Mount St. Helens - Worm Flows Route — Friday, May. 23, 2014

South Cascades > Mount St. Helens

My Cousin and I left seattle at 9pm on the 22nd and pulled to the lone fir resort in cougar at midnight. we emailed them our climbing permit receipts so they would leave them out but they only left my cousins. so we hit the sack one of the lovely rooms and woke up at 5am so we would be ready to get our last permit at 6am right when the office opened. met some other people waiting for the office to open and also saw a family who had spent the night and were getting an early start on hiking. also saw at least one deer in the parking lot. got the permit at 6am and headed up to the marble mountain sno park trail head, saw one elk on the way there. road was clear to the trailhead, there was probably about 10 or 15 cars in the parking lot. we were hiking by 6:30am. weather was partly cloudy with sun breaks. we hiked about 2 hrs on dirt w/ pine needles at first (nice and soft!) then onto rock. we didn't see anyone else until we got about 3/4 the way toward the snow. after about 2 hrs we were onto the snow and we put on gaitors, I was using trekking poles the whole way and my cousin wasn't using any. the hiking on the snow was great, there was a boot pack to follow which made it easy, I felt very stable with my poles, my cousin who is lighter on his feet than me was fine with no poles and no ice axe. we got to the faux summit in 4 hrs, we passed everyone we saw between the start of the snow and the top of the mountain. approximately half way up the snow portion of the ascent the clouds rolled in and it starting raining and the wind picked up. the wind was whipping about 20mph at the top. we hiked counter clockwise around the rim toward the true summit, have to down hike slightly then ascend again. we made the true summit and turned around. we started heading back down at about 4.5 hrs into the hike. took us 3 hrs to get back down to the car, down hiking in the rain. 7 hrs round trip with no real significant breaks, only short stops for water and to put on layers or take off layers. Greatwork out, but no views at the top this time! dang, we will be back again for the views as long as we can get permits.