The world-wide spread of our volunteer program

Mount Rainier volunteers, hello! Cheers, Aloha, Bonjour, Konnichiwa, and Здравствуйте!

Preparing to mail our Mount Rainier Recovery posters to almost 1400 addresses, it's been fascinating to me to see how widespread our volunteer program is. It's concentrated in the Puget Sound area, of course, but we have many, many volunteers in eastern Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Hawaii, and points even further away. We have volunteers in Canada... Japan... the United Kingdom... and Slovakia.

With the magic of Google Maps, I was able to plot the distribution of our volunteer program online. Check out the full data at http://maps.google.com/?mid=1203463084. Here's a few screenshots, too. The one at the top of this post shows our world-wide volunteers. Clearly, we need to make some inroads into the southern hemisphere, including Africa, South America, and Australia. I volunteer to make a recruiting trip!

The second map shows our U.S. distribution. That's 37 states, plus U.S. Military and the District of Columbia. We're still missing Alaska, Alabama, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia. If you have relatives in those states, invite them to come spend a week volunteering with us this summer!

Our greatest concentrations of volunteers, of course, are close to home. The third map shows Washington and northern Oregon, with lots of volunteer markers engulfing Puget Sound, and stretching out along the highways into the Willamette Valley, Columbia Basin, High Desert, and Olympic Coast. Looks like lots of you could work at North Cascades or Olympic National Parks just as easily as here.

Wherever you're from, thanks for coming here! (Arigato, Merci, and благодарю Вас!)