He Got Airlifted Off Mt. Baker, Then Taught Himself to Sew Left-Footed

Spencer Kadas is the owner of High Above, a mountain bike pack company based in Pioneer Square, Seattle. A data scientist who spent his career building fraud-detection systems, he quit his job at 31 to be a ski bum for a year — then bought High Above from its founder without ever having touched a sewing machine. He learned by sewing all day, every day (left-footed, after a ski wreck on Mount Baker destroyed his knee a month into ownership), and has since pushed the brand from a beloved hip pack company into technical territory: the Supernatural backpack, the Venture 3D with its 3D-printed back panel, and the new Cascadia — High Above's first bladder-compatible hip pack, built on a fully custom UHMWPE-and-nylon fabric he helped design.

This is a conversation about the unglamorous math of a small brand — eating margin on spacer mesh nobody will see in a product photo, buying a year's worth of fabric to hit a minimum order, wondering about payroll — and why it's worth it anyway. Spencer talks about regret as a decision-making tool, building bag-making knowledge from first principles with CAD and a CNC cutter, acting bigger than you are with suppliers, and the belief that holds it all together: remembering why you go riding in the first place.

• Quitting a data-science job at 31 to ski-bum for a year — regret as the deciding vote
• Buying High Above with zero sewing experience, then sewing all day, every day
• A destroyed knee on Mount Baker one month after buying the company
• Designing in CAD with a CNC fabric cutter — tight tolerances over paper patterns
• The Cascadia — a custom UHMWPE fabric and the first hip pack High Above trusts with a bladder
• Acting bigger than you are — how a tiny brand lands premium materials
• Resisting the pressure to be rad — remembering why you ride