The Mountaineers is a big part of my life, it’s big a community which I very much love and appreciate! I’ve long been plugged into the Seattle branch and the climbing programs there.

If you are new to The Mountaineers, here are some links to help you orient:

• The organization’s homepage: https://www.mountaineers.org/
• The overall list of visible upcoming scrambling & climbing courses: https://www.mountaineers.org/courses/courses-clinics-seminars#c9=&b_start=0&c4=Climbing&c4=Scrambling
  (Note: Many courses repeat on a yearly cycle, and have an application period and sign-up during the late-fall or early-winter months, e.g. Oct, Nov, Dec., so to get in that’s when you need to be looking & applying. The actual course workshops/lectures/field-trips/etc. typically happen during the late-winter & spring months, mostly wrapping up by June. Then, during the summer-ish months, June through early October, anyone who is an approved Scramble Leader or Climb Leader can post Mountaineers Scrambles & Climbs as official-club-activities in the mountains, and students who were in courses need to sign up for and complete a certain number of those in order to fully graduate from their course.)
• If you’d like to sign up for a course but aren’t sure which one, this unofficial diagram may help you navigate the rather-complicated structure of available courses.
• If you have climbing experience outside of the Mountaineers and believe you qualify for ‘Equivalency’ for some course, read this page about Equivalency.

1. The Biggest Problem…
2. When Signing Up for Climbs…
3. What makes a good Leader-permission-request?
4. Getting more climbs posted
5. Pain-Points as a Climb Leader, and tech “solutions” we’ll never get
6. Some Bonus Info on Other Topics

The Biggest Problem…

Unfortunately, the most significant and most long-running problem faced there is that it is so hard to get on climbs, and has been for a long time. At least the official-club-climbs posted on the website. The problem is a huge asymmetry between the small number of official Climb Leaders who are posting trips, and the enormous number of students & graduates & other people trying to get on those trips. And I really do wish there were plenty of trips for everyone!! I love seeing people get outside and be active!! But a limited supply arises from issues with both the process of becoming an approved Climb Leader, (At what point is the level of friction in that process actually too much friction? Is the number of newly-approved Leaders unintentionally throttled more than necessary?) And also issues with the retention of active Climb Leaders: it’s entirely volunteer, and it’s kind of a rough job, it is so much easier to be a participant than it is to wear the responsibility of leadership (if the choice were there, pretty much everyone would rather sign up for a trip than lead one themselves), and enough people make it harder on leaders–whether they realize they are doing so or not–that leaders feel a lot of discouragement from leading trips. Fortunately, many leaders so strongly want to give that they overcome frequent-minor-discouragements for a very long time and still post a lot of trips, but retention isn’t going to last forever that way.

And I say to the the leaders who are active and posting trips: THANK YOU!!! No matter what trip you post, whatever personal-preference you have about how you post it or what you require for it, and even if you are only posting just one trip a year, still THANK YOU!!! You are giving a gift, and it is appreciated. Every single trip posted is one more trip posted, every single trip posted is an incremental addition. Every little bit helps, and the best path forward here is to get more trips posted!! Let’s create more leaders, and also make it more enjoyable for leaders to lead!!!

Okay, so what should you, as a student, be doing to get on official Mountaineers club climbs?

When Signing Up for Climbs…

Some notes about etiquette when signing up for other leaders’ climbs:

• If you send a leader a message asking about a climb:
  • be polite
  • before reaching out, do read the details of their trip posting, especially the “Leader notes” section!
  • make your request short, but high impact (leaders often get flooded with these, and thus spend less than a minute reading each)
  • have a climbing resume snippet:  a brief, but specific list of 3 or 4 trips you’ve previously completed that show evidence of your fitness for big days in the mountains and scramble capability for rock and snow. Past scrambles you’ve done are great for this.
  • remember that every climb leader is a different individual, but they are all just human, and are all volunteers, and unless they know you already, you are a stranger on the internet asking for a favor
  • hinting at stoke and positivity is always a bonus 🙂
• Read their “Leader Notes” of their posting carefully before messaging them.  Many will specify something like “I’m willing to hear permission-requests from Special-Group X starting on Y date, but I don’t want to receive permission requests from other students until after Z date.”  Please respect that.
• Another point on reading the “Leader Notes” carefully: they may have special fitness- or gear- or skill- requirements that they’re asking for in the Leader Notes.  If they do, make sure your message to them mentions that you see that, and tell them WHY you believe you meet those requirements.  Remember, they don’t know you yet.
• In any leader permission request, make sure you give a few concrete examples of things you have done that would give someone a very clear & measurable idea of what your fitness is.  (“I did X scramble which had Y feet of gain on Z date.”, etc)  (Not from this class, but I had some other student message me, and all they told me was that they had “General hiking fitness”, WTF does that mean??)  Climb Leaders do want to help, but many of them get flooded with emails that they get a bit tired of replying too.  Often times what they really care about in a leader-permission-request is not so much why you might be interested in their climb, but more-so can they be sure that adding you to their climb won’t risk slowing-down or turning-around their climb.
• Depending on the Climb Leader, it can be okay to send a permission-request to a Leader before their trip opens for registration.  If you are really lucky, sometimes they will even add you to the roster early.  However, make sure you’ve read their posting carefully: if they say anything that suggests they don’t want to be contacted early, definitely respect that.
• About being on a waitlist for a climb: The waitlist can mean different things to different Climb Leaders, but most Climb Leaders expect that if someone is on a waitlist, it means they are free to take a spot as soon as a spot opens.  If you are on a waitlist, but then you make other plans that are going to take priority, then remove yourself from the waitlist!
• If you’re going to cancel off of a trip, please really try to give the Climb Leader a few days heads up.  A week’s notice is great.  Two days notice is tolerable.  Cancelling on a Friday for a weekend climb is kinda shitty and causes a real hassle for the Climb Leader, since on top of their own packing & prep & last-minute coordinating, they now also have to start individually contacting people on the waitlist in a way that keeps the order fair, even though a lot of the waitlist people are unresponsive or had made some other commitment without taking themselves off the waitlist, and it just ends up being an unpleasant experience for everyone.

What makes a good Leader-permission-request?

Think of it from the Climb Leader’s point of view.  For me, leading a climb, my primary goals are to make sure that the climb succeeds: reaches the summit, doesn’t have any safety incidents, and perhaps especially: moves along quickly. I know going into many Basic Rock climbs that they’re likely to be 12 hours car-to-car. When everything goes smoothly and we get it done in 11 hours, or even less, I love it. Versus: when they drag on to 14 or 15 hours car-to-car, because one person on the climb didn’t do enough conditioning hikes, or didn’t practice enough with the technical skills, and everybody else has to wait for that one person, it begins to feel kind of excruciating. Of course I do everything I can to help everyone, but there’s only so much you can do to help someone who’s unprepared. So mainly I’m trying to use leader-permission-requests to screen & select for people that give me confidence that they can move at a reasonable pace throughout the whole day, plus some reassurance that they’ve had at least some practice with the technical skills related to that climb.

So, the critical components that boils down to are:

• Some specific numbers that give me a sense of their fitness for off-trail alpine approaches.  Example trips are my favorite thing to see, I’d prefer hearing about example trips more-so than hearing about what their in-town workout routine is.   I.e. 2 or 3 specific trips they’ve done in the past year (like “Recently did X hiking trail or scramble, which has Y amount of elevation gain, in Z amount of hours & minutes up.“)
• A specific example when they have used ice axe (and perhaps crampons too) for some steep-snow travel, to reassure me that they have that experience. Steep-snow can be really hazardous for people if they are shaky on their basic ice axe usage, so I want to know that I can trust everyone I let on the climb’s roster to have enough experience to be safe with this portion of the approach.
• A nice-to-have: some indication that this person does at least a little climbing at some climbing gym. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it’s nice to see.
• Another nice-to-have: I do rather like knowing who this person has primarily learned from, i.e. who their course-leader or SIG-leader has been in the Mountaineers, because I often know the other leaders, and sometimes I reach out to that other leader and ask them how-prepared the student in question tends to be.  (Though honestly most of the time I don’t reach out, I just make a call based on what the person asking has told me in their comments, because more emails is more work, and it’s all a lot of emails already.)  If you were a student of mine and you are reaching out to other Leaders, feel free to mention how I was involved as a leader or instructor for you in the past. If any other leader reaches out to me asking about you, I will happily tell them what I can remember about how well-prepared you were at workshops or field-trips that we interacted on, and/or about your sparkling personality, your admirable growth-mindset and how you stuck with hard things, etc., as long as you’ve given me reason to be able to honestly say those things, which most people do! 😊

Let me try showing what leader-permission-requests look like from the perspective of the leader reading them. Here’s an example of a really good one, and a really bad one. I believe I’ve removed anything that would have identified the people who sent them. Both of these are from people I’ve never met before, and didn’t know anything about, other than what they tell me in their comments.  Read them both, and think about: What do you now know about that person?  Would you want them for a climbing partner?  For the bad one, he gave me no real information about what his fitness was, or how prepared he would be for this climb.  I didn’t have the time to send him follow up emails asking questions about all that stuff, especially since he’s one out of SO MANY leader-permission-requests in my inbox. It was easier just to reply with a flat “No.” 

But all that said: Don’t worry, leaders want help. I want to let people on my climbs. I just need enough specific information from people (that doesn’t require extra digging or followups on my part) to reassure me that they won’t be a liability. 

Getting more climbs posted

Aside from requesting permission to get on trips that are currently posted to the Mountaineers website, there’s another not-so-secret way to get on climbs that can be way better:  See if you can get new trips created!! It would be absolutely fantastic if you’re able to make this happen!

As you meet people in the Mountaineers, network, and keep an eye out for Mountaineers members who have been approved as Climb Leaders (or Rock Climb Leaders, or Glacier Climb Leaders.)  Get to know them, ask them about routes they’ve enjoyed leading in the past or would like to lead sometime in the future.  Tell them about about your climbing goals that you’re excited about, especially if it’s a route on the list of Basic Climbs Routes & Places.  If they seem open to it, ask them if they’d be willing to post an extra climb for you.  Just asking nicely can be really powerful, everybody loves a chance to help someone else, especially when there’s a lot of positive vibes and a sense of appreciation.  The more you can make it easy for them (by being flexible on dates, or helping them organize it,) the more likely it is to happen.  If you can, try to nudge them: since they’re going to spend the day climbing anyway, might as well make it a roster of 4 or 6 or more so that there are also a couple of spots available for open-signup, it promotes social mixing and helps the whole club!

Another equally important thing to keep an eye out for is anyone who seems like they would make good Climb Leaders in the future.  Tell them that you see that in them!  It’s quite a compliment and will always be really appreciated, and it might help nudge them towards that path.  There’s a lot of people who certainly would make great Climb Leaders, but they just haven’t envisioned themselves in that role yet, so they haven’t pursued it.  I especially want to help people like that along!  If you talk to someone who seems interested in becoming a trip leader but isn’t sure what steps to take, send them these links:

• The current official info: https://www.mountaineers.org/volunteer/leader-resources/climbing-leadership-structure
• Also, an older guide that’s outdated on some of the approval-process-specifics, but may still be generally helpful: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X-71GyVPLfjrw7PUSb_6iM4NF2_dI7snoBSUegB3AtE/edit?usp=sharing

For some people who aren’t Climb Leaders yet but have potential, you might be able to talk them into seeking out a “Mentored Lead” with some other Climb Leader that they know, which could get a new trip posted, and see if they’re willing to add you as a participant from the beginning 🙂

The more we can do to encourage more climbs to get posted, and more people to become Climb Leaders, the better it is for everyone trying to get on climbs!

🙏 Help us increase the number of climbs posted!!! 🙏

Thank you so much for reading this. 😊

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Pain-Points as a Climb Leader, and tech “solutions” we’ll never get

Not all of these have tech-solutions, but in the spirit of thinking-out-loud and maybe brainstorming: Personally, these are some of my pain-points as a Climb Leader:

1. I feel sad when a climb with space for 3 participants is full, and has a 10-person waitlist, and I’m still getting leader-permission-requests to get on it. I feel sad for those people, it indicates to me that there aren’t enough other trips available for them to have a good sign up experience. Yeah, this isn’t a thing that there’s any tech-solution for, I just had to mention the emotion of it. The only solution is ultimately getting more climbs posted / more Climb Leaders. But that’s a bigger problem to solve.
2. It’s a pain-point when people send me a leader-permission-request yet have clearly not actually read any of my leader notes. I do think there’s a software user-interface-design issue here: the registration side-bar is colorful and on-screen, the eye is drawn to it, and may find the “Request Leader’s Permission” button first. Whereas the leader notes are often hidden off-screen when the webpage first loads, hidden and requiring a click of the [More+] button, people have to know to go looking for it. I kinda wish that in the UI, Leader’s Notes could be made more prominent or more eye-catching by default, or maybe better yet, the “Request Leaders Permission” button could be moved to inside the Leader’s Notes section, so it can only be clicked after at least expanding Leaders’s Notes and noticing that they’re there. I also recognize that this is tech change that probably isn’t feasible 😕
3. It’s a pain-point for me when someone cancels, specifically when I am limited on time to find a replacement. It’s the finding a replacement that’s the real pain-point underneath that. Maybe, a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” idea: what if there was a website-feature available to the trip leader, a button they could press, which would automatically email (or send a phone text for faster response?) to everyone on the waitlist saying: “Hey, you’re on the waitlist, and registration is already closed so you won’t be moved automatically, but someone cancelled and a spot is now open. Do you want it? If so, click this provided button or link and the website will put you in that spot.” If that process of getting positive-confirmation from someone on the waitlist that they will indeed fill a suddenly-open-spot last-minute were automated, it would reduce at least my frustration with last-minute cancellations substantially. This is probably too wishlisty though.
4. The whole back-and-forth sequence right now of someone emailing to request permission, emailing back to verbally grant them permission, then maybe they follow up and actually register is quite clunky. I wish rather than email, it was handled entirely by a UI within the website itself (email notifications would still be nice.) A dream solution: When a student clicks “request leaders permission” on the website, they get added to a list the website tracks of who has requested permission for this climb (and the trip-leader gets sent an email that says “Hey, you’ve got a new permission request!”, but that email is just an FYI.) The website has a UI for the trip-leader that shows the list of people who have requested permission for this trip, and for each of those people, it shows their name and info, it shows the text of the message that requestor wrote, it has a text-field for the trip leader to write a reply, and then the key feature here: a row of buttons on the website the trip leader can click for that person: “Accept: Reply & Add to Trip”, “Decline: Reply & Remove”, and “Reply only, without affecting registration status”. When the trip leader clicks one of those buttons (well, specifically the “Accept” button) on one of those listed leader-permission-requests, the requesting-person is immediately & automatically added to the trip roster by the website, there’s no onus on the requesting-person to come back later and click “Register” themselves. Eh, this would be a dream, but it’s probably a pipe-dream, I can’t imagine a change this big is even possible to our website. But man it would be nice.
5. When I go on a climb, and someone’s not fit enough, forcing the whole group to move like molasses. I recognize I have shot myself in the foot here at times: At times I’ve been a big softy, and let someone on who hadn’t yet done their Mt Si Conditioning Test. Then, surprise surprise, they were so much slower than everyone else in the group, even if I carried their pack for them in addition to my own. Anyway, clearly the fix here is a me-problem, I need to resist the urge to “help everyone” and to actually be a hard-ass about conditioning requirements, and not be lenient, for my own sanity’s sake, and for fairness to everyone on the trip else who did do the physical preparation. But a relatively-small website change could really help here: The pace drop-down of “Casual/Easy/Moderate/Challenging” is utterly meaningless, those are all subjective words, that will mean different things to everyone. (My “Easy” maybe someone else’s “Challenging”, or vice a versa.) I’d rather see a list of options like “This trip will move at an effort-level comparable to doing Mt Si with 20% of your body weight in…” then give time brackets, like “In <2hours”, “in <1h50m”, “in <1h40m”, “in <1h30m”, something concrete and measurable that’ll mean the same thing to all people reading it without being subjective. As a bonus, that also makes it less-judgemental wording if someone wants to post an intentionally slow-moving trip: it’s not a “slow person’s” trip, it’s an “intentionally more like a 2hr+ Mt Si pace,” to make space for people who do want to post trips that accommodate intentionally-slower paces. Maybe it would be nice if the website had a way for each person’s profile to have a “Mt Si w/ 20% pack” time-value (could be a privately-visible thing), but then would restrict or at least give a big visually-noticeable warning if they’re trying to request leader-permission for a trip that says it will go faster than the number in their profile.

Sorry to ramble so much. Just brainstorming, and venting feelings 🙂 I do love helping people and taking people out on trips that are new to them. There’s so much I wish we could change about the website, but I also recognize that very little change is likely to be technically feasible. I definitely personally understand how the massive work it takes to build and operationalize software, and how quickly that can make costs prohibitive without being a high-return-expected for-profit-corporation to be able to pay that cost. As a non-profit, we are in quite a tough spot, and if we have to go on just making the best of the wonky tech solutions we’ve got, that totally makes sense. 😅 Not much can be done other than ask all students & leaders to follow best-practices guides, and contort to use the website as it exists, even if it’s not ideal.

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Some Bonus Info on Other Topics

Finally, here are some other random links you may find helpful:

• I’d appreciate it if everyone would read my thoughts on Safety In Practice, and Advice for Teaching.
• For students new to the Basic Course, or one of its modular equivalents like the “Following Alpine Rock” course, here’s a gear-guide specific to the gear for Basic Rock climbs. (Also, this is what the club means by “Basic Rock” climb, and a nice trip-report from a student about being on a Basic Rock climb to give an example. And here are some little additional thoughts about how overnights and rock climbs may relate.)
• For graduates of the Basic Course who are interested in getting on the sharp end, and beginning lead-climbing, here’s some of my personal opinions on gear for leading on bolts & the beginnings of leading on trad.
• In the event of an emergency in the mountains where calling for help becomes necessary, I recommend printing & carrying the first page of this linked doc to help you formulate a useful call for help.
• There’s tons of things I wish we could improve about the Mountaineers. I have tons of personal opinions about what the Basic course should be, how course-applications should be managed, and what might be a-bit-too-much-friction in the new-leader approval process. Though with all of this stuff: If you agree with me on any of the above points, great!  If you disagree, that’s great too!  Either way, it doesn’t matter yet, all we’ve done is talk about it.  None of these changes will happen from just talking about it.  We need someone (if not you, then who?) to take ownership of an idea here, and champion it, carry it forward.  Come to Climbing Committee meetings.  Be the advocate there for the idea you want to see happen, either at the meeting, or more likely by identifying the right person to talk to after the meeting.  And more importantly, volunteer to do any work necessary to implement that change.  Don’t just complain, instead actively work to make things better.  If you want to see the change happen, you have to put the time and effort in to make it happen.