At long last, I finally summited Mount Saint Helens! My buddy and I got to the Marble Mountain Sno Park at about 8:30pm on the 18th. We set up camp, got most of our gear all packed, and slept there. We got up at 4am and set out by 4:30am. It took us about an hour or so to make it past Chocolate Falls. Between the Park and the Falls, there were some stretches of snow, so we put our spikes on. It was extremely humid in this whole section and rather buggy. We both wore warm jackets and leggings and changed out of them within a mile and a half.
Shortly after Chocolate Falls, we hit the Worm Flows. We mostly stayed on the rocks and sand until the weather station. We saw the sunrise on Mount Hood to the south. Past the weather station, it was almost all snow with a couple of rocky sections. I'd say the last 2,000 feet was nearly all snow, but before that you can mostly avoid it if you want to.
From what we saw, we were the first to top out in the morning at 9:20am after 4hrs and 50mins total between camp and the summit. The push to the false summit was very, very steep. We had microspikes and ice axes. Crampons would have been more useful for ice and the really slushy stuff, but spikes worked fine provided we were aware of our weight and had our ice axes out in case we needed to self-arrest. The final ascent was long, as we were tired, but the view when we topped out was absolutely stunning. Stay back from the ledges, as they were very corniced out and dangerous.
We met two other two-person groups who came up after us, two ladies and a father and son. We all had a nice time taking photos and talking. My friend and I were there for almost an hour. We donned our rain pants and gloves. He put on gaiters and I wore a lovely trash bag. We glissaded down a whopping 4,000 feet! The first 2,000 were prime glissading real estate with well carved out chutes. We had our axes to control our speed and self-arrest if things got out of hand. We had way too much fun. From then on we hopped from chute to chute, sometimes crossing rocks to find a good one to go down. We made it all the way down to the bottom of the worm flows.
There were a TON of people coming up as we slid down. It was very hot, even near the top past 8am in the last hour we climbed. We thought an early morning was worth it so we didn't have to struggle up slush in the heat.
Once we finished our glissades, we hopped on the trail and hit Chocolate Falls again within ten minutes. The rest was an easy but somewhat long walk back to the parking lot. We had an incredible adventure!
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