Mount St. Helens - Worm Flows Route — Saturday, Mar. 27, 2021

Note: if you lost a pair of red prescriptions glasses, I have them! Please email me at tmulc18 at gmail dot com so I can return them! Found them while skiing down. 

Arrived at 11pm the night before and still had to park about .6 miles from the trailhead.  We started skinning at the trail at 8:15 am, and the ascent to the rim took 5 hours.  I was on a split board and my partner was on skis.  I was having issues with the slick snow, so I put on ski crampons and used them for the majority of the ascent.  Didn’t have any slippage issues after that, so we were able to avoid boot packing up to the top, which I think saved a lot of time.  

We stopped at the rim to take some photos and have lunch before we left our skis and put on boot crampons as we made our way to the true summit, which only had a few people on it.  Right as we got there, a snowmobiler arrived, and he said it took him only 15 minutes to sled up! The summit was scarily corniced, so we only stayed for a few minutes before walking back.

The snow was a bit crusty during the first 1000 feet of our descent, but eventually softened into a nice corn for 2000 feet (although the wind-blown areas at these elevations seemed very icy!) until the pack turned to a sticky concrete.  The snow stayed this way until we got to the tree covered part of the trail.  We noticed a lot of wet loose avalanche signs, saw one skier trigger one east of the trail, and even triggered a small one ourselves when we got slightly off course—please be careful and look at the terrain before your trip!  The descent took about 1 hour in total.

Overall, had a great time being one of the probably thousands who made the journey up St Helens before permit season starts.