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3.5 miles of hiking • 1750' elevation gain •

In short - too much snow starting at 3,400 feet (!). There were patches of snow along the road to the trailhead (around 3,000'), and once you cross the creek near Blue Lake, the trail is mostly covered with up to 2-3 feet of snow. I lost others' boot tracks 1/4 mile after the creek crossing (tracks are hard to see on dirty snow), and since I don't know that trail well, gave up on Sheep Canyon and decided just to scramble to a good viewpoint of St. Helens.

The rest of the story - in pictures.

Staticmap?size=254x125&zoom=4&maptype=terrain&markers=icon:http%3a%2f%2fwenthiking.com%2fimages%2fmarkersmall.png&key=aizasydt2ewyqnn42qqnrpazuysi2dtyerccchw&center=46.1861,-122 I did the best to find my summit in Google Earth. There is a ridge and my summit is the lower of the 3. A little further up, there was no trail at all. The tree wells were easy to avoid - trees are far from each other I made a mistake of leaving the canyon bottom too early. Higher up the snow has melted and hiking was any where as easy First beargrass I hoped to see St. Helens from that rock spire but the views were so so. I noticed that the actual summit is really close and decided to check it out up There were some paintbrush and phlox View of Mt. Hood from the rock spire Shrooms The last 200-300 feet were very steep Summit rock - maybe 20-30 feet high. I tried the obvious route on the left but realized my dog cannot do it (which would mean she'd try to follow me and risk falling). I decided to try another approach. On the left (west) side of the rock was this snow barrier - this thing is at least 5 feet high on the wall side! We walked on top of it to the rock, but it's too steep to climb there Next I tried to walk around the right side of the rock. We were able to climb this snow drift (10-15 ft high) on east-northeast side all the way to the summit. When this snow drift melts, it's probably a vertical rock there and no easy approach to the sum Higher summit to the west St Helens View south Summit picture! Partly obscured view to the east The trail just above Blue Lake Blue lake - where I want to camp one day!

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Comments

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Eric Peterson
July 3, 2011

Nice camera work, is it a DSLR type?

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Roman
July 3, 2011

Yes, it's Nikon D40, one of the lightest DSLR's