News & Events

Think back to your first big outdoor goal. How hard the journey appeared at first - how daunting the end goal seemed. But then, through hard work and perseverence, you reached the figurative (or literal) summit and glowed in the sense of your own accomplishment. We've all realized the benefit of a good plan, hard work, and the excitement of accomplishing it.  Well - finding  the next visionary to lead The Mountaineers into the future is much the same. Read more…

We launched our new website on May 5, 2014. It was a tremendous undertaking and has only improved since its launch. It was just featured on Plone's website as one of their success stories and as a project on Jazkarta's website. Read more…

Need some new gear for winter? Come to the Seattle Program Center November 20-22, 2015 to buy some Sherpa Adventure Gear! Read more…

Meet your fellow Mountaineers and learn more about our programs and activities at this 40 minute information session, and stay after to chat with your fellow members and guests. Read more…

The Mountaineers Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following board endorsed candidates to the membership for consideration in the upcoming Board of Directors elections: Chloe Harford, Kara Stone, Steve Swenson, and Tom Varga. Read more…

Based on a true story, Everest depicts the saga of two expeditions caught in a sudden storm on the world's highest peak. Full of drama and high-altitude highjinx, Hollywood has tried yet-again to portray climbing in a realistic way for a mass audience. Did they finally get it right? Read more…

Join One by One for the premiere of Shout Gladi Gladi at The Mountaineers Seattle Program Center on October 8 to learn more about the fight for maternal healthcare in Africa. Read more…

With great sadness we share the news of the passing of Timothy Hagan, a long-time member of The Mountaineers community and a prominent peak-bagger.  Read more…

In the spring of 1990 - when the US, China, and Soviet Union were Cold War enemies and real war seemed imminent -  I organized and led the Mount Everest International Peace Climb. But there were personal reasons for the climb as well. The expedition not only focused on peace and the environment, it fostered a global mountaineering community and inspired efforts to save a young life. Read more…

In the spring of 1990 - when the US, China, and Soviet Union were Cold War enemies and real war seemed imminent -  I organized and led the Mount Everest International Peace Climb. Planned on for the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, we sought not only to reach the summit, but to send a message to world leaders about the state of the environment.  Read more…

In the spring of 1990 - when the US, China, and Soviet Union were Cold War enemies and real war seemed imminent -  I organized and led the Mount Everest International Peace Climb. Despite language barriers, foul weather, equipment failures, and illness, our expedition of mountaineers from enemy countries reached the summit and changed the conversation from one of war to one of peace. With so much tragedy and death on Everest the past couple of years - especially  on the Tibetan side of Mt. Everest where we climbed -  I want to share why I still see Everest as a symbol of hope.  Read more…

Interested in learning how to snowshoe, kayak, or navigate in the backcountry? Want to meet some new exploration buddies? Have a gear wishlist a mile long, or have some extra gear you'd like to unload? Come to The Mountaineers Seattle Program Center from 6-8:30pm on Monday, September 21! Read more…

The Mountaineers Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following board endorsed candidates to the membership for consideration in the upcoming Board of Directors elections: Chloe Harford, Kara Stone, Steve Swenson, and Tom Varga. Each of these candidates is eager to serve The Mountaineers, and possesses the professional skills and personal commitment needed to further The Mountaineers' mission.  Read more…

Twenty-five years ago Cold War Enemies, united by climbing, stood together on the highest point on earth honoring world peace and the environment. Join us September 17 to celebrate this ground-breaking anniversary.  Read more…

Admission is FREE and registering will guarantee entry at Wild Rivers Night.  Read more…

Established in 1979, Mountainfilm is dedicated to educating, inspiring and motivating audiences about environments, cultures, issues and adventures. Read more…

We've been busy this summer and not just with hiking, climbing, and paddling. We've been adding some cool new features to our website and are excited to unveil mountaineers.org 2.4 including improvements for books, feedback surveys, and searches. Read more…

project plan, scope and execution

The future of mountaineers.org

Technology Blog

Have an Idea?

Project Plan, Scope and execution

The Mountaineers has historically made technology decisions based on immediate needs, without a clear focus on governance, effectiveness, or efficiency of the entire technology environment. While this has allowed us to change how we run the organization for the better, it has also been a challenge for us to keep up with the pace of change. In this project, we've taken a proactive and strategic approach with a holistic view of how we've used technology in the past and examined the possibilities for how we'd like to use it in the future.

In 2010 we started gathering feedback from volunteers, members, and guests that became the outline of our design requirements. Starting in May 2013, we created our website using an "agile development" process which allowed us to test our website as we created it. We completed internal functional development (how stuff works) and testing, and content development (words and images) in late February 2014. We conducted external "beta" testing with a group of key volunteers from around our organization in March to April. The final week of April and early May we spent fixing the bugs uncovered during testing and completing the content development. We launched on May 5th, an ideal launch date because it is a transitional period for us. Many courses that started in winter and spring are winding down and the spring and summer activity programs are just starting to wind up.

Our ultimate goal with our new website was to simplify and improve as many processes as possible.

• We designed and built simple tools for our leaders, making it easier for our volunteers to volunteer: schedule and manage activities, schedule and manage courses, manage committee rosters and documents. Are you a leader? Learn more about all of these features on our Leader Resources page.

• We improved the process for people to join, register for courses and activities, and donate.

• We added new features like our badges and blogs and created new web pages where people can easily learn about who we are, what we do and where we gather.

We are quite pleased with the results. Our new website is friendly, contemporary, and modern. Our courses and activities are more accessible, making it easy for everyone to explore, learn about and protect the outdoors with us. We created a blog that highlights our skilled volunteers, showcases our diverse conservation efforts, and directs everyone to our vast portfolio of outdoor knowledge.

The Future of mountaineers.org

As you can imagine, we’re excited about this project and what it means for our members and our programs. Watching this evolve from early user interface discussions to a nearly completed system has been fantastic. But we’re not done... and, arguably, we will never be done. Our launch on May 5, 2014 was just the beginning of a constantly evolving technology platform. We will work to continually enhance our new website with improvements and new features to better meet our needs.

Through the course of this project, we identified many more features that were not in the May 5th launch. Some were because of complexity, some because of time, and for many, we want everyone to get used to our new system and its capabilities before enhancing or adding certain features. We have dozens of items on our backlog. Some are very important, and some are not as important. We will review and prioritize these items and any identified by you, our volunteers, members and guests. Here is our list of top priority enhancements:

• Integrating book purchase into the shopping cart so that members to purchase books along with a membership and course.

• Importing activity and course history so that members can review what they’ve done and staff can create reports. Note that all prerequisites one might need for activity registration are the badge rosters that were imported at launch.

• Improved accounting functionality and integration.

• Improved course functionality, mostly aimed at making instructor registration easier to find and mange.

• Map search in addition to the list-style faceted search for activities, courses and Route & Places. A cool feature that requires a small amount of development.

Have an idea?

Log on to feedback.mountaineers.org, our feedback and help desk system powered by UserVoice, and tell us about it!

Future Website Enhancements Archive

Before we started using feedback.mountaineers.org to organize ideas and report on their status, we kept them in spreadsheets. The Future Website Enhancements Archive folder contains all of these.

The Mountaineers pioneered alpine climbing in North America. Join us on August 26 to revel in the terrible ways climbing has been portrayed in the movies ever since. The "Arc'Teryx Bad Movie Night" is the premier event you didn't know you wanted!  Read more…

Meet your fellow Mountaineers and learn more about our programs and activities at this 40 minute information session, and stay after to chat with your fellow members and guests. Read more…

This weekend Conrad and his teammate Renan Ozturk will be in Seattle on Sunday, August 16 at the Guild 45th Theatre for a special Q & A after the 1:30pm screening of Meru. Read more…

It’s with sadness that I announce Martinique Grigg has decided to step down from her role as executive director of The Mountaineers August 13.  She has served in this position since December 2009. Read more…

Serving as executive director of the Mountaineers for nearly six years has been the high point of my professional career.  I’m pleased we have achieved so much: financial sustainability, significant programmatic advancement, and growth in every part of the organization. Read more…

Sally Kleinfeldt is one of the people who helped us design our fantastic new website. She attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference last March and was inspired to submit a session proposal for the 2016 conference. She knows we have lots of useful information to share with the nonprofit community, and her session proposal was accepted! Read more…

Meet your fellow Mountaineers and learn more about our programs and activities at this 40 minute information session, and stay after to chat with your fellow members and guests. Read more…

That's a wrap! After more than two months of website development, we're happy to announce the launch of several new and improved features. We added to or improved something in nearly every part our website! Read more…

Hope everyone enjoyed Father’s Day! Read more…

Meet your fellow Mountaineers and learn more about our programs and activities at this 40 minute information session, and stay after to chat with your fellow members and guests. Read more…

NW Peaks Brewery is looking to The Mountaineers for someone who could offer informative, interesting presentations on topics that will  inspire the community to get outside, enjoy the wilderness that surrounds Seattle, and to get involved in protecting our wild spaces. This series is a new aspect of this vision and will feature one or two speakers giving a 30-45 minute audio/visual presentation, Q&A, and discussion or mingling with attendees.  Read more…

You know what is great? Beer and Mountaineers. You know what is even better? When you combine those two things. Read more…