St. Helens rim beta/question

Figured I'd start a new thread, since that "St. Helens beta" thread in the partners forum is mostly about the new permit system.


A non-TAYer coworker of mine skiied it from the summit yesterday. He said that, about fifty feet from the visible edge of the rim (er, cornice edge), there were cracks where the huge cornices were starting to show signs of peeling away!  Said he sunk into one such crack, about up to his chest, and had to claw his way out.

I was hoping to summit it one of these next few weeks too.  And now, I've heard about how on winter climbs people sometimes belay each other out to the snowy edge of the rim for seeing the crater... But it seems that it's getting to the point where even that would be dicey.   

So, the question this leads to is:  when's the best time of year to climb it if you hoped to maybe just maybe be able to find bare ground on the rim, but … still have most of the ascent/descent be on, um.. snow??   I called MSH today to ask them about that …. The person said "I dunno, maybe June" but didn't seem to really know much about it at all.  As with most stuff, I guess ya gotta just watch for and read TRs …

For me half the fun of going up MSH is looking into the crater… and I've been up it in the winter before, but it was so cloudy seeing into the crater wasn't even an issue. 

What makes it really spooky is the fact that the thing's seismically active, so a cornice can get shaken at any time. There's a 2+ magnitude earthquake or more there about once a week. When I was there in January, I decided that I was willing to risk getting close enough to the cornice rim to be able to see the dome in the center based on my own impressions of the megacornices nearby; my weight was negligible compared to the windgusts that had hit the cornices from the South earlier that morning. I also decided against ticking the true summit in part due to the risk of traversing along the rim (I reached the rim one high-point to the East of the normal Worm Flows route, so I had a lot of traversing to do) with the potential of cornicefall, since they often break farther back than you expect.

It seems to me that a belay on a cornice of that size is unlikely to be more than a psychological crutch for the party; if, when the cornice fails, it rotates a little as it falls, part of the weight of the cornice will be placed on the dead guy/rope/anchor/belayer. Seems like a recipe for unpleasantness at best, and an illegal trip into the crater for the belayer as well at worst. Furthermore, if the explorer falls through, somebody else may have to wander at least part way out onto the cornice to set up a haul system/pad the lip.....

All that said, the view is pretty cool, though I've primarily appreciated it vicariously through my own hastily snapped photos (Huge file, but worth it for the resolution). The photo makes it look like I was closer to the rim edge than I remember being. I'm pretty sure I was about ten feet from the edge proper. I remember being surprised at seeing tracks that made the traverse from the top of the Worm Flows route to the true summit along the top of the cornice instead of traversing the slope below the lowest possible breakpoint of the cornice.

Big new cracks sound pretty spooky!

To answer your question about when is the best time to find safe footing. Seems to me that we have always been lucky more towards the quota impose date of May 15 .Always a crowd there then as well.
Personally my criteria on timing is based on being able to ski all the way to the parking lot.