How to Glissade Down a Fourteen Thousand Foot Volcano and Photograph It
How to Glissade Down a Fourteen Thousand Foot Volcano and Photograph It
The Fastest Way Down Is Also the Silliest Looking
I summited Mount Shasta just over fourteen thousand feet after a day that started at three in the morning. I ate two bars at the top. Then I sat down on my butt in the snow and slid most of the way down the mountain using my ice axe to control my speed. That is glissading, and it is the least dignified thing a grown adult does on purpose in the mountains. It is also, on the right slope in the right conditions, by far the fastest and most sensible way to get off a big volcano.
I want to describe this honestly because glissading gets very little attention compared to skiing or climbing. There is no glamour in it. Nobody makes a highlight reel out of a guy sliding downhill on his backside. But it is a real mountaineering skill, it has real consequences when done badly, and on summit day it was the tool that got me back to camp around noon or one in the afternoon with enough left in the tank to pack out the same day.
What Glissading Actually Is
The basic idea is simple. You sit down on a snow slope and let gravity move you, and you use your ice axe dragged into the snow beside you as a brake. Press harder and you slow down. Ease off and you speed up. Your feet, your body position, and the axe all work together to keep you tracking straight and moving at a speed you actually control rather than one the mountain picks for you.
The word control is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A glissade that is going well feels almost relaxing. A glissade that is going badly turns into an uncontrolled slide very quickly, and an uncontrolled slide on a big snow slope is one of the more dangerous things that can happen to you in the mountains. That is why the ice axe is not optional and why knowing how to use it is a prerequisite rather than a nice extra.
There is also a hard rule that matters more than anything else. You do not glissade wearing crampons. Points catch in the snow, your foot stops while the rest of you keeps going, and that is how ankles and knees get destroyed. On my descent, crampons came off before I sat down. That is one of those steps that feels annoying when you are tired at the top of a mountain and want to be moving already, and it is exactly the step that keeps you from turning a good day into a very bad one.
Why I Was Glissading Instead of Skiing
This is the part that surprises people. I am a skier. I had skis with me on this trip. I skied on Mount Lassen earlier in the week. And I did not ski down Mount Shasta. The skis stayed at camp at Horse Camp for the entire summit push, and the only skiing I did on Shasta was from camp back toward the van during the pack out at the end of the day.
That was a deliberate choice, and honestly a hard one. Bringing skis to the summit would have meant carrying them up through Avalanche Bulge in the dark, through The Thumb, and up Heartbreak Hill, all on a day that already included forgetting my helmet and losing an hour and a half to it, plus roughly two hours helping coordinate a helicopter rescue near The Thumb. Adding that weight and that complication to a day with that much going on was not a call I was willing to make.
So I went up with crampons, an ice axe, and boots, and I came down on my backside. The mountain does not care which method looks cooler. It cares whether you get down safely with enough energy left to do the rest of what the day requires, and on that measure the glissade was clearly the right answer.
How You Photograph Something You Are Doing Alone
Now the part that makes this a photography problem instead of just a mountaineering one. You cannot hold a camera while you glissade. Both hands are on the axe, your attention is entirely on speed and line, and anything loose in your hands is going to end up somewhere down the mountain without you. So documenting a glissade means either shooting before you start, shooting after you stop, or setting something up and sliding into or out of the frame.
The realistic approach for a solo creator is to think of the descent as a sequence rather than a single moment. There is the summit itself. There is the moment of taking crampons off and getting the axe ready. There is the track left in the snow behind you, which is often the most descriptive image of the whole thing because it shows the line and the scale of the slope at once. And there is you at the bottom, wrecked and covered in snow, which tells the truth better than an action frame would anyway.
This is the same thinking I applied across the whole seven days. When you are the only person there, you stop chasing the one impossible hero shot and start building the story out of the moments you can actually capture. Nobody was going to hand me a mid glissade tracking shot on that mountain, and pretending otherwise would have cost me time and safety for an image I was never going to get.
Protecting Your Gear on the Way Down
Sliding down a mountain with a camera kit strapped to you is its own problem. Everything needs to be packed and closed before you sit down, not after you start moving. Snow gets into every gap it can find, and a camera that gets wet at altitude and then goes into a cold pack does not always come back the way you want it to. I had already left half my camera gear at camp for the summit push, which turned out to help here as much as it helped on the climb.
Body position matters for the gear too. A pack riding high and tight sits above most of the snow spray. A loose pack drags, catches, and pulls you off line, which is a safety issue as much as an equipment one. Take the extra minute at the top to cinch everything down. On summit day that minute felt expensive, since I was tired and behind schedule from the morning, but I have never once regretted spending it.
What the Descent Taught Me
The glissade off Shasta stands out in my memory as one of the more purely enjoyable stretches of the entire trip, which is strange for something that looks so undignified. After hours of climbing in the dark, a rescue situation, and a summit push that asked everything I had, moving downhill fast under my own control felt like the mountain finally giving something back instead of taking.
It also taught me something about matching the tool to the day rather than to your ego. I wanted to ski that mountain. Conditions on the trip were the kind that make a skier itch. But the job I was there to do, the brand work for Big Agnes, Crazy Creek, and Out There, did not require a ski descent of Shasta, and the day I actually had did not leave room for one. Choosing the less impressive option because it was the correct one is a skill, and it is one I have gotten better at over a decade of working in places where the wrong choice has real consequences.
By the time I was back at camp reviewing photos and texting Kristin, I had already decided to pack out the same day rather than spend another night. That decision was only possible because the descent had been efficient instead of heroic. The unglamorous option bought me the hours I needed, and that is usually how it goes on a project like this one.
Dalton Johnson is a commercial photographer and director of photography based in South Lake Tahoe, California. Over the last decade he has worked with brands including Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, and Big Agnes across all seven continents. He documents adventure, travel, and the outdoors through photography, film, and writing. Follow along at dalton-johnson.com.