Thursday's weather report looked great, and work gave me the OK for a day off, so a friend and I headed up to Helens. The report was pretty much spot on and it was a beautiful day up there. Adams was clearly visible all day, Hood was visible earlier, but got a bit cloud covered later in the day.
Getting to the lot was snow free. Although the first step outta the car was a bit icy, so we just had to step carefully.
The 1st quarter mile was spotty snow, then turned into all snow beyond that. It was cold enough that post holing was minimal and just boots were fine. I think it was around chocolate falls we spiked up. I didn't bring microspikes, so I just went ahead an did full crampons, which was a bit overkill at that point.
Around the monitoring station, I got tired of lugging my snowshoes and was confident I wouldn't need them, so I dropped those off, to pick up on the way down.
Maybe around 1/2 - 1/4 mile from the top it was wind swept down to hard ice, where I was glad to have crampons and an ice axe. Then right before the top it became more powdery again - maybe from snow blowing over the edge? At the very top all of a sudden the wind went a bit crazy, the 3 or 4 other guys up there said it had been perfectly calm up there for the last hour, they were just hanging out chatting and enjoying things, then literally 2 minutes before I showed up they said it all went crazy with the wind. Ha ha. We guestimated about 50 mph gusts, that were literally knocking us over and pelting us with little ice bits.
On the way up, a hiker coming down said you could see over the cornice into the crater and Rainier. But from where the flag was, that wasn't true, so he must have gone further out than the flag, which I certainly wasn't comfortable with. So no crater or Rainier view past the flag yet.
The way down definitely softened up some, but postholing still wasn't bad. It would have actually been perfect glissading snow, but I was honestly too lazy to take off my pack and do the whole remove shoes for rain pants, etc - Mine don't zip all the way :-( - so I just walked all the way down. I kinda wished I had glissaded, because there were actually a decent amount of chutes.
Lots of skiiers and splitboarders riding down. Watching them sure made me wish I knew how to ski - almost every one of them was whooping on the way down, with one notably hollering (This is aweeeeesome) so it must have been perfect conditions for them.
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