Information on who and how many visitors are accessing backcountry sites is essential for recreation planning and management. This information is useful to more effectively target education and outreach programs, prioritize operations, and communicate the importance of avalanche centers. However, effectively monitoring backcountry winter recreation is difficult and expensive; sites are often far apart and logistically challenging to access, and visitors are hard to count due to the complexity of entry points and sites. We conducted a pilot study utilizing a community science framework for engaging members of the winter recreation community in research and data collection. Leveraging an existing volunteer network and education outreach program run by the Northwest Avalanche Center (NWAC), this project addressed questions about whether a community-run monitoring program can produce statistically valid estimates of backcountry visitation rates and visitor characteristics. Based on our pilot analysis, studying only weekend visitors at the most heavily used access points, we estimated that there were 344,000 visits to the NWAC forecast area from these high use access points during the 2022-2023 season. We found that the majority of visitors were male and white, with an average age of 37 years. We present the challenges of accurately and reliably counting visitors during volunteer outreach events conducted at recreation sites, and our recommendations for future visitor monitoring done in concert with volunteer outreach programs. These results have implications for how other avalanche centers could implement their own community science based monitoring program using these methods.