Mount St. Helens - Monitor Ridge — Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025

Sunrise hike of Mt. St. Helens via Monitor Ridge on 8.26.25

ROAD: 2.5 miles of forest road at the end to contend with. Lots of potholes, ruts and rocks. I just rode it sloooow over the rougher spots with the little Nissan Versa Note and made it, as did some other passenger cars.

Toilet was open and had TP but was definitely ripe especially with the heat. Lots of nice tent spots at the parking area!

TRAIL: I began my hike in the very dark night at 1.40 a.m., a loud screech and call of a barred owl startling me and sending me on my jumpy way out of the parking lot. Thankfully the forest was uneventful (yes, I am paranoid about cougars when I hike alone in the dark).

Finding my way up the boulders to gain the ridge was a little confusing in the night, but Gaia kept me on track. Like many reports state, I stayed to climbers' left and lower of the poles that mark the ridge, where there was generally a decent bootpath to be found in the gully.

As I climbed, there were definitely some sections through the boulders that needed some use of hands to get up, but if you find yourself yarding on loads and loads of rocks for an extended amount of time, you're just doing it the more challenging way and there's an easier path somewhere. I definitely found easier paths on the way down than my way up, when I could finally see (overcast and just past a new moon? I'm a sucker for punishment). 😆

The final few hundred feet to the crater rim were mostly sand/scree/smaller rocks - a little slippery, but not bad, and much easier to deal with by headlamp than finding my way through the boulders had been.

I reached the crater rim at around 5 a.m., quite a bit earlier than I expected. It was still rather dark, so I sat and had a snack and waited for a bit more light before I began the traverse to the crater highpoint/true summit.

There was a bootpath that pretty much hugged the crater rim. This traverse involved some descending and reascending several times through more scree and a rocky section before I reached the summit area - a larger flat spot marked with a cairn, right before the unremarkable highest point on the ridge.

I stayed a while, watching the sunrise progress, before making the ups and downs back on the traverse to return to where I had come up. Sadly, the views were pretty smoky but it was still a pretty morning.

Wildly, no one else was around for sunrise, and I didn't see any other humans until I was maybe half an hour into my descent. It was a bit surreal and almost creepy being the only one on the crater rim while I was up there for over an hour, since there have always been other people around every other time I've been there!

I definitely thought it was worth hiking in the dark to beat the heat and get a sunrise to boot. 😊

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More Information on this Trip Report

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