Went with a group of six people on the last weekend of self-issue permits. We arrived at the Marble Mountain parking lot a little before 11PM Friday night. The lot was almost completely filled and buzzing with people. We slept in our cars or cowboy camped between/behind cars. The noise/activity level in the lot only had one brief lull between 1am and 2am; beyond that it was constant.
We had planned to get hiking by 5:30am, but the swarm of activity around the permit register delayed us a bit and we didn't really get moving until about 5:45. The mountain was teeming with people - split fairly evenly between hikers/climbers and skiers/snowboarders.
We started off in microspikes until we hit the weather station after the first relatively steep bit of climbing. At that point we all put on our snowshoes. The snowshoes weren't really needed for flotation, as the morning snow was very firm. Instead, we switched into snowshoes for the heel lifters to take a little bit of the strain off of our calves and Achilles tendons. We kept a moderate but consistent pace up and joined a crowd at the crater rim at about 10:30am. After taking a few obligatory photos and taking a luxuriously long rest/lunch break we made the short but slightly more technical (you'll probably want to use an ice axe) traverse West to the true summit. The true summit had a fairly substantial cornice that was clearly visible on the approach, so we stayed well back from the edge, which prevented a good view of the crater. It seemed like maybe only 10% of the people who hit the rim ventured over to the true summit.
After booting it back to the crowds, the sun had sufficiently warmed and softened the snow, so we put on our glissade gear (rain pants and/or trash bags) and got ready to go down. There was a lot of fairly dangerous lack of knowledge/technique on display. We saw lots of people glissading in crampons (and even one person trying to glissade in snowshoes!!!). We saw people wildly flinging their ice axes with clearly no idea how to use them or some people with no device for arresting/slowing at all. Many climbers elected to boot up in glissade chutes, adding giant postholes to them. When people glissading didn't know how to slow themselves, they would just kick their feet into the glissade chute to stop, creating a hillock of snow that effectively ruined the chute. I would definitely advise people to learn and practice proper ice axe glissade/self-arrest technique before they get to the top of St. Helens (perhaps even take a class from one of the many local providers).
Once we got through the first 500 feet or so of descent - either people started to iron out their technique or they just gave up, because the chutes got much better. We made great time down and were back at the parking lot at about 3pm.
Comments