Walking, Mountaineering, Hiking and Rambling Club Membership Card Printing

The front carries the club name, the member’s name, a membership number, the club’s insurance or affiliation details and the year. Most clubs add the member’s usual walk grading — easy, moderate, strenuous — because walk leaders use it when planning routes and when deciding whether a newcomer is in the right group. Mountaineering and hillwalking clubs often extend the same idea to record whether a member is cleared for winter conditions or scrambling.

It is the reverse of a walking club card that matters more than on almost any other membership card on this site. Walking, rambling and hillwalking happen in places with no phone signal, some distance from a road, and a card in a rucksack lid pocket is realistically what a fellow walker or a mountain rescue team would find.

For that reason we would give the whole reverse to emergency information: a named contact and number in the largest type the space allows, room for any medical note the member chooses to include, and the club’s own emergency or walk leader number. The walk programme can live behind a QR code. The emergency contact cannot.

Whatever the label on a rucksack says, the lid pocket is damp after eight hours on a Welsh hill. Everything in it — map, compass, snacks, membership card — comes out at the end of the day wetter than it went in, and it does that twenty or thirty times a year.

Printed card turns to pulp. Laminating pouches last a little longer, until water finds the seam at a corner and wicks in behind the film, at which point the printing inside is gone and there is no resealing it.

Our walking club cards are 760-micron solid PVC with the design sealed beneath the card’s own surface. There is no film and nothing to get behind, and PVC stays flexible in the cold rather than going brittle the way some laminates do. A card issued at the start of a year is still perfectly legible at the end of it — which is the entire point, if the most important thing on it is an emergency contact.

Variable data is the one that makes the emergency information work properly. Send an Excel file and each card is individually printed with its own member’s emergency contact name and number, plus any short medical note they have asked to include. Every card different, one production run, no extra artwork charge. A generic club card tells a rescue team nothing useful; a personalised one tells them who to ring.

A signature strip is useful where walk leaders sign off a member’s grading, since it takes an ordinary pen and can be updated as someone moves up from moderate to strenuous without a reprint.

Colour coding by walk grade helps at the start of a group walk, when several grades set off from the same car park. And a 5mm punched hole lets walk leaders wear their card on a lanyard so a group of twenty knows who is leading, which is more useful than it sounds on a busy hill.

Finally, a QR code — square, at least 15mm — pointing at your walk programme keeps the card current all year while the programme changes behind it.