My best hike up St Helens yet....and I've been up at least 12-15 times. I don't remember the exact number.
My young friend Logan and I left Seattle at noon and reached Marble Mountain parking lot at 4pm. That included stopping to eat. No traffic. We hiked in for 1 1/2 hours to tree line and spent the night. Perfect nights sleep. We did have 6 guys go by at 12:47am (yes I looked). At 5am we left our campsite and headed up. The dirt/rock path is fast and easy hiking. Around 1 mile from the summit the trail turns to snow. Make sure to bring traction devices. We had Microspikes and they worked perfectly. We reached the summit at 8am....only 3 hrs from our campsite. We saw the 6 guys heading down. They caught the sunrise. We had the summit to ourselves. Absolutely no wind and clear views looking at Rainier, Adams, Hood and the Sisters. We couldn't see Baker. We stayed for around 45 minutes. We were fortunate to have camped out and awoken above the clouds. While hiking up the clouds kept sneaking up in elevation on us, but we stayed ahead and had a clear view of the summit the entire way up.
On the way down we glaciated. Our last glaciate put us within 150 feet of our campsite. I really felt sorry for those that started late from the parking lot. Their entire hike up was in the clouds for those people. I'd say the clouds stopped climbing at about 6,500 feet in elevation. Other hikers kept asking us if the clouds will ever clear.
We packed up our gear and it took us only 1 hr and 15 minutes to get back to the car. Hikers were still heading up by the time we were done. We were back in Seattle at 3pm.
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