Designed
UI/UX
Developed
Swift
Launched
Under 5 months
Professional guides needed a better way to share field reports. We built the app to help keep people safe.
Situational Awareness
For years, the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides has run a service called the Mountain Conditions Report (MCR). It started as a private mailing list where guides traded hard-won info about dangerous backcountry conditions. Think: avalanche risks, wildlife sightings, and trail hazards.
The mailing list was useful but closed, so the information often didn’t reach the travellers who needed it most. In 2005, after several fatalities in the backcountry, the MCR was opened to the public and it’s been helping people make safer decisions ever since.
Years later, the outerwear company Arc’teryx teamed up with the ACMG to widen the MCR’s reach to climbers, skiers, and other backcountry professionals. After building the web platform, Arc’teryx asked Steamclock to do what we do best: build a great mobile app. Marc Piché, the Technical Director of the ACMG, explained the motivation:
Photo by ACMG
“The Canadian guiding culture is very much about sharing. We want to learn from each other’s experiences. Sharing helps everyone make informed decisions and prevent incidents.”Marc Piché, Technical Director of the ACMG
Going Mobile
At its core, the MCR app was about creating and viewing real-time, guide-submitted field reports that detailed conditions and safety incidents, complete with geolocation tools, photo uploads, area alerts, and integration with Avalanche Canada forecasts.
But before we could start building any of that, we did a deep dive into which mapping solution would be the right fit for the unique circumstances field guides would find themselves in. We investigated several SDKs based on their ability to support overlays, annotations and callouts, compass updates, and location services. We also explored map data formats and generation tools. In the end, MapKit won out and proved to be a stable foundation to support the reporting and visualization tools.
From there, we built out capabilities that could stand up to the harsh, low-connectivity field conditions professional guides needed.
The Long Game
Launch was only the start. Over the next three years, we worked continuously with Arc’teryx and the guiding community to evolve the app, shipping a stream of iterative releases based on what guides told us they needed in the field.
We built out a catalog of contributing guides, complete with profiles and social links. We refined the alert system so travellers were notified about new reports in the areas they cared about. We added report view counts, smoothed the path for new guides getting started, and added support for international guiding associations like the British Mountain Guides.
The Bigger Picture
During the app’s run, Apple’s App Store Canada team featured it in their “Made in Vancouver” showcase. By 2019, the broader MCR program had shared over 2,400 field observations from professional guides.
It doesn’t get much better than building an app that could help save lives alongside a company we admire.
