May 1, 2004, Mt St Helens - Worm Flows
5/1/04
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
2751
3
Like a couple hundred other people, I descended on Mt St Helens for some quota free turns. The road up to the Climbers Bivy is still snow covered so the Worm Flows was the route. I car camped at the snow park Friday night & was actually surprised at how few people there were (given the great weather).
Anyways, I headed out at 4:30am along with several other groups. You don't hit continuous snow until the Trail 244, 244C "Y" just below timberline (1 mile in?). Even beyond that, there are a couple of short (10,20 ft) stretches down to bare ground. What struck me today was that the snow are 4:30 was already plenty soft. From the camping at around timberline, I elected to snowshoe up pretty much the whole way until the last 1000' or so when the steps to the summit were very well defined.
I topped out about 12:30pm (slowpoke extraordinare) and there was a constant breeze but not bad. The was a fair amount of haze all around so the furthest south I could see was Mt Adams. I dropped in & found the snow great. By now it was plenty soft but not quite grabby. Although I didn't notice it on the way up, I believe I did come across 2 or 3 wet slide releases off of the lee side of ridges somewhere around 6,000. I don't recall if they were human triggered but there were tracks in the area.
Great ride back down although it was kind of a downer to have to hike out that last mile on foot! :)
We we're a bit ahead of you, we left the summit at about 11:30am. One of the skiers in our party triggered some pretty large wet slab avalanches. He outskied it, but we (the other members in his party) were on an adjacent aspect and didn't see the event in action. Here's a photo though. From the tracks, several others had skiied this same aspect and slope before the slabs released. Note the line of people on the right headed for the rim, and there are two others in the upper left:
And here's a link
And here's a link
![](http://folks.harbornet.com/zenom/AVI2.JPG</a> to a photo taken from a lower vantage of the slab in the foreground - this was at least 300 ft wide and maybe 6-12" (?) deep. </div></div>
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I'm impressed. Do you have any idea what the slope angle was? The aspect? Any indication why the slabs broke where they did (e.g., on his ski cut, at a rollover or obvious weak zone, etc.)?
Thanks.
Thanks.
I'd guess it to be a 30-35 degree slope angle. The aspect was facing SE. It was baked by the sun all morning and got really heavy. I suspect the layer that slid was deposited in the dump about 10 days ago. All SE facing aspects were really heavy that early afternoon and anywhere steep wanted to slide. I'm not sure why they broke where they did. The upper slab may have partially broke on a ski cut (see far tracks), but I don't recall seeing that on the lower. Even so, the ski cut was 10-ft or so, and each of these slabs were something like 300-ft wide at least.
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