Cash in, Miss Smith
I organized a big group trip to Mount Saint Helens this weekend - it
was awesome.
Mount St. Helens is about a three and a half hour drive from Seattle
if you head for the southern entrance and toward Climber’s Bivouac,
the point from which most summiters take off. In the interest of
mountain restoration, only 100 passes are issued a day through
November. Passes are available online and cost about $22 per person
which includes parking permits for the parking area near Climber’s
Bivouac. Most of the other administrative details are available from
the Forest Service website so I won’t go into them here…
We left pretty early Saturday morning. The boarding place that looked
after Io came to pick him up in the morning and then Tanya and I
planned on driving our friends, Eva and Adam, to the mountain.
But when they got to our place and we looked at our collective pile of
junk, it was obvious we wouldn’t be able to cram it all into our car
so they graciously agreed to pick up driving honors. Note to self:
neither an ~20 gallon cooler nor a 5 gallon water jug are probably
necessary for an overnight camping trip. But then we were on the road
close to 11.
On the way to Mount St. Helens, Adam recommended we stop for lunch at
a place named “Burgerville.” As a 12 year vegetarian, I wasn’t too
keen about this but I didn’t want to rock the boat since they were
driving, rocking the boat is usually just a hassle for everybody, and
I have reasonable faith in my friends’ judgment — unless the topic is
file 
— so Burgerville it was. The place turned out to be hugely and
pleasantly surprising. Most of the characteristic fast food trappings
were there: unhealthy, calorie dense foods with a menu consisting of
variations of burgers and fries. But the food was served to our table
via numbers and it was mostly made with sustainably produced, local
ingredients. Their burgers are made with Oregon Country beef which is
what my smaller local co-op has offered for years and which I almost
decided to start eating a couple years ago (it’s rbgh-free, vegetarian
fed beef). But then I decided there’s no really important reason to
reintroduce red meat into my diet, regardless of whether I agree with
how it’s raised. But the point is that it’s amazing that it was on a
fast food menu at all. They offer two types of veggie burgers, too,
which is a huge concession to vegetarians at a fast food
place. Lastly, their cheese is Tillamook, which is locally produced
and (generally) rennetless. Oh - and their kids’ meals feature a
medley of animals who seem to interact with a ranger and one of the
animals wears a shirt proudly proclaiming “Science Rules”. The
message is really pro-environment which is certainly one I agree with,
but it’s great to see the more general plug for science as long as the
flat earth society is
constantly trying to take us back to a simpler time.
But wasn’t this supposed to be about Mount St. Helens? So we started
heading toward Climber’s Bivouac. On the way there we had a brief
stop at Jack’s to pick up our climbing permits and parking passes.
When we got to the campsite, Jason, Alicia, Beth, Taylor, and Dan were
already there and had started scoping out the spots to pitch our
tents. John, Heather, Jim and Jayme showed up shortly afterward and
we all had out camp sites set up in pretty short order and with plenty
of daylight to spare. The campsite was really pretty nice with a
number of fairly small and private individual camps with nice, flat
sleeping areas marked out and tons of grills. There is no water
available (the person I spoke with on the phone indicated they have
tried drilling but they kept finding e. coli in the water!) but there
are surprisingly nice bathrooms. Our group was spread between two
grills for dinner: a
primitive camp on the outer ring and the
Estates on the inner parking area. We learned John and his crew
know how to camp without making it a full on granola experience.
I forgot to mention the weather - it was incredible. There wasn’t a
cloud in the sky on Saturday. It was windy and chilly but it really
could have been much, much worse. It got pretty cold by the time the
sun went down, but it was just fine in our tent and sleeping bag.
It’s a great experience to get away and look up at the clear night sky
seeing constellations and the Milky Way. I should definitely try to
do this at least once a year.
We got up at about 5:45 Sunday morning to take down our tents and get
an early start on the hike. Everyone was ready to go by about 7 and
we
the trail. The first two miles of the hike gradually gains about
1100′ from the campsite under tall evergreen trees with
views of the surrounding cascades until you get to the
at about 4800′. Climbing permits are required from here on up the
mountain to aid in its rehabilitation. From here, it’s about 3 miles
and 3500′ of rough climbing and bouldering to reach the crater rim.
The view is awesome, though, with
Hood, and Bachelor all visible on a clear day like we had. Adams is
the closest so it’s the only one I really have as a backdrop in my
pictures but in the full sized version of the
degree panorama from the crater rim, you can see Hood and,
faintly, Bachelor.
There is snow in the shadow of boulders much of the way up and
considerably more snow at the exterior crater rim. Incredibly, when
we got to the rim we saw two golden retrievers that had been roaming
the campsite the night before! They seemed to be part of a project to
clean the snow off the rim since they were eating up a lot of it. I
was amazed to see these guys at the rim and that they beat us! They
were super friendly and
made a new friend with one of them.
The rim itself is awesome. As you look down into the crater you can
very clearly see the new dome that has been forming since the eruption
in 1980. We saw steam rising from about three or four spots inside
the crater. The eruption blew off the north section of the crater
rim, so from our vantage on the tip of the south crater we had a great
view of the
area, crater, new dome and further in the distance
Lake and Mount Rainier. We posed at the top for some
pictures with
and the
in the background before
the dogs
down.
On the way back to the campsite, I paid closer attention to the
landscape including the
the
through the sloughs, the
transition between treeline and the rocks and the two main types
of fauna: a kind of
and a
wildflower. It wasn’t easy to pay super close attention to any
details other than where to step on the
boulder, though.
We stopped for one last picture
up at the crater rim from the campsite before heading back to
Seattle. I don’t know if I’d take the chance in the future to book in
August for a weekend in late October, but we really had awesome luck
for our trip and I’d definitely do this again. Next time I’d probably
try to go some time from June or July through September since Tanya
noticed there is also a summer route to the summit and it would be
nice to give that a try. But this was a really great experience and
even with all the caveats (only about 10 miles round trip with 4500′
of non-technical elevation gain that you can do in one day), it’s
still really exciting to have climbed to the top of a mountain.
Adam said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
Don’t forget the rousing game of superghost and boticelli on the way back home!
Patrick said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
Of course!
Who could forget the Superghost and Botticelli! Together those games forged an alliance that almost rivaled climbing an active volcano for high point of the weekend. I am *always* up for a game (unless it’s with Nick who is a tremendous cheat at both).
Alison said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
Those are gorgeous pictures! Sounds like a fabulous trip.
Nick said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
cheat?
How dare you? Patrick must have been winning. Once he starts losing, the accusations of cheating start flying around!
Cory said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
After doing something like that, aren’t you supposed to drop a ring in some volcano - like those movies where all they did was walk around? Something to do with hobbits or some crap…
John said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
What a grea trip - Thanks again for organizing the whole thing Patrick.