Why Climb With Us

Why Climb Mount Shuksan with Alpine Ascents?

I had a great experience on the 4-day Mt. Shuksan climb. I learned a great deal and accomplished several of my personal goals. The guides enriched the experience through their professionalism, competence, and friendly nature.

Schedule Flexibility

Important to success and enjoyment for our climbers is the ability to adjust our climbing schedules as needed to account for ever-changing mountain conditions. Rather than throwing up our hands and ending an expedition when a route may become unclimbable, we treat these situations as challenges and, thanks to our experience and local expertise, we can change locations mid-expedition if necessary and offer alternate climbs and adventures. When such occasions have arisen, our climbers regularly praise these adjustments as highlights of their expeditions.

Experience

We have been running successful expeditions around the world since 1986 and look forward to our 30th year of operation. Our familiarity with the region, our expertise and our knowledge around the world lend a depth and richness to every expedition that we feel is unrivaled in the guiding community. This expertise is based upon years of accumulated experience-not just from individual mountain guides, but through experience on particular mountains where details are fine-tuned over time. We maintain our process of multi-leveled and critical evaluations for each expedition. Innovations like daily weather reports, established season-long base camps, environmental pioneering, and operating our trips with small climber-to-guide ratios led by Alpine Ascents guides are just some of the factors that keep us in the forefront

Environmental Awareness

We believe that most of the guiding world is eco-friendly, but taking leadership in environmental matters can be costly and present obstacles. Pioneering the use of Wag Bags© in the Cascades, officially partnering with Leave No Trace for over 10 years, and removing trash from Everest, Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro are a few of the efforts that demonstrate our leadership of environmental causes. More than simply the right thing to do or a marketing angle, we look to keep the mountains and wilds clean because this is our second home (first home for many guides) and we want to return each year to pristine environments. Environmental leadership is axiomatic, yesterday’s ideas are simply not good enough, and we constantly challenge ourselves by asking, “What’s next? What more can we do? Is this really helping?”

Leave No Trace principles are fundamental to our program, and we encourage all who climb and trek with us to understand proper wilderness practices. We help facilitate this effort by passing on Leave No Trace training and literature to every Alpine Ascents climber.

Love it! Our guides were both fantastic! From the initial gear check to our check out they were gracious, knowledgeable professionals. We’d love to have them guide us on a future trip.

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Partners & Accreditations

Alpine Ascents International is an authorized mountain guide service of Denali National Park and Preserve and Mount Rainier National Park.
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