April 26, 2009, Mt. St. Helens Worm Flows

I dragged my buddy Rich up Mt. Lichtenberg a couple of weekends ago.  He was on snowshoes and carrying his snowboard on his pack.  It was his first Cascade backcountry glisse adventure and amazingly he said he would be up for another one.  When I suggested Mt. St. Helens he shipped his board to Jackson Hole for conversion into a split.  It arrived back just in time for our trip on Sunday.  After a bit of hassle getting our permit at the Lone Fir we pulled into a rainy Marble Mountain Sno Park.  I will say that getting the permit was not as bad as I thought it would be though.  You can make the request online at the Lone Fir and walk out with a permit in hand in less than 15 minutes.  Other than the $7 fee it was not much worse than getting it at Jack's back in the day.  We were one of the last groups to leave Sunday after we took our time getting ready.  There was a nice fire going in the shelter we just had to enjoy. 

For Rich's first time on skins it went pretty well.  We followed the skin track of a lone skier up to about 5200' and eventually rejoined the cow path.  The forecast clearing happened right on schedule and by the time we reached the summit we could see Hood, Adams, Rainier, and most importantly the full crater and lava dome.  I hadn't been since the closure, so I was excited to see the new dome.  It was huge compared to the old dome.  We passed a group of 22 from NAS Whidbey below the summit and it was cool to see a bunch of first time climbers pushing through the pain to make it to the top.  A group of about 10 skiers left the summit shortly after we arrived.  We were probably about 20th and 21st down, but other than the first 500 vertical it was easy to find nice untracked corn.  We headed down around 3:30 pm and that was probably a bit later than ideal, but the snow was very nice for the top 3000'.  Below that it was a bit more creamed corn than fresh corn, but still quite skiable.

The snow was continuous all the way to the parking lot and I expect it will be for another couple weeks at least.  The only damper on the day was finding that my tent had been stolen shortly before we got back to the car.