Thank you for your interest in The Mountaineers and welcome to Washington! I am happy to help you navigate our website and to provide some more information about our organization. Our Getting Started page also contains some helpful information.

Since you are a guest member, you have the opportunity to participate in two activities or courses before we request that you pay for an annual membership. Many guest members do day hikes for their two activities as they decide if this is the right community for them. You can search for all upcoming activities, and you can specify what difficulty and what type of activity you are looking for on our Find Activities page. Use the green bar on the left of the page to select different activities, dates, and difficulty levels.

We require badges for many activities to make sure that participants have the skills they need to safely do the activity. You can earn badges in two ways. First, you could take the course, and you can find more information here on our Course Overviews page. Please check out our Course Calendar as well to see when courses are offered in general. Our courses are entirely taught by volunteers, and they are quite intensive, so we usually only offer them once per year. Courses occur the season before the season when the activity is popular, so that students are able to participate in the activity throughout the popular season once they graduate from the course. Course offerings vary from branch to branch, and you are welcome to take a course with any branch. Some courses have applications as well. The pricing for courses is also higher for guests, but you are able to take courses as part of the two activities you do with The Mountaineers as a guest member.

The second way to earn badges is to go go through the equivalency process. To gain equivalency, first you must become an official member of The Mountaineers, and then we will help connect you either to the equivalency application, or directly to the volunteer in charge of determining equivalency. Please note that our climbing courses teach climbing at a very in-depth level. Our Basic Alpine Climbing Course badge outlines the skills you have to demonstrate to gain equivalency in climbing.