Forest Service tells Mount St. Helens climbers to avoid crater rim or risk death

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Andy Goodwin stationed himself last Saturday at the top of Mount St. Helens, where he usually spends several hours each week educating climbers about one of the Pacific Northwest’s most spectacular volcanoes.

Goodwin, a volunteer steward with the Mount St. Helens Institute, watched as two climbers arrived at the 8,300-foot summit, brushed past him and sat down right on the edge of the crumbling crater rim, their feet dangling into the mouth of the active volcano.

He politely pointed out they were taking a significant risk sitting on the soft mixture of ash, pumice and stones that regularly breaks off and plummets into the crater.

Their response, he said, was a terse: “We’ll be fine.”

Later, Goodwin watched the climbers scramble up to the high spot along Monitor Ridge, the primary climbing route, and walk between the eroding rim and several wands he had placed to warn climbers to stay off an especially crumbly piece.

It likely won’t be the last time he and other volunteers see people get too close to the crater’s edge, risking a fall.

But they hope the 40,000 to 50,000 people who climb the mountain each year will heed an unusual alert from the U.S. Forest Service.

The federal agency that oversees Mount St. Helens has asked climbers to stay away from the rim and avoid looking down into the crater – as breathtaking as the views may be – at all times of the year.

The warning follows several recent rim failures, two breaks of large snow overhangs called cornices and the death of an experienced climber six months ago who perished after walking onto a cornice.

“While very tempting, the structure of the rim is extremely unstable and is continually being undermined by constant rockfall,” the Forest Service posted online. “More of the rim will give way with this rockfall activity. … Treat it like an ice cornice and stay at least 30 feet back.”

POPULAR ROUTE

The Mount St. Helens summit – a few hours’ drive from both Portland and Seattle – has proven extremely popular over the past three and a half decades.

The area reopened to recreational climbing in 1987, seven years after the mountain erupted, sending a plume of smoke and ash into the sky, burying valleys and forests in lava and rock and killing 57 people.

Climbing permits are required year-round on the mountain and access to the crater is forbidden, except via educational trips led by the Mount St. Helens Institute.

To reduce overcrowding and protect the national monument, the number of daily climbers is limited from April 1 to Oct. 31, ranging from 300 to 110 depending on the month.

The climb takes most people seven to 10 hours to complete and requires scrambling over boulders and steep, slippery slopes, but the summit is one of the most accessible among Northwest peaks.

Hikers typically don’t need technical gear on the summer route. During winter – which on Mount St. Helens can last from October into late spring – a slightly longer route requires mountaineering skills and gear such as crampons, snowshoes and ice axes.

The U.S. Forest Service says traffic on the mountain is pretty evenly split between climbing seasons. The agency has issued 20,581 permits out of a maximum of 34,100 allowed for the 2024 summer climbing season so far.

During the winter climbing season, when permits aren’t restricted, the agency doesn’t collect precise data. But estimates derived from the climbing register indicate 20,000 to 30,000 people attempt to summit each winter.

“Anecdotal evidence indicates that this number is increasing as more people venture into backcountry skiing and snowboarding/splitboarding activities, which make winter mountaineering more accessible and appealing to a larger group than traditional mountaineering,” said Jon Gellings, the manager of the 110,000-acre Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

CORNICE FAILURES

Cornices have been a perennial hazard on Mount St. Helens even before the eruption, forming on the peak’s leeward side as snow sweeps over the mountain, Gellings said.

And with the gaping crater they became an even larger risk as people sought to look inside. At least two experienced climbers have died after tumbling into the crater after a cornice break – Roscoe Shorey this past March and Joseph Bohlig in February 2010.

Cornices and the deaths they cause aren’t unique to Mount St. Helens. They form on mountain ridges and crests around the world.

In May, a cornice collapse led to the death of two people on Mount Everest; one killed a climber and injured four others in September in the Alps between Italy and Switzerland and another led to the death of a man on Canada’s Mount Temple in 2022.

In alpine environments, cornices occur year round. On Mount St. Helens, they typically form in early fall starting with the first snowstorm, Gellings said. For now, the rim is still relatively snow free, though that’s about to change, given snow in the forecast for the next two weeks.

Over the winter, up to 20 feet of snow accumulates on the rim and hangs out over the crater. It’s impossible to tell where the rim edge ends under the snow or where the snow cornice is thin and dangerous – which is why climbers are advised to stay at least 30 feet from the snow edge.

“If people walk out on this lip, it will likely break. You never know how far back it will break. The only safe spot on a cornice is off of it,” Gellings said.

Come spring, a crack develops along the rim margin as the massive cornice starts to melt and slumps toward the crater. Often, the crack is covered by a thin layer of snow that obscures it – and climbers can and do fall through it.

Eventually, as spring turns to summer, the gap between the cornice and the rim widens. The rim is exposed and the cornice starts eroding into the crater. It eventually melts off by summer’s end or early fall.

The rim cornice is so treacherous because it blocks the view that most climbers seek.

“People who are sitting up on the ridge, they want to be able to see down into the crater, but they’re just looking at snow,” Gellings said.

Another cornice also forms on the winter climbing route below the summit, at about 5,000 feet elevation, where the route runs up a narrow rocky ridge. That cornice is especially dangerous because climbers often reach the area in the dark.

AND NOW THE RIM

This year, in addition to the cornice danger, the earthen rim has proved especially unstable and dangerous – well beyond the usual mix of rocks and ash cascading down into the crater.

A several-foot-long piece of the rim broke off during the Fourth of July weekend right after a big piece of cornice failed spontaneously and fell into the crater. It happened in the exact spot where climbers were first reaching the rim – leading many to stand there and look down into the crater.

Then during the first week in October – with the cornice all melted – Goodwin discovered another large piece of rim had cracked off and rolled into the abyss.

All these spots are along Monitor Ridge, a half-mile stretch of the 3.5-mile horseshoe-shaped lip of the crater. That’s where climbers gather, catch their breath, eat their lunches and gaze at the dramatic beauty of the serrated ridges of the blast zone, the lava dome growing inside and the glacier fed by avalanches of snow and debris from the crater walls.

The view on clear days features Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Spirit Lake on the horizon. Smartphones and cameras are as ubiquitous as backpacks.

Jon Major, scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory, said the rim has eroded since the eruption and he isn’t sure what’s causing the weakness now, possibly water percolating through the volcanic rock. But he said the trend is likely to persist.

“We may well see continued erosion in places around the rim in the future — sometimes at paces that are more accelerated than others,” Major said.

In addition, extreme winter weather this year likely contributed to the instability of the rim and led to stepped-up safety warnings.

A massive snowstorm in early March created such a large cornice that no one could see north again for several months, Goodwin said.

The cornice didn’t start melting until July, he said, and it was early August before anyone could get up to the rim to look down into the crater.

Goodwin said he has been using bamboo wands with orange flags to mark the best guess for the rim edge during snow season and more recently to mark unstable ground at the edge.

But sometimes snow buries them or violent wind gusts break or carry them away. The week that Roscoe Shorey fell to his death through the cornice, a storm had dumped several feet of snow onto the ledge, covering all the wands.

“It’s extremely difficult to have anything up there that lasts any time,” Goodwin said.

Given how hard it is to place physical warnings at the peak, he gets up at 3 a.m. at least once a week to drive from Portland to the mountain, climb to the summit and warn those on the route about the rim or the cornice.

Goodwin has been climbing the mountain almost every week, year round, for the past decade as one of the volunteer stewards – the mountain’s main warning system. This year, 49 climbing stewards have helped climbers on the mountain. They’ve also reported the changes in rim stability they witness on the mountain to authorities.

He’ll often use vacation days from his day job as a fish health manager with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to climb mid-week or during a storm when fewer volunteers are on the mountain.

“I pull people aside and say, ‘You’ve got to be aware of the cornice, you need to stay this far back,’” said Goodwin, 63. “My role is to hang out on the climbing route and help people make good decisions.”

Still, some don’t heed his advice, he said.

He has seen people who approach the rim get so excited that they suddenly start running for the edge. He has had to physically grab some of them to stop them from going over, he said.

He’s witnessed climbers walking onto the cornice to gaze into the crater and take photos or sit on the exposed rim, like the two climbers last week, with their feet hanging over the rim.

Last spring, Goodwin watched in horror as a family positioned their teen daughter for a photograph just a few feet from the cornice edge.

“This family ignored all of my increasingly strident warnings in favor of a picture that would make their daughter look awesome on Facebook,” Goodwin said. “She could have very easily died.”

CLIMBER’S MOTIVATION

Greg Brown of Vancouver has ascended the mountain three times this year and can speak to the thrill of taking in the geological wonder.

“You kind of just come right up onto it as you’re coming up to the top, you don’t even realize you’re just a few steps from the edge and then boom,” Brown said. “You’re like, oh my God, we’re here.”

Brown said volunteers like Goodwin have done an amazing job of warning climbers, including by staking the wands around the rim edge.

“I definitely heed those warnings. I’m not sure if everyone else does,” he said.

For CeCe Venzon, a Seattle resident and volunteer youth guide with The Mountaineers, a Washington-based educational nonprofit, personal motivation and attitude play a major role in how people behave on the mountain top.

Venzon, who led a small group of adults and youths to the summit in June, said her group talked about the cornice days before the climb and again on the morning of the ascent.

“We were all in agreement that, as soon as we got up to the top, in no way, shape or form would we walk along or sit even remotely close to the cornice,” she said.

But while at the top, she witnessed two adult women nonchalantly walking atop the melting cornice to snap photos.

Venzon, who has been a youth mountaineering leader since 2013, said it’s not just inexperienced climbers who make bad decisions.

The desire to impress others and the pressure to compete and prove yourself as a mountaineer can lead to people taking risks, she said.

To Venzon, climbing needs a paradigm shift from a competitive and fashionable sport to a more spiritual, introspective experience. It should be a time to “just be,” enjoy nature, think about a higher power or spend time with friends and loved ones, she said.

“The mountains provide a space of contemplation, questioning and meditation,” she said.

For now, beyond the alert online, the Forest Service said it doesn’t plan to close off the climbing routes due to the rim and cornice failures.

It’s up to individual climbers to be aware of the dangers, said Gellings, the monument manager.

“We hope that people have some understanding of the natural hazards that exist out in the woods and in volcanic areas or in any alpine area,” he said. “People are still free to do what they want, but having better information can help them make good decisions.”

That’s key, said Goodwin, as forecasts call for a foot of snow, whiteout conditions and wind chills below zero on the rim next week.

A new cornice is about to start forming and this one is likely to stick around.