Friends Question Why Novice Climber Who Died on Mount Hood Was Free Soloing

A 30-year-old climber fell to his death while soloing a route on Oregon’s Mount Hood (11,249ft) last week. Thomas Hostetler was on the leftmost variation of Devil’s Kitchen Headwall (AI3; 800ft), a line on the south side of Hood, on Sunday, January 25. He was with a partner, but the two were climbing unroped. At 9:45 a.m, other climbers on the mountain called 911 after seeing Hostetler tumble roughly 300 feet down the wall.

Paige Baugher of Portland Mountain Rescue (PMR) was one of the rescuers who responded to the incident. Baugher and other PMR rescuers were already on the mountain conducting training exercises and reached the scene of the accident quickly. However, by the time she found Hostetler at the base of the route, he was deceased.

How did Thomas Hostetler end up on Devil’s Kitchen?

Ty Siepert was one of Thomas Hostetler’s best friends. He told Climbing that although Hostetler was an avid backcountry skier and hiker, he had no real climbing experience aside from bouldering in a gym a few times. He was far out of his comfort zone climbing a technical ice route. “This was way out of his skill level to do with no safety measures, free solo,” Siepert said.

Another friend, John Black, told Climbing that Hostetler had never even been in a belay system. “He didn’t own climbing shoes, a harness, or an ATC,” Black said. “The last link I sent him was Black Diamond’s combo starter kit.” Although Hostetler had spent plenty of time in the mountains, his “climbing” experience, Black said, was limited to non-technical snow routes, like the standard routes on Mount Adams (12,276ft) or Shasta (14,179ft). He’d climbed Hood before, too, but not by a vertical, fifth-class route.

After the accident, Siepert spoke with Hostetler’s climbing partner, James Shingleton. Shingleton reported he and Hostetler had reached the first belay station on DKV1 to find it occupied by another two-person party preparing to lead up the first pitch. In order to not wait around, they decided to climb past the other team unroped.

It was unclear if they planned to stop to belay at all, or just continue soloing to the summit. “It sounded like there was no clear plan as to when or if they were going to rope up,” Siepert said.

Siepert startd a Reddit thread in the wake of Hostetler’s death, and accounts from the two climbers in the other party were subsequently posted to the thread. Both said Hostetler and Shingleton passed and began climbing ahead of them unroped without any warning or communication, and noted that the two climbers were only carrying a 6mm tagline, so it seemed unlikely that they intended to set up a traditional belay. They added the incident could have easily been a double or triple fatality, as Hostetler nearly fell on top of them.

“I was belaying behind a rock feature and could not see uphill, but seconds later I heard a big sound and watched a body rolling downhill fast, maybe a yard or two away from my partner,” the belayer, Andre Piwoni, wrote. “… My partner could have been seriously injured or killed by impact if he decided to start climbing several seconds earlier.…”

Siepert said there was no clear reason why Hostetler had fallen. According to Shingleton, “Thomas just kind of ‘stood up’ on his crampons for a second,” and lost grip on his tools. “I think it was probably just to readjust, his arms probably weren’t really used to holding ice tools on vertical terrain,” Siepert explained. “So there was a momentary lapse, he kind of turned around to look at something, and all of a sudden he slipped.”

Black and Siepert said that Hostetler also didn’t know Shingleton very well. The two men had met only a couple of weeks before. In a post to the Facebook group Pacific Northwest Mountaineers, Shingleton claimed that he had “overestimated Thomas’s ability” and said that the decision not to rope up had been Hostetler’s, not his. “Never let go of your tools,” he added. “Every climber knows that. It still does not make it any easier.”

What do the rescuers have to say?

Baugher, the rescuer who found Hostetler’s body, has been climbing on Hood for 20 years, and has worked with PMR since 2018. She said if pitched out, DKV1 typically goes at around three to four pitches of AI3, but added that it’s not unusual for experienced climbers to solo the route.

Although the weather on the day of the incident was stellar—clear skies, only light wind—she said conditions on the route itself were poor. “It’s a record low snow year,” Baugher said. “It almost looks like late summer on the upper mountain right now. When I’ve climbed [DKV1], when it’s in, the approach is a snow ramp right up to the base. It doesn’t look like that up there now. The approach was steep, almost vertical. There’s a bunch of exposed rock, and it’s incredibly icy. Just a lot more treacherous than I’ve seen it in the past.”

She added that there was also an abnormal amount of icefall coming off the route on the day of the accident.“Usually these routes will shed in the spring, when the sun hits them, or if it’s really windy, but I was seeing a lot of shedding up there early in the morning,” she said. “I got hit by a giant iceball that I wasn’t expecting, and it was only ten o’clock. The mountain just isn’t glued together right now.”

Hood has a number of entry-level alpine routes, but Baugher said the increase in winter traffic is primarily occurring on the peak’s more technical routes. She noted that this is actually the second death on Hood in a little over a month, and that the other occurred under similar circumstances and conditions.  Matthew Aldridge, 26, was climbing Wy’East Face, which typically forms as a moderate, 45-degree snow line, with two partners on December 13. When his partners decided to turn back, Aldridge continued on alone. He never made it back to the trailhead. His body was discovered three days later, below the neighboring Newton Clark Headwall. “It’s not clear what happened because he was by himself, but the thought is that he slipped,” Baugher said. She added that on that day, too, the conditions on Hood were extremely icy.

As a rescuer, Baugher said her message to the public is that winter ascents shouldn’t be underestimated, even during high pressure windows that can make conditions appear more optimal than they are. Her comments also illustrated that climbing unroped is always a gamble, even on easy routes.

Siepert said his friend’s death made him reconsider his perception of free soloing. On Reddit, he noted that Hostetler’s death occurred on the same weekend that Alex Honnold completed a widely celebrated livestreamed free solo of Taipei 101, a skyscraper in Taiwan.

“I know it comes with the sport, but I’m concerned with the culture,” Siepert wrote. “Maybe it’s just I’m part of that 1% of climbers that experience grief like this, but why do we celebrate a lack of safety?”

“A friend that would do anything for you”

Hostetler was born in California and raised in Georgia. At the time of his death, he was living in Portland, and had worked for a year and a half as a registered nurse at the pharmacy chain CVS. His mother, Darlene Hostetler, is also a nurse. She told The Oregonian that her son had wanted to pursue a career in the field since he was a young teen.

“He came to my work and met all my co-workers, and saw all the love that the nurses were showing me, and heard my stories of how I connected with my patients,” Darlene Hostetler said. “He never even considered another career. He knew that that’s what he was meant to do.”

“Thomas was one of those friends that would do anything for you,” Siepert told Climbing. “Like, at John’s birthday party, he was out of town for work and flew back that day, then drove eight hours throughout the night and hiked through the dark to meet us at our campsite, just to surprise him. He would do anything for fun and adventure, and being with the people he loved.”

Black said that because Hostetler’s family was across the country, in Georgia, he often spent holidays at Black’s house. “For Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Thomas was at our house with our family. He was like a brother.” Although the pair only met around two years ago, Black said their bond was immediate and strong: “It felt like we were lifelong friends.”

“Obviously Thomas died doing something that he loved, but the results have been hard,” Siepert added. “There’s a lot of hurt people right now.”

A friend and colleague of Hostetler’s from CVS, Sarah King-Brown, has set up a GoFundMe to help cover funeral costs and the transport of his body back home to Georgia.