Kevin's Weblog

On Friday I climbed Mount St. Helens with a Mazamas crew. It was a little rough; between vacation and moving, my training regimen sort of fell apart and I hadn’t done a serious hike in over a month and a half. But, at a certain level, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually you end up at the top. (Well, that’s not true for all mountains, but it’s pretty much the case for St. Helens. Just don’t keep walking into the crater.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, we got a lot of snow this year. Most of the roads in the Mount St. Helens National Monument have been closed until the last week. As a result, all the earlier Mazamas climbs of the mountain have been canceled. We lucked out on timing, as they cleared the road to Marble Mtn Sno-Park just a couple days before our climb. We drove up and camped there Thursday night, rising at about 4AM to hit the trail at 5. We cleared the treeline around 6:30, and by 8 we were well above all the neighboring terrain. But, still only about halfway up.

Three hours later, we made the summit, and plopped down for lunch.

The trip down was a bit faster. We were able to glissade all the way to treeline. That’s a technical term that means “sliding down the mountain on your butt”.

(Photo by Travis Schweitzer)

More photos on Flickr