Mt. St. Helens, Butte Camp

Activity Notes

Climb Mount St. Helens via the rarely climbed Butte Camp Route, and enjoy a springtime climb of Mount St. Helens in relative solitude!

Technical gear required: helmet, ice ax, crampons.

Overnight backpacking gear required. Please bring a map, compass, and if you have a GPS or Gaia on your phone, please bring it and upload the track (available on the Mazama website) before the climb, along with your sense of adventure and humor. This climb is exploratory for me, meaning that I have not climbed this route before, so we'll get to enjoy routefinding together. 

Permits: I have acquired climbing permits for the team, which cost $20.75 per person including reservation fee. Upon being provisionally accepted to the climb, you will need to reimburse me for the $20.75 permit cost prior to full acceptance on this climb.

Per USFS, Road 81 is still covered with some snow drifts between Cougar Sno Park and Red Rock Pass. Therefore, we'll park at Cougar Sno Park and hike from there, doing this as a two-day/1-night climb, camping at Butte Camp then making our summit attempt on Sunday May 4th. This will be approximately 16 miles round-trip.  

Drive to the town of Cougar then continue east on Hwy 503/Lewis River Road (which turns into NF-90). Turn left on NF-83 and continue until its junction with FS-81. Cougar Sno-Park is on FS-81 more-or-less at the junction. It takes approximately 15 minutes to get to Cougar Sno-Park from Cougar. At this time of year, no Sno-Park permit is required.

Have your pack on and be ready-to-go at Cougar Sno-Park (approximate elevation 2,200 feet) at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday. We'll hike approximately 3 miles west on unplowed FS-81 to Red Rock Pass Trailhead (elevation 3,135). From Red Rock Pass, we'll hike on the Toutle Trail 238 then Butte Camp Trail 238A a total of about 2 miles to get to Butte Camp (elevation 4,000 feet) where we will make camp and spend the night. If we're feeling energetic, we may hike up one or both of the Butte Camp Domes after setting up our tents.

We are likely to be camping on snow. While there are streams in the vicinity of Butte Camp, if they are still snow covered it's possible that we'll have to melt snow for water, so bring extra fuel. Otherwise, we should be able to filter stream water. 

Sunday morning we'll get up early and will hit the trail by about 6:30 a.m. We'll continue on the 238A Butte Camp Trail until it intersects the Loowit Trail after about 1.3 miles just below 4,000 feet elevation. From the Loowit Trail, we'll head uphill on the unmarked climbing route until we get to the crater rim and summit at 8,363 feet. Be careful to stay extra far away from the crater rim due to the potential for large unstable cornices. After (hopefully) enjoying beautiful summit views, we'll head back down the way we came. Once we get back to Butte Camp, we'll break camp and re-pack our overnight packs for the hike back to the cars. I guesstimate that we'll return to the cars by late afternoon/early evening. Total distance is approximately 16 miles and upwards of 6,200' of elevation gain and loss.

Depending on group interest and time, we may stop for a group meal in Cougar before driving the rest of the way home.