Mount St. Helens - Worm Flows Route — Sunday, Apr. 22, 2018

South Cascades > Mount St. Helens

A perfect beautiful day for an Earth Day summit and our first mountain summit. We started early at 3am but ended up missing the trail sign in the dark and doing 8 miles before ending up back at the parking lot. Restarted at 7:30 am and took us 7 hours to summit after our 8 mile accidental "warm up" hike. It was sunny, sunblock is a must and more water than you think you'll need. I used spikes the first part of hike then crampons. Glissading down is the best way to go so have an ice axe, trying to walk down that steep mountain would be hard and the parts we did have to walk to another section to glissade, we postholed. I recommend an super early start so the snow is still compact (our 3 am start would have been great). Once it warms up and turns slushy, it's slippery and much harder to hike on. You can camp in the parking lot, we got there later on Sat night (about 7:30 pm) and did not have a problem finding a spot. Some people set up tents, we slept in the back of the Subaru. Despite doing 20 miles round-trip instead of 12, we were in good spirits and enjoyed all that this beautiful mountain had to offer