May Day, Mt. St. Helens

Lots of folks on the mountain for a weekday.  We all must have been thinking along the same lines- wanting to take advantage of the good forecast before the unstable weather moved in.  The actual weather was not quite as nice as the forecast.  Mostly sunny turned into mostly cloudy with high winds.  Left Marble Mtn. sno-park at 9 am and started skinning immediately.  Made it up to the rim by 1:30.  The high winds prevented us from lingering too long.  While we were up there a snowmobile came gunning up to the top.  Needless to say, the noise was very annoying.  Is it allowed for snowmobilers to go to the top?

On the ski down, the top 1500' or so was breakable wind crust- not so much fun on tele skis.  Then we had about 1000' of nice cruising corny snow before hitting the sticky mank near the bottom about 1000' above treeline.  The coverage was great- lots of snow up high and down in the trees as well.  We were able to ski all the way back to the parking lot.