Mountaineer Magazine

Endurance comes in many shapes and body sizes. Read more…

I became a big-M Mountaineer somewhat late in life. My daughter Fiona and I joined the club when she was only fifteen and I was fifty-seven. We took the Alpine Scrambling Course with the Seattle Branch in 2003 and bracketed the class — she was the youngest and I was the oldest. It came easily to us. I had been doing self-taught solo trips in the mountains for nearly thirty years and involved her from infancy. Read more…

Anyone who has been around me for a nanosecond in winter knows I love cross-country skiing. A lot. Maybe even more than climbing, kayaking, downhill skiing, and biking combined. (Gasp!)  Read more…

Mountain Workshops, The Mountaineers’ youth outreach program, has become well established in our Seattle location over the past five years. But these programs have just recently begun in Tacoma. By partnering with other youth-serving agencies, our goal is to reach youth that may not otherwise have the opportunity for rich outdoor experiences. Read more…

Both Stephanie Houston and Logan Urrutia served on the Mountaineers Adventure Club Leadership Team. The Mountaineers Adventure Club (MAC) is a Youth Leadership program run by teen members of The Mountaineers. With staff and volunteer support, the stated aim is to help the youth of the Puget Sound discover and explore the public lands and waterways of the Pacific Northwest, to help them grow as individuals, and to foster greater connections to our public lands to help steward and conserve them for future generations. These youth represent not only the future of The Mountaineers, but the future of responsible, sustainable outdoor recreation. But I'll let them speak for themselves… 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 Andrew Monko & Roseanne Kahn. Read more…

Sandeep Nain grew up with his parents and siblings sharing time between the town of Jind, Haryana and a village just outside, named Dharodi in northern India. He describes his house in Jind as a typical urban Indian dwelling, "a stand-alone concrete structure of about 250 square meters in a crowded urban housing community." He preferred their home in Dharodi. The traditional thatched roof and mud walled house there has a special place in his heart. The open feel and connection to the earth it provided still influences his life today as he connects with the land in the Pacific Northwest. Read more…

Northern Pygmy-Owls must enlarge their territories in the winter when prey becomes less abundant. Small mammals are harder to find, reptiles and amphibians are in hibernation, and many small birds have migrated. And so these owls often move downslope to places along waterways or near bird feeders, where there is a greater concentration of passerines and rodents. Read more…

Josh and I first met when we worked together at the Northwest Outward Bound School, and I’ve always been struck by his creativity, analytical skills, approach to teaching, and sense of humor. Josh has a rare ability to champion and role-model the highest values and expectations as an outdoor educator/guide — one of many attributes that make him such an inspiring professional colleague. Read more…

My cousin just got back from Actun Tunichil Muknal – The ATM Cave, the network of caves in Belize. These caverns were Mayan burial sites. They are sacred places, now open to commerce. The stories of the people who used this enormous natural wonder are mostly lost to us. Read more…

Whether you are gearing up for skiing, snowshoeing, climbing, or pack carrying, you will benefit from having a strong core to connect upper and lower body. When my husband and I climb mountains, we like to do pushups at the summit.  Read more…

On December 29, 2002, a party of seven mountaineers were involved in an avalanche accident in Cement Basin near Crystal Mountain. While skiing, they triggered a slide that buried one and partially buried three. One person was killed and another sustained a broken leg.  Read more…

I’ve hiked in some of the world’s most beautiful and awe-inspiring places. I’ve logged miles in the Andes, Alps, Apennines, and the Appalachians. The Rockies, Sierras, Peninsula Ranges, and escarpments of the upper Midwest, too. I’ve trekked in the Pyrenees, England’s Lakes District, the Scottish Highlands, and Bulgaria’s Pirin Mountains. I’ve snowshoed and skied in Japan’s Ishikari range, the Austrian Alps, and Bolivia’s Cordillera Real. I’ve hiked deserts in the American West and in Northern Chile. Explored Patagonia, the Peruvian Amazon, and Ybycui National Park in Paraguay. I’ve hiked national parks in the Yukon Territory, Quebec and a whole lot in between. And I have logged thousands of miles in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve seen amazing landscapes and amassed incredible backcountry experiences. But my fondest, most vivid, and most heartwarming memories involve the people I have encountered along the way. Read more…

Mount Rainier National Park, though open year round, has a paucity of hiking and scramble options owing to limited trailhead access. This installment of Our Secret Rainier offers two winter scramble options. The scrambles we selected - Tum Tum, and Cowlitz Rocks - are climbable year-round (though should be avoided in high avalanche conditions). Both are listed in the Guide to 100 Peaks at Mount Rainier National Park.  Read more…

When I first applied for an internship with the In My Backyard program in the National Park Service, it seemed almost impossible for someone like me to join. Read more…

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…

Ahhh, there’s nothing like heading out on your favorite trail to take in the fragrant smells of spring... only to catch the putrid stench of crap. Dog and human alike — it seems lately there’s been a proliferation of poo plopped along our trails and streams of toilet paper flowers soiling our backcountry. And this abundance of trailside turds isn’t just an affront on our visionary and olfactory senses, it’s a major affront to our health and the health of our wild places. Read more…

If you have breakfast at Thor Hanson’ home in the San Juans, you will experience the amazing variety of seeds: wheat in your pancakes, cotton for your pajamas, pepper in your bacon, jam from strawberries, and of course that most stimulating of seed brews – coffee. Read more…

In 2007, I was working for The Washington Post and Slate magazine in New York City. My role was to support the sales team in developing media plans and executing digital media campaigns across our publishing platforms: The Washington Post, Slate, Newsweek and Budget Travel. I worked for The Washington Post for about six years, during which time I watched the decline of print newspaper subscriptions as the ascendancy of online media, tablets and smartphones took hold. I experienced first-hand how digital devices altered the world of print publishing. Read more…

The converted bicycle wheel supports much of the litter’s weight, but this trail is miles of boulders and steep hairpin switchbacks, and the light is fading. In the beginning we tie a piece of webbing to the back of the litter for a tagline; four people hold the litter up and then a half-dozen other people grab onto this piece of webbing to keep the brakeless contraption from rocketing downhill with gravity. Nobody can see their feet, and this trail, like all trails, is too narrow to fit the litter in the middle with two people abreast on either side, so the people on the sides are intermittently mashed into trees, or have no footing and suddenly disappear downslope to be picked up at the next switchback. The folks on the front and back ends do not have a better time. Read more…

Prairie savannas dotted with Garry oak trees — the only native oak species in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia — used to be common throughout the Puget trough, including the San Juan Islands. As human development and Douglas fir have encroached, this unique ecosystem has shrunk to less than five percent of its historic range in this area, and birds like the Western bluebird, that need open spaces, have disappeared along with it.  Read more…