Hellgate’s newest club of the year is the Hellgate Backcountry Club. This club is primarily run by students and has weekly lunch meetings, usually on Wednesdays in a different room each time. Where they discuss plans and past trips. The club is all-inclusive, so anybody can join no matter what their background in outdoor activities is.

    Activities that you might experience in the club are rock climbing, car camping, backpacking, skiing/snowboarding, backcountry awareness skills, and more. The club will go out on weekends and whoever would like to go can join in If that isn’t for you then you could also find a group of people to just go up the M and get outside.

Over the weekend of Sept. They went on a backpacking trip with a couple of the members as their first big excursion of the club. They just spent one night and all carpooled to the trailhead. The “leaders” Micah Jaffe, Logan Gillespie, Hilde Hamilton and Silas Chmielewsk, focused on helping the other people be safe and have as much fun as possible while also learning more about backpacking and nature skills.

Logan Gillespie, a founder of the Backcountry club said, “Inspiration came from an outdoors club at Hellgate that was founded in the ‘70s but has since ended.” Gillespie and a couple of his friends wanted to try to recreate the club so they brought it up with principal Judson Miller. Miller was all for it and has supported them with classrooms for meetings. 

“We will not only be getting outside and having fun adventures. There will be events for things like skiing, running, rock climbing and more. As well as lots of volunteer work for the environment and getting educated on public lands rights and movements,” said Gillespie.