Weather conditions looked excellent and avalanche danger low so we decided on a day hike to the summit of Mt St Helens. We were *not alone*-- lots of people on the trail. We set off from the TH around 8am. The trail was compact snow and ice the whole way to the summit. We were fine in boots for the first couple miles and put on crampons around 4000 elevation. We saw a couple people in microspikes, but felt crampons were more appropriate. We had carried snowshoes as well, they ended up being training weight since the snow was hard packed in most places. Lots of people carrying skis up, but with the icy conditions earlier in the day, we saw lots of them carry the skis back down again too. The ridgeline was corniced and had exposed rock/dirt, I practiced my mixed climbing on rock/snow in crampons but my hubby took them off for this section. You can avoid the rock, but that puts you into an area with significant cornice collapse danger. We hiked up at a leisurely pace, there was no way to really go fast in some areas because of all the people!
We reached the saddle where most people stop at the crater rim around 1pm and headed climber's left to traverse to the true summit. The most difficult conditions of the day were during the traverse. Some of the ice was so hard that I couldn't get my ice axe to bite, although my crampons usually did. The summit itself was also very icy and angled so we opted to backtrack to a saddle along the way for our lunch break. Very cold here with the wind, I put on my warm layers, even my belay jacket! Word on the mountain was that a couple people had taken falls and slid a significant distance in the icy conditions. I don't think anyone was seriously injured. I watched a couple skier falls as well.
After finding friends at the main saddle, we goofed around a little and descended slowly. Two in our expanded party tried glissading and it was too icy to stop very well so they gave up on that. On the lower sections the snow had warmed up significantly so we were able to take crampons off around 6000 elevation and just boot down. Looked like the late-coming skiers were having better luck as conditions had improved. Our leisurely descent took 3 hours and we were back to the car with headlamps at 7pm. I do recommend using care on the descent, especially if it's growing dark, we pointed the right direction to several parties who were getting off route- esp near the Chocolate Falls crossing.
Per GPS (approximated via 4 tracks with slightly different stats) about 12.2 miles 6600 gain to the true summit RT
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