I see why people signed up for a trip need to contact the leader to take themselves off a trip after signups for the trip has closed. However, I DON'T SEE why that applies for people who are merely waitlisted.
What is the possible logic for this?? Especially since being waitlisted means you can't sign up for anything else at the same time. You need to contact the leader and then the leader, who may be away from email, needs to take them off. Especially since the closure period for some trips is way in advance of the trip.
This should be changed, or at least the rationale explained because it's not obvious.
Thank you.

At the scramble summit, there was unanimous desire to be able to tag a scramble as rock or snow. I gave two suggestions and they didn’t seem to have a strong opinion one way or another.

First: since Winter Scramble is under difficulty, just add Rock Scramble and Snow Scramble. They liked the simplicity of this and that if something is rock/snow you can just tag something as both. They did feel like its not truly a “difficulty” rating, so logically it doesn’t make a lot of sense under difficulty.

Second: Add a “scrambling category”. The benefit here is that it shows up where it makes more logical sense. The downside is we would need to list Rock Scramble, Snow Scramble, Rock/Snow Scramble and Other.

The system has such capacity for displaying our routes and places in an attractive and appealing way, with enough detail to know where the trailhead is and whether or not it covers the route or place that one wants to take. It seems a huge missed opportunity to let routes-places be submitted without even the most basic of descriptions other than the pure length and elevation gain, which doesn't tell us much. Yet I know that Member Services is deluged with route place requests that are so urgent that you hesitate to push back. I wonder if we might be able to assemble a committee (with the help of an intern from BCC or elsewhere?) who could go through our routes and places and beef up the ones that are minimal, clean out those that are redundant, add multiple activity types now that we can, as well as add more routes and places so that we can at least have all the major routes and destinations in our own Mountaineers '100 best' trail guides.

Currently, participants submit incident reports to the Safety Committee, which then compiles the data and looks for trends in the aggregate (it does a lot more than that as well, but this aspect of its work is onerous). If we connected incident reporting with routes/places and even illustrated on a map, committees could analyze trends and information much more rapidly and wouldn't have to wait for Safety Committee reports. Safety Committee efforts could then be more available for training and prevention work now that the data crunching burden has been reduced. Members and Leaders could then have information about incident "hot spots" available to them in deciding what level of risk they are comfortable with. Data could be filtered by activity, committee, location, type of incident, etc.

The incident report exports narratives in HTML. Change to plain text format. Example:

<p>At 1:10 pm 1.5 miles from the trail head on the Spray Park Trail (heading back to Mowich Lake), participant tripped on a root and ended up bumping her brow bone on another root.  Student did not present with any signs of head trauma, the bump site swelled to approximately 2.5 cm in diameter and no bleeding was noted.  Patient reported minor discomfort, no current medications.  Applied a cold compress with bandana soaked with cold creek water and continued to hike out.  Patient still retained normal mentation and reported no significant discomfort associated with the bump.  Advised that she will likely get a black eye over the next couple days, the swelling may not go down right away, and to consult her normal physician if she has concerns.  Student was able to drive herself home with no further medical attention.</p>

This posting is the result of 1) a few years of cross-branch discussions among the Snowshoe Programs of the various branches, and 2) email discussions with the Program Center about how to go about changing the rating system used to classify Snowshoe trips. The feedback we received from the Program Center was that the correct way to document our request for changing the website was to post the changed to feedback.mountaineers.org.

The Snowshoe Programs of the various branches would like to change the way that Snowshoe Routes and Trips are rated so that each route/trip has a separate Strenuous and Technical rating - this is of course the same technique used by scrambles and climbs. A final version of the new rating scheme was presented at the Snowshoe Summit held on October 9 and approved unanimously by all branches. The proposal document includes the rationale for the change, and can be viewed here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/133v_0TZhir56_kGjwl3BT_XNoYYAQgQFl6q2sAz1M6M/edit?usp=sharing