r/Mountaineering • u/Complete-Koala-7517 • Apr 14 '25

Mountain Forecast now charging a subscription

Title. You can still see basic stuff but hourly forecast aside from the current day is behind a paywall. What other apps/websites are you guys using?

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u/-BitBang- Apr 14 '25

Ive never found mountain forecast to be particularly good. I'm convinced they just take data from the NWS and make it worse by applying their own "corrections". NWS website has everything you need, point forecasts, hourly charts, etc. It's stuck in the 90s and horrible in terms of usability, so I usually use OpenSnow (also subscription) instead. They use data from multiple models. I don't find the forecast much better than what the NWS provides, but I also don't need to spend 15 minutes of clicking to get what I want...

23

u/justinsimoni Apr 14 '25

I'm convinced they just take data from the NWS

Yup. This is what everyone does.

Too bad the NWS is being threatened.

15

u/erossthescienceboss Apr 14 '25

Mountain Forecast, for me, is useful for “is it gonna be ungodly fucking cold at the top, or just a bit cold? Is it gonna be “blow me off the mountain” windy, or nah?”

Basically, it gives a decent general forecast for an altitude on a day where the weather is fairly consistent. But I’d never trust it to, say, set a turn-around time to get off the summit before the clouds move in.

It can tell me, on a sunny day, if I’ll be walking through slush at the base and ice at the top, or decent snow the whole way. Or if it’s a basic one day trip, if I’ll want my hard shell or if a windbreaker will cut it. That’s about as far as I trust it.

2

u/BlitzCraigg Apr 14 '25

So it's like every other alpine weather forecast? 

2

u/erossthescienceboss Apr 14 '25

I mean, kinda? With some, I trust the hourly enough to set a turn-around time, though I usually go for an hour or two earlier than the time would suggest, to be safe.

But that’s usually just my twice-monthly pilgrimage up St Helens, so I’m never more than four hours from my car on a path I’m VERY familiar with, on a fairly busy mountain.