Twenty-four ways to turn outdoor passion into citizen science

Skiers, mountaineers and others who spend time around the Northern Cascades are sought by the Living Snow Project, a program that studies pink snow, an occurrence that causes the snow in a glacier to take on a reddish-pink hue due to the growth of ice-adapted algae, in the range. They can contribute by either sharing observations of the phenomenon through a dedicated app or collecting pink snow samples to help scientists at Western Washington University characterize each sample’s microbiome and learn more about the dynamics behind this snow-melting process which models aren’t accounting.