The Mountaineers
At our 'Breakthrough' fundraising Gala in 2015, we unveiled a capstone video project documenting The Mountaineers rich history of exploration, education, and conservation. For our 2018 Gala, we celebrated the theme of Adventure With Purpose, and it felt appropriate to update our favorite video to reflect our efforts to transform lives and protect our wild places for generations to come. We updated our video again in 2020 to reflect our learnings around equity and inclusion, specifically with regards to erasure language of Indigenous peoples.
We are mountaineers - Adventure with Purpose
We are Mountaineers.
We are explorers and adventurers. Wanderers on sacred lands.
We are groundbreakers. Founded in 1906 by 151 visionaries at a time when a trip into our unmapped Pacific Northwest mountain ranges meant riding on a luggage car, then picking a faraway peak and finding our way to the top with only a compass and a keen eye.
We shared summits and explored waterways and built trails to uncover unique and challenging landscapes.
Half of the first Mountaineers were women. They wore veils and long petticoats, but summited mountains all the same.
We helped create the North Cascades Wilderness Area and pass the National Wilderness Act.
Early mountaineers established methods for safe travel in the mountains. The same methods our volunteers still teach today. We wrote the book on mountaineering. Literally.
Our members founded REI, seeking better gear to take them further. Jim Whittaker, the first American on the summit of Mt. Everest, and Fred Beckey, the first Dirtbag climber, were both Mountaineers. Your grandparents were Mountaineers. Your kids will be too.
We aspire to inspire with hundreds of monthly activities led by our coalition of volunteers. Our recreation, conservation, and sustainable lifestyle books are deeply-rooted in the Pacific Northwest yet reach people worldwide. We hike, ski, climb, and paddle. We sail and snowshoe and scramble. We capture and savor. We conserve.
In getting outside we inspire a community to give back. Adventure with purpose is our legacy and we will endeavor to make it our future.
Our growing community is powered by people and places. Members join to take classes only to discover a group of lifelong friends. We learn skills from books and volunteers, falling in love with the outdoors in the process. From this love grows a passion to give back and advocate for our wild places, so the next generation can also discover the power of visiting an untouched place.
We go outside to inspire curiosity and self-discovery. To feel small. To unlock our true potential and release the burdens of every day.
The outdoors brings us together. The Pacific Northwest is our home.
We lose ourselves in the outdoors. We find ourselves there too.
