Mount St. Helens - Worm Flows Route — Sunday, May. 29, 2011

South Cascades > Mount St. Helens

We camped overnight at the parking lot. Around 3am, a bunch of snow mobilers came and started revving their snow mobiles over and over and yelling and swearing. Also, when people start really early in the morning, you can hear them getting ready and talking. Last year, we had slept in the car, and while that was more uncomfortable, at least if we had done that again, we could have just driven away to a quieter spot. So if you have a larger car, you might think about just sleeping in the car. Also, the shelter that used to be there burned down. Lame. But there are two really nice toilets there (they don't smell! and they have toilet paper!). We started about 6:30. There's snow from the very beginning of the trail. We had both crampons and snowshoes: the crampons were helpful on the way up and the snowshoes were helpful on the way down. The snow was pretty slushy until the last 1,000 feet or so at the very end, when it got a lot better. It was pretty overcast most of the time, but also very very bright. We applied sunblock several times and still ended up getting burned. So please be extra careful about applying sunblock, and don't forget to protect your lips too! A few times visibility got very low, but there are plenty of well-defined tracks to follow. And the sky did clear out for a few minutes at a time throughout the day. It was really warm almost the entire day. There weren't very many people that day, maybe 30-50? Considering it was Memorial Day weekend, that seems really low, but maybe people were scared off by the weather forecast. At any rate, I think most people who started in the morning made it to the top.