Tacoma Snowshoeing Committee

Call it snowshoeing, winter hiking, or winter travel, The Mountaineers refuses to leave you inside when it gets cold outside.

Get outside while it's cold, beautiful and there are no crowd's!
Register now for Basic Snowshoeing, Backcountry Snowshoeing and Winter Camping.

Basic Snowshoeing

This course provides students with a solid foundation in snowshoeing. Topics covered are snowshoe techniques and travel, winter clothing, gear selection and conditioning for snowshoeing. We’ll have recommendations for where to go, what to rent and what to buy.

Successful completion will allow the student to participate in Easy and Easy+ snowshoe outings. It will also allow an interested student to continue on to the next level course; Backcountry Snowshoe.

There will be a discount for people who want to take all three snowshoe courses (Basic Snowshoeing, Backcountry Snowshoeing and Winter Camping) and register at one time. If you wish to take advantage of this option, see Winter Travels - Tacoma and sign up for that instead of the three courses individually.

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Backcountry SnowshoeING

The Backcountry Snowshoe Skills course is designed for adventurers who want to gain the skills and experience to handle more challenging snowshoe routes and terrain than those offered in Easy or Easy+ trips.

Moderate and Strenuous trips are, in many cases, non-technical mountain-climbing routes with mountain peaks for destinations.

The course will cover information and skills needed to survive in backcountry terrain, including introductory avalanche awareness and response, incident response, emergency shelters, self-belay and self-arrest skills.

Winter Camping

Learn to make a comfortable camp in the snow. This course will cover both winter tent camping and non-emergency winter shelters (primarily snow caves, but touching on igloos and other options).

The course consists of one lecture and one all-weekend field trip, which includes building a snow cave!

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Winter Travels

Winter Travels is a combination of Basic Snowshoeing, Backcountry Snowshoeing and Winter Camping.

Winter Travels combines all three snowshoe courses taught in the Mountaineer's Tacoma Branch. It it exactly the same as taking Basic Snowshoeing, Backcountry Snowshoeing and Winter Camping. The advantage is that there is just one registration for all three courses and, for the novice, there are no prerequisites and you may proceed to the Backcountry course before actually graduating Basic Snowshoeing provided that the basic classroom lecture, basic field trip and one Mountaineer's basic snowshoe trip have been completed.

As an incentive to have students commit to all three courses this way, there is a fee reduction as compared to signing up for each individually. There is also only one conservation activity since this is only considered one course. (Please feel free to volunteer more if you choose.)

All requirements for each of the modules still exist. The same five year window to complete all the requirements still applies.

There are no prerequisites for this course.