The Mountaineers
Enjoy access to our quarterly Mountaineer magazine, keeping you up-to-date with everything our organization and community have been up to. Hear from regular contributors on topics from training exercises to trail tips, and read features from our members sharing stories from the outdoors. We encourage you to access all of our updates, stories, tips, and more in the tree free online magazine today.
Ecological literacy – part of which requires being able to read and understand the landscape – requires continuous engagement with and attention to your surroundings. I sheepishly admit that my mind prefers wandering to anywhere but where I’m meant to be paying attention.
-Skye Michel, Editor
The theme for this edition is "Conversations with the land," and our features and recurring columns host an inspiring array of authors who understand the land with reverence, empathy, intuition, and careful attentiveness. In this issue, you'll learn that a conversation can take a wide range of forms, such as a shared olfactory experience, devouring naturalist guides, advocating for the lands and waters you cherish, or measuring the resilience of your stomach against the altitude.
Learning to be in conversation with the land involves patience, but we are all capable of speaking its language. Whether you err on the side of ecological fluency and can translate the cues of the terrain where you recreate, or are still discovering which stomach-cramp-inducing-berries to avoid consuming, there’s something to learn in every conversation. I hope the stories in this edition encourage you to tune your ears, open your eyes, and listen to what our lands and waters have to tell us.
