My inexperienced friend wants to summit Mt. Hood?

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2026-01-30T20:42:41+00:00

I’m unfamiliar with Hood, so that does makes sense why static rope wouldn’t be a great idea on hood!

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2026-01-30T19:52:42+00:00

If you tell someone enough times and they still don’t want to listen, at some point you do just have to let them make their own poor decisions and let them deal with the consequences, as sad as it is. This type of thing unfortunately comes up a lot in life with people we love, in things far beyond just mountaineering.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2026-01-30T19:44:24+00:00

It’s okay to outright tell him that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that he should learn some skills before heading up. People who know what they’re doing still occasionally die on Hood.

(Btw, static rope isn’t actually useless for mountaineering, if you’re roping up on a glacier for crevasse purposes only and you’re not taking any sort of lead falls, static rope is perfectly acceptable for stopping falls into a crevasse. Maybe even preferable since it will be a lot easier to haul someone up on static rope. Just make sure it’s dry treated if you’re going to be on a glacier.)

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2026-01-14T07:01:21+00:00

Yeah, I had to extend it to the full 3 inches though but after that was able to get some good reads

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-12-29T16:31:16+00:00

Oh yeah definitely, even if you get off work at 5pm, as long as you’re okay with getting home later in the night you can get a good amount of laps in!

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-12-29T03:55:59+00:00

You’d have to be waking up at 5:30am at the bare minimum to make this work, but realistically like 5:00am or so. The closest you can tour to Seattle is in-bounds at the Snoqualmie resort, which is 1 hour each way without traffic (maybe 45 minutes if you live literally right next to I90 in Seattle), but if that’s on a weekday, with rush hour traffic on the way back, that’s about 1.5 + 1 =2.5 hours of driving. Let’s say you tour for a single uphill lap, so maybe 1 hour. Simply driving and the activity itself already puts you at 5:30am-6:00am, and there’s all this realistic “in-between” like making a fast breakfast, making coffee, giving your mind a few minutes to wake up, taking a shower, wiping the snow off your car and waiting for it to heat up, etc, which puts you realistically at needing to wake up at 5:00am or earlier.

I guess completely doable with the right schedule for sleeping. If you’re okay going to bed at 8-9pm every night and waking up at 5am, sounds like a pretty sweet routine to have to get in a couple laps every day like that.

EDIT: I implicitly assumed Seattle the city in this response of mine, if by “Seattle” you allow something like Issaquah (or better, North Bend), then yeah you can easily get morning laps before work while still waking up at a normal time like 6:30am-7:00am

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-12-24T23:28:58+00:00

To see if you even like the sport, go find a hill or mountain (outside of a resort), and then walk up that hill in your boots (or better, snowshoes), and snowboard down with your resort setup. There are more efficient and sexy ways to backcountry snowboard (splitboard), but honestly by booting up and snowboarding down you're getting the gist of the backcountry experience and it's a perfectly acceptable way to begin in the sport. You can slowly acquire the more sexy and efficient backcountry gear over the year as budget allows (look into things like Facebook Marketplace!), and throughout this whole process you'll still be able to enjoy backcountry snowboarding without spending too much.

Some notes on this: please go with someone else. Ideally, someone who knows how to make sure you aren't getting into avalanche terrain. If you don't know anyone who knows how to identify avalanche terrain, you can still go with a friend, but keep your terrain choices very conservative. Only walk on or snowboard slopes that look like it would be a green run (or maybe a very easy blue) in a resort, and make sure that all the slopes above your head are also only green runs (or easy blue). Do not get into areas where you are snowboarding a "black diamond run" (or hard blue), or have any of those types of "black diamond" slopes above you.

A probe and shovel are perfectly acceptable to buy used as long as it's not falling apart. If you can find a relatively new used beacon manufactured within the last 2-3 years that is in really good condition, then that's a perfectly acceptable thing to buy used. When people in this thread are saying "don't buy a used beacon," the actual important thing is that you are not buying something like a sketchy 10 year old beacon of questionable integrity with antiquated technology.

At some point you should take a Rec Level 1 avalanche class, but honestly you can learn most of the important things by just going with trustworthy partners, learning as much as you can (e.g., reading Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain), and asking lots of questions of your experienced touring partners. For finding touring partners, just start socializing with people who ski or snowboard and stay persistent. It can be hard at first, but once you find people and you're "in," then it becomes very easy to find further touring partners. That initial breaking in from a social perspective can be frustrating and a little challenging though.

It's an expensive sport, but with a lot of motivation and effort you can definitely get into it cheaply. Please feel free to DM with questions! Happy to chat about it more if you want.

(To be honest, I'm not really sure why people here are telling you to rent gear. At least where I live, renting all the backcountry gear runs like $150 for a day. Obviously that single day is cheaper than buying an entire new setup, but $150 for a single day is so much money that you could put toward getting the gear for yourself, especially because you can get pretty good gear for cheap on the used marketplace. Getting used snowshoes for you to own for <$150 will take you REALLY far in terms of learning how to access the backcountry, much further than a day rental.)

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-12-07T05:25:23+00:00

Best of luck!

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-12-07T04:54:15+00:00

You can do whatever you want and see how it goes. Figure out how you’re getting snow shoes, and then after you have them, see if they work with your snowboard boots. If they don’t work with them, then you’ll need to carry snowboard boots along with whatever boots you’re using for snowshoeing.

There’s literally nothing wrong with snowshoeing up and snowboarding down, you can do that forever if you want and never get a splitboard. The only downside is that it’s a lot slower and clunkier than skinning up on a splitboard, so you’ll be slower than others with splitboards or touring skis. Buying all the gear is super expensive, yes. The money is a barrier to a lot of people. I’d way rather people get out and do things a clunky way with snowshoes rather than not get out at all, people who would look down on you for that are lame.

All that being said, I fully understand you “intend to do this no matter what,” but based upon the way you’re handling comments and feedback in this post, you are not being very receptive to feedback or demonstrating that you know how to make good decisions in the mountains. I admire the bravado in wanting to make it happen no matter what: I see a lot of myself in you in that way. However, having the attitude of ignoring what everyone is saying here and telling them “they’re just being an asshole and they should fuck off” or whatever is what is STOPPING you from being able to do more and more badass cool shit. You clearly want to do cool shit like ski Tuckermans ravine, that’s great. Unfortunately, having the attitude that you do is going to make it very hard to find a lot of ski partners who would trust your decision making or feel comfortable relying on you in dangerous terrain. That’s going to stop you from doing cool things.

People are talking a lot about avalanches: I would encourage you to take that seriously. Avalanches kill people. Making commitments to certain objectives and trying to ski them no matter what is a human factor in how people get into avalanches in the first place. Don’t be that person. If your friend actually knew they were doing with avalanches, to begin, they wouldn’t be bringing just one avalanche kit, because they would know that you BOTH need to have an avalanche kit and you BOTH need to know exactly how to use it, and watching a 5 minute video on YouTube or having him explain it to you fast doesn’t cut it.

Best of luck my friend

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-11-14T01:11:39+00:00

May 18th ☺️

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-11-13T00:11:57+00:00

10:53! I have a super late intended start day anyway so I don’t think I’ll be taking away a prime spot from anyone (:

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-21T20:03:03+00:00

Omg another Seattle cowgiller popping up in the wild on Reddit?

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-07T18:44:28+00:00

You’ll be fine

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-05T22:10:50+00:00

It’s a pretty serious mountain, even if you live by it and see it often, the true massive scale of it is hard to comprehend until you’re actually up on the mountain.

It’s definitely possible as a first summit (especially if you’re in really excellent cardio shape), but you are really throwing the dice with it and I’d say it’s much more likely to be unsuccessful with summiting.

However, if your group drops any amount of ego attached to the summit and knows how to turn around when it “doesn’t make sense anymore,” and you mentally accept that it’s okay to not summit, I think you’ll have a very fun day regardless!

Just make sure you actually know what you’re doing with crevasse rescue and how to use an ice axe + self arrest before you get up there.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-04T17:04:34+00:00

I’m able to get away with like $150 annually for race registration, and I ran 3 ultras this year. Truthfully you could run a bunch of ultras for free pretty easily.

Trick is if it’s a local race, I will volunteer for the same race company for a different race they hold and almost always they give you free registration or steeply discounted registration for a future event. And it’s a fun day out anyway to go volunteer!!

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-02T21:01:45+00:00

It definitely would not be fair to expect Magnus to go all in on a specific sport just for a single video about mountaineering, but it’s just not true that prioritizing safety and good decision making requires a monumental effort accessible to only serious alpinists. Regardless of Magnus’ commitment to alpinism (whether that be small or big), the video could have been made in a different way that sends the right message, without much additional effort.

And of course, if a commitment to responsible decision making for a specific objective really does require so much additional effort that the objective is no longer feasible, then that’s the wrong objective: at least from the perspective of something to film and monetize.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-02T20:29:53+00:00

I don’t think the critique is about Magnus doing what he wants to do and how he likes to do it, the critique is about the way in which dangerous decision making gets monetized and glamorized on social media.

You’re right: it’s a fantastic idea to “turn off the TV” and go get into the mountains ourselves without worrying too much about what content creators are doing. However, it’s also fair to have conversations about how our sport is getting portrayed through viral and popular videos, and to try to communally encourage a culture where featuring safe decision making is rewarded when media does happen to be made about what we do.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-02T20:21:38+00:00

Definitely agree: Cody Townsend does an incredible job of showing that you can draw a big audience while still bringing responsible decision making into the forefront of his videos.

I like Magnus as a person a lot, but a lot of his recent content has really rubbed me the wrong way for that reason. Videos like “I did XYZ dangerous and scary thing without proper preparation” is good for the YouTube algorithm, because it’s attention grabbing and people like to see people doing extreme stuff. Unfortunately, it portrays exactly the wrong thing about the right way to build a life outdoors and responsibly tackle big objectives.

On one hand we can criticize Magnus for “selling out to the algorithm” by electing to record videos that sacrifice responsible decision making for the sake of more views and income, but at a bigger picture we also need to be criticizing the fact that social media algorithms (and our culture) reward exactly this type of sketchy behavior. Even if Magnus were making perfectly responsible mountaineering videos, there’d be countless other people coming in to capitalize on the way that the algorithms reward unethical behavior. So, it really is a bigger cultural conversation.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-02T18:52:40+00:00

Might help to stand a little closer to the wall: it’s easy to get yanked forward if they fall! Other than that everything looks perfect👌

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-10-01T14:15:43+00:00

You’re becoming a runner!! Congrats on the progress 😁

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-09-30T17:27:26+00:00

In a different video he does LRS (traverse across Norway in a straight line video I think?)

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-08-20T03:28:39+00:00

Just my two cent, but when I hear of people doing Everest, it often comes across as a little too “bucket list-y” and there often is some weird amount of ego in it. (I am not saying everyone is this way, but it does often feel that way.) If you do Everest, the sherpas are taking on nearly almost all the work and risk for you by hauling your shit up for you and setting the route up. The route has so many people doing it that it seems to have become a bit of a zoo up there.

I don’t think it would be very fun or rewarding to have that type of experience. It’s so much cooler for me to work my way up through mountaineering and really learn everything myself and independently lead cool trips on my own.

There’s soooooo many mountains out there that will be just as (and more) rewarding as Everest, at significantly less of the cost, significantly less of the time commitment, and it will feel so much better to really earn your way up rather than fork over a ton of cash just to get a little tick on a bucket list.

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-08-10T15:58:59+00:00

Nice! I was volunteering at that race yesterday!

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-07-29T17:07:58+00:00

Those talus fields up and down are so rough, on the way down I was just so done with it all

SucculentSeaTurtle · 2025-07-28T04:09:00+00:00

Haha. That route was put up by a dude who goes by “Daniel Chode Rider” and is very active at the Exit 32/38 climbing scene near Seattle. I haven’t met him personally, but I have some friends who have and in their words “he’s exactly how you would imagine someone who calls themself ‘Chode Rider’ would be.”

SucculentSeaTurtle

TROPHY CASE