My goal in the Mountaineers, more than anything else, is for it to be easier for people to sign up for climbs. (Well, really any activity, but climbs happen to be my personal area of interest.) I want to see more climbs posted. I want to see more people getting out, social mixing, and doing active things together in the outdoors, and just generally having positive experiences. I want this both for more people, as well as for already-engaged people more often. I imagine we all share these goals.  It’s often easy to agree on goals. Often times where framing & conversation gets more complicated is in the how —> “How do we make strides towards these goals?” At the really boiled-down core, my philosophy here is a philosophy of more, not a philosophy of less.

Acknowledging the Problem

It is really hard to sign up for Mountaineers Club Climbs as a participant / Basic Student / etc.   There definitely is a lot of very-understandable frustration & difficulty around the experience of someone who is interested in finding participant-spots on Mountaineers climbs trying to find actually-available-spots.  They are indeed super scarce.  This has been an ongoing problem for more than the past 10 years.  When someone goes looking, what they see is that:

1. A lot of climbs are already full.  Regardless of how a climb is set up or configured, many climbs already have full rosters and shockingly-long-waitlists.  (Yes, this absolutely is a major bummer.  Yes, we all wish that was different.  There simply isn’t enough supply-of-climbs to meet the demand-for-climbs.  The only way to address this pain-point is to increase the numbers, increase the supply of posted climbs.)
2. Another more-nuanced complaint I’ve come to understand:  Students are seeing a lot of climbs to wade through aren’t currently accessible to themselves specifically.  I.e. a lot of climbs in the search-results are set up with the mechanism “Priority for such-and-such-specifc-group until X date,” worded in the freeform-text leader notes.  And/or a lot of climbs are set up with the note “Don’t send me leader-permission-requests until X date” in the freeform-text leader notes.  (Not that either of those mechanisms are a bad thing themselves, in fact they’re quite necessary, and from a big-picture-point-of-view, we should be very very glad that there even are “a lot of climbs” at all!  We’re not trying to reduce that number of total climbs.)  The problem is, for that individual user, when “today” is still earlier on the calendar than that “X date” (for either type of “X date”) for a particular climb, seeing these climbs in search-results is a lot of clutter, thus may be frustrating to a person searching for participant-spots, because there’s nothing actionable the person searching can do with any of them at the moment.)
3. Building on #2 above: it is a very onerous user-experience for the person who is searching for a roster-spot that is accessible to them, since there’s currently no software tool to filter down to what is accessible to them.  Instead, they have click into each climb, and read the freeform-text of each, which is a slow and tedious process.  Furthermore, there’s a ton of variability between posted climbs about where in the freeform text those dates may be mentioned, if they are mentioned at all. (The date when leader-permission-requests will start being welcomed, or the date when registration opens to everyone beyond some original prioritized-group.)  All that variability on the placement (or even existence) of that information makes the user-experience extra difficult here, especially when manually wading through dozens of climbs.  (And we do want there to be even more climbs posted than there currently are!  More climbs would definitely be a good thing overall! And at the same time, we can also acknowledge website-usability-headache that searching-participants are running into here with our current system.)

The Dangers of Incorrectly-Describing the Problem

Pretty often, I see people frustrated by the difficulty of finding climbs they can sign up for.  (And as I acknowledged above: That frustration is totally valid, there are very real reasons to feel that way!)  Unfortunately, I have noticed that almost-equally-often, without really thinking about it, many people are quick to attribute that frustration towards things that aren’t actually the real problem.  Specifically, I’ve seen people leap to: “man, all these activities require leader-permission to sign up for, that’s why I can’t sign up for any!  That way of posting an activity is the problem!”  That kind of thinking is a misunderstanding of the real problem.  It is not the fact that many activities require leader permission that’s your problem. Seeing “those activities” as “the problem” is misguided.  It is NOT a “problem” that activities that are posted that other people get to go on.  It is NOT a “problem” that some climbs are posted in a way that doesn’t work for you personally; the real problem is the lack-of climbs getting posted in a way that DOES work for you personally!  The real problem here is within the negative space, the lack or shortage of a thing, and I get it; negative-space is inherently just slightly harder to conceptualize.  And this may seem like a subtle difference, but how you define the problem will define what people will focus on when trying to solve the problem, and will make a world of difference to what kind of “solutions” end up getting tried down the line.  Accidentally attributing the blame for a problem on the wrong thing has a high potential to set people on the path towards the wrong solution, and even the potential to actually make things worse instead of better.

I’ve heard statements like “Leader’s Permission is used far more frequently than intended” which is unfortunately a highly misleading choice of phrasing. It carries an implication of “we wish there were fewer activities posted that required leader permission,” which is very nearly identical to saying “we wish there were fewer activities posted…”  I am fairly confident that this is not a genuine expression of what any of us really want.  I believe we would all be quite sad if we “got what was wished for” in that language, and actually saw fewer total activities posted as a result, even if it was accomplished by “only losing ones that had required-leader-permission.”   A phrasing I’d strongly prefer is “We would like to see MORE activities posted with this-configuration or that-configuration.”  Using a language of “More”, to indicate our underlying philosophy is indeed a philosophy of “More” and not “Less.”

Why Specific-Language Here Matters

How we frame a problem has a lot of quiet-but-powerful influence downstream; it does a lot to shape our patterns of thinking in terms of how we try to address the problem. The language a problem is framed in subtly creates a box, such that it’s far easier to think of solutions within that box rather than outside of it. If we broadcast a culture of “there should be fewer activities posted that require leader permission”, a lot of people’s minds will initially jump to considering strategies that have a dampening or discouraging effect on the number of activities posted, since that’s how the problem was framed. If, instead, we broadcast a culture of “We would like to see MORE activities posted and open for sign up”, a lot of people’s minds will initially jump to considering strategies that have an encouraging or incremental affect on the number of activities posted, since that’s how the problem was framed. And to be real simple about it: things that discourage/dampen the number of activities posted == bad, and things that encourage/increment the number of activities == good. At least from my point of view, the use of the “leader permission” mechanism is not our core problem. The shortage of climbs available for sign up is.  If our language directs attention away from the thing that is actually our core-problem, and instead directs attention towards “fixing” a thing that wasn’t the core-problem after all, then there’s a real risk of accidentally making things worse.  I just want to make sure that we’re all thinking about that clearly, since how we frame our thoughts will end up influencing the frame of what we say, and the frame of what we say will influence the policies & strategies that get proposed and possibly eventually implemented.

I invite you all: if you hear someone using the language of “Less”, please immediately encourage them to reframe their point in the language of “More” instead.  I imagine it’s what they meant to be saying anyway, and I’d hate for them to be misunderstood.  Choosing to phrase our goals (and really all communication) to focus on a philosophy of “More” is absolutely crucial towards actually getting MORE climbs posted, and getting MORE climbs posted is absolutely crucial in order to move the needle on the signup-difficulty problem in a positive direction.

Why Leader-Permission is Actually A Good Thing

It appears to me that for the vast majority of climbs posted with “Require Leader Permission” turned on, it’s an indication that that specific leader wouldn’t feel comfortable posting that trip specifically for the Mountaineers without the “Leader Permission” mechanism.  In other words, the existence of the “Leader Permission” mechanism gives hesitant leaders a way to post climbs that they wouldn’t otherwise post.  Said another way, the existence of the “Leader Permission” mechanism leads to more climbs posted than there would be if that mechanism didn’t exist.

For a technical & potentially-dangerous activity like alpine climbing, I’m not at all surprised that the majority of Climb Leaders (all of whom are volunteers, doing an entirely voluntary thing) appear to feel that way: that they’re not willing to let “just anyone” sign up for the trips they’ve posted, without at least a little chance to do some vetting before letting a person they might never have met before on to their roster. (And the Mountaineers’ “badge” system is woefully inadequate here, since someone having a particular badge or not doesn’t indicate anything about whether they’re highly-skilled or minimally-skilled at that thing, or if they’ve practiced 10 times this year versus they happen to be 5 years out-of-practice, etc. Whether someone has a skill-badge or not can be an interesting single-data-point, but it’s far from a replacement for actual-conversation for trip-specific vetting.)

Also, mathematically, do a thought-experiment here:  Imagine that there had been 88 successful Basic climbs posted in 2024, made up of 63 climbs that DID require-leader-permission, and 25 that did NOT require-leader-permission.  If you use language that focuses on changing the number of climbs that DO require-leader-permission, then which of the following two scenarios do you really think would be better for the cultural health of the Mountaineers?

1. What if, in a future year, the number of leader-permission-required climbs ended up being reduced by 50%?  That would mean we’d now get 32 climbs that DID require-leader-permission, and 25 that did NOT require-leader-permission.  The resulting total number would be 57 available climbs that year.
2. What if, in a future year, the number of leader-permission-required climbs ended up being increased by 50%?  That would mean we’d now get 95 climbs that DID require-leader-permission, and 25 that did NOT require-leader-permission.  The resulting total number would be 120 available climbs that year.

It’s an extreme example to illustrate the point; I don’t really think anything is going to move the needle by 50% (32 climbs) either way in a single year. But what about by 10 climbs? Or even 5? Every little bit makes a difference. With the same number of total students competing to get on climbs, I’m quite confident that scenario #1 would make it a lot harder to get on climbs, and scenario #2 would make it a lot easier to get on climbs. (With more climbs existing in total, a lot more rosters would have open spaces, and I guarantee that more open spaces on rosters will make leaders quicker to grant permission to sign up, among other effects.)  And to be clear: I don’t directly care whether climbs are posted as requires-leader-permission or not.  Rather, my entire point is that I want to simply encourage “more” climbs posted, of any type, and thus think heavily about what policy & culture could possibly do to encourage “more“.  Then within that goal of “more”, I do end up caring about the leader-permission-mechanism as a subpoint of that larger goal, since I recognize that it is currently playing a role in how motivated and/or comfortable leaders feel about posting more vs fewer climbs.

Other Mechanisms in the Climb Sign-Up Process

Okay, I’ve used the “requires leader permission” mechanism a lot as an example above, simply because using a concrete example is easier to wrap our heads around than an abstraction, or a list of many possibilities.  But it’s not the only mechanism that (incorrectly) gets “blamed” for sign-up difficulty.  If looking at any particular posted climb, there are a lot of different dimensions that affect apparent “ease of sign up” for that particular climb:

• Was the “requires leader permission” mechanism used or not?
• Did the climb give “priority” to a specific group or not?
• For climbs that gave “priority”, were people outside of the priority group able to at least join the waitlist?
• Did the waitlist move or not?
• Was the climb’s waitlist so long that it felt discouraging?
• Did the climb rely on “Registration open date” and thus favor people with at-the-computer jobs as opposed to selecting participants by some other criteria?
• Was a lottery used to select who would be on the climb or not?
• and probably other dimensions I didn’t think of…

In a lot of the sections of this blog post where I’ve used the leader-permission mechanism as a concrete example, you could just as easily substitute in the “priority for a certain group” mechanism, and make the same points about it.  With all of these, there is a temptation to blame that bullet point, a temptation to say “That aspect of posted-climbs is the root cause of why it’s hard to sign up for climbs”, even though phrasing it that way is quite misleading, and misses the bigger reason lurking out there in the negative space.  Instead of focusing any of those bullet points individually, I think what we really care about is: how do we get MORE climbs posted??   For *most* of those bullet points above: personally, I don’t care if the answer was “yes” or “no”, I just care that the climb indeed got posted:  it’s not that I care if the “leader permission” mechanism was used, or if that’s some specific group the leader wanted to help; I DO care is that one more climb got posted than we would have otherwise, that a few more participants now can get out on a Mountaineers activity, and thus there are a few less participants in the “hustling” pool of people who feeling stressed & competing-with-eachother-for whatever other limited participant-spots exist on other climbs that same weekend.  Every additional posted climb helps.  For nearly every real example I’ve seen, the details of how a particular climb was set up would NOT make us actually wish the leader HADN’T posted it.

Rather than doing any discouraging, or framing things in a language of “less”, we should focus on what we DO want MORE of

I think we (anyone in the Mountaineers who cares about this) would be better off spending our time discussing/defining/encouraging what we DO want MORE of.  If we wish there were more climbs that didn’t utilize the “requires leader permission” mechanism, we definitely DON’T want any of the “requires leader permission” climbs to go away (not get posted), but perhaps we DO want to talk about what would encourage/incentivize existing-leaders to post that are set up a certain way, and also encourage/incentivize more non-leaders to become new Climb Leaders so that they add to the number of people who at least could post claims that are set up a certain way that we want to encourage.

If we truly care about accessibility, we should focus what the most-exclusionary, least-accessible type of climb is:

The least-accessible type of climb are the climbs that are happening without even being posted on the Mountaineers website.  We all know that very frequently, people who had at some point been a student in the Mountaineers, choose to organize and do a climb with just their friends, and don’t even post that climb on the website.  (Often referred to as a “private” climb.)  That type of climb is inherently more-closed than any type of climb posted on the website.  That type of climb isn’t even visible to most people looking for participant-opportunities; those unposted climbs are effectively invisible to the vast majority of Mountaineers students, graduates, equivalency-holders, etc.  They also don’t even show up in OUR data (the Mountaineers organization’s data), making it difficult to know how frequently they occur.  Though anecdotally, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of evidence that unposted climbs happen especially frequently.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the number is around 1,000 per year!    (There are a few hundred routes & places in Washington where climbing is possible, and the summer-climbing-season is either ~35 days if you just count Saturdays & Sundays, or ~120 days if you count weekdays too.  I’ve personally observed that many popular routes & places often easily have 10 parties on any one Saturday or Sunday (The Tooth?  Baker? Vantage?), and when I checked the Mountaineers website, I always notice that vanishingly few of those parties had actually posted their trip on our website.  And when I stop & chat with those other parties, it’s extremely frequent that someone within the party does indeed have some connection or history with The Mountaineers organization.  Of course, it’s completely fine that people do this, we cannot begrudge them doing so.  But I think the interesting question for us (The Mountaineers) here is: why is it that so many people so frequently prefer not-posting-climbs??  Is there anything we can do about that?  What kind of policies or culture could we put out there that would make people more willing, (or more able, in terms of reduced hurdles to jump over,) to actually post a trip as an official and visible Mountaineers club trip, rather than a private trip?

What is it that motivates leaders to post climbs to the Mountaineers website??

This.  This is the really crucial question.  One that I’d like to explore more.

One element I have to at least give a quick mention to:  specific groups of people often are the motivation for leaders to post climbs in the first place.  In any case, the absolute key is making more leaders want to post trips, and also having more leaders actively posting trips!!

Why DO people post climbs?

(An early start to a brainstormed-list that likely needs to be filled out more.)

Could be any subset of combination of the following:

• They’re invested in some specific group of people (e.g., one specific SIG), and they know those students need help.  The direct human connection to another specific human or specific small-group-of-humans is a lot more motivating than “open sign up.”
• If they were directly asked by another human who is in need, that can be really powerful, and motivate that leader to post a climb for that specific human on a day or weekend that they hadn’t previously planned on. I’d love it if they did that, and then since they’re spending the day anyway, I’d also love it if they were able to add a few more spaces to the roster-size as well so that they can both help the person who asked, and help a few more interested-participants out there in the larger club too!
• I think student-graduation-requirements accounts for a surprising amount of the reason behind why Leaders post climbs at all.  (Case study about when the Basic program switched from requiring 3-climbs-to-graduate to 2-climbs-to-graduate.  The number of climbs posted seemed to drop by 1/3rd right along with that.)
• To get to climb a specific route which that Climb Leader personally wants to climb? Maybe. While I think this could be motivating, I do not think the current Mountaineers system does much to encourage it: Anyone who’s gotten as far as getting approved as a Climb Leader who could post climbs has been around long enough to have plenty of existing-climbing-partners already, and I’m not sure I see what reason they would have to post a personal-goal climb to the Mountianeers website, rather than just ask their existing-climbing-partners and organize a private climb. If thinking about it through the lens of what would be in the “self interest” of someone who’s already a Climb Leader, posting a climb on the Mountaineers website has little personal up-side, but a plenty of potential for personal down-side to that Climb Leader, since it opens them up to all the little-headaches that potential-participants may inject into it. Instead, I think that most climbs posted to the Mountaineers website are done so primarily from a place of selflessness and altruism. (Which is cool and all, it is nice that people do that!! But I also worry: man, the Mountaineers organization is really relying hard on the supply of selflessness & altruism here, it seems a little “all eggs in one basket” for the organization to rely so completely on that. I don’t know what they could do about it though.)
• (TODO, better fill this list out. What other reasons are real for people out there?)

Why DON’T people post climbs?

(An early start to a brainstormed-list that likely needs to be filled out more.)

• There’s a pretty darn high barrier to entry for even becoming a Climb Leader these days.  (More thoughts on that) I’ve seen a lot of people initially want to help, want to become Climb Leaders and be part of the solution to the climb-scarcity-problem, only to get bogged down & fully discouraged by just how very many hoops an experienced-climber has to jump though in order to get approved as a Climb Leader, realizing that it’s comparatively much less of a hassle to organize private climb with their friends instead of for the Mountaineers.
• Dealing with potential-participants who cause headaches adds up. In my experience, the headaches are small, but many many small headaches do add up. A few people don’t read the “Leader’s Notes”, and/or don’t provide useful information when sending a leader-permission-request: that’s a small headache. A few people cancel off of trip-rosters last-minute, forcing the leader to put more time into re-organizing a climb they thought they had already organized: that’s a small headache. A few people aren’t really prepared fitness-wise, and somehow make what could have been an 11-hour day stretch out agonizingly into a 15-hour day, that really didn’t have to be that long: well this one is actually a pretty significant headache. Or, someone in the community huffishly throws shade at how a Climb Leader set up their climb’s posting on the website, implying that it was “bad” that they used the leader-permission-mechanism, or “bad” that they posted this climb to help a specific subgroup or specific person. Each of these things happen, not all the time, but with a pesky partial regularity. These headaches add up, and more often than not, at least one of them will happen on seemingly every climb I post, making me think to myself “omg, this is a reminder of why I shouldn’t post climbs publicly on the website.” (It’s kind of amazing–and a real credit to the incredible altruism of Climb Leaders in general–that our organization has any Climb-Leader-retention at all!)
• Route-repetition can get boring. For example, specific to “Basic Rock” climbs, the Mountaineers has kind of a weird historical-precedent-definition of what a “Basic Rock” route is, leading to their only being about 7 feasible routes total that are allowed to be counted towards the Rock-portion of Basic graduation. Speaking for myself, I’ve climbed all of them. If I post a Basic Rock climb on the website to help students in need of credit, it kinda just has to be a repeat of one of those 7 particular routes over and over and over again. For new Climb Leaders, how many times will they post a Basic Rock climb before they feel tired of the routes on that small list too?
• Personally, I find that posting a climb for the Mountaineers has a pretty high opportunity-cost. Specifically: I’ve got a group of friends who is going to make outdoor-adventure plans together pretty much every weekend. They all were part of the Mountaineers, and that’s who we met, but each of them has been pushed away doing club-official things in one way or another over time. I can either be part of making plans with them, and hanging out with them; or I can post a climb for the Mountaineers club, effectively guaranteeing that my personally-closer-friend-group will hang out without me on that day. I’ll still post a Mountaineers climb here and there, but it does mean choosing to spend a day with random-participants who cause many small headaches, while my other friends hang out without me and go climb or ski something else more-interesting without me. I do still post some Mountaineers club climbs, but in terms of really understanding why I don’t post more often than I do, this is a big contributing reason.
• (TODO, better fill this list out. What other reasons are real for people out there?)

P.S. Believe it or not, I had a lot of this post written as a private-draft before I read the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Unsurprisingly, I am a huge fan of the message in the book “Abundance”, and I highly recommend adding it to your reading list if you haven’t done so already.