We Move Mountains

She Moves Mountains is a rock climbing guiding company that aims to create a space for women (cis, trans, femme) to realize their strength through rock climbing. 

Women are underrepresented in leadership roles, especially in the outdoors, resulting in an inequality of opportunities for women to learn from other women. According to the American Mountain Guide Association's State of the Guiding Industry, only 12% of guides are women. We created She Moves Mountains to challenge this disparity and to assert the strength and capability of women.

We achieve this by:

• Hosting technical skills clinics for women taught by women
• Providing mentorship opportunities for women who are interested in guiding
• Multi-day rock climbing and yoga retreats (or backpacking and meditation retreats) that cultivate community and focus on learning to take up space
• Media and events that share the stories of a diverse group of women in the outdoors

Climbing is one of the fastest growing sports with more than 5 million participants in the United States and an estimated 25 million worldwide. Still, when I started working at Smith Rock State Park, a globally recognized rock climbing destination, I was one of two women guiding. 

Over the past three years our team has grown from two guides to nine. Our second and third season we had over 300 women attend our clinics. But as we look to the future, we find ourselves asking - how can we do more?

This year we had hoped to:

• Improve our mentorship program by hiring someone to organize it and host free guide skills clinics.
  • We chose 12 participants from 31 applicants - prioritizing women who do not have access to mentorship, are from minority backgrounds, and whose goal is to use guiding to empower minority groups
• Partner with organizations already doing the work to provide access to underrepresented groups in the outdoors by providing our guiding services at cost.
• Diversify our story telling by hiring WOC, trans women, and non-binary individuals to write blogs for our website and submit content for our social media
• Provide funding to our guides working to take the next step in their guide certification 
• Get guiding permits for locations in Utah, California, and various crags in Washington to expand our guiding operations

Before COVID-19 completely shut us down, we were moving forward with all of these programs. But as we face at least a 75% loss in our annual revenue, we can no longer afford to cover the costs of these next steps. 

If you find yourself in a position with financial flexibility please consider contributing to our campaign by purchasing one of the awesome rewards we have available - all designed by women artists we are psyched to support.  THANK YOU!