to his community. He volunteered as a leader at The Mountaineers serving as board president in 1968, climbing committee chair in 1967, as an editor of the second edition of Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills, and as a co-founder of the Mountaineers Foundation. A lifetime member since 1959, John passed away in April of 2015 at the age of 101.  Read more…

To truly care about something, it has to have impacted you intimately. It’s that personal connection that gives us the impetus to act. Read more…

“Look Mom!” I cried. “Bison!”

We were heading to the geysers [in Yellowstone National Park], but when we rounded the corner we saw a field of bison.

We could see a calf fighting its sibling, each one tumbling into the dust. We could see the bulls wallowing in the mud pits. We could even see the cows looking after the calves. It was an amazing sight seeing the bison covering that field like ants covering honey.

That’s one of the many exciting memories Samuel Tinker shared with me. Read more…

A few years ago, I took a group of Nordic skiers to the Dolomites in Italy. One couple in my group was looking forward to celebrating a significant anniversary in Florence and Rome following our ski adventures. We had been in the Dolomiti for about 10 days and, on this day, had enjoyed a rigorous mountain ski. After lunch and a ski back to a side valley where our path crossed a road, the anniversary couple decided to take the rest of the day off and bus back to the hotel.  Read more…