The basic features will always be free. We want to create a place that accessible for anyone in the community to report and know when the mountain is out. But given the time and resources this project takes we might introduce premium paid features to help cover our costs.
Basically we have built some software that allows you to send in a report of The Mountain out status and then we update the map based on recent reports. We have certain thresholds set in place and anonymize and randomize user data to keep everything privacy focused.
Yes we might, although based on usage to cover maintenance and upkeep costs it might cost money after a certain point.
Yup - and we will take that as a compliment!
No, we have build this with privacy in mind. We use an open source library (H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index) to approximate your location. And further more we don’t send GPS information to server. We submit an approximate area of 100m² to the server with the report. Additionally, when displaying this on the map we use larger areas (2km2) until there are enough reports to break down the large area into smaller areas. We plan to use 3-5 resolutions of grainularity.
Yes. That's actually in our long term plans. Stay tuned!
We would love your financial help, this website has been years in the making and in 2022 alone we spent 100+ hours on it. Thanks for your help! If you have a github account, you can sponsor our sponsor our work there. We also design and sell mountain merch so you can rep your love for The Mountain! Check out The Rainier Watch Shop where we donate from every purchase to organizations that support and protect our National Parks!
We need your location to add your report to the map and sometimes this permission is disabled. If you’ve recently denied the request (or denied the request from another site), you will need to go into your browser settings to allow permission to share your location. Here's how to do that on iOS, and Android. Also you can have site-specific location sharing in both iOS and Android browsers.