So this was another big year for us, because It felt like we'd finally established the Mount Saint Helens trip as a part of the culture at Vanier. It was year five for us, we stayed pretty consistent with numbers (this year saw 41 students) and word did finally spread around that hanging out with Bourget and Young on the May long weekend wasn't painful.

This year saw Mary Whyte and Leigh-Ellen McAskill join us as chaperones and we switched up the itinerary a bit. We added an extra day on to the trip leaving on Thursday rather than Friday. This was significant in that we didn't have to cram everything into one day on our visit. We were able to use Thursday and Sunday as travel days (still taking the ferry to Tsawwassen and going south on the I-5) but splitting the mountain experience over two days Friday at the Ape Caves and Saturday at the JRO on the north side. It was still a long bus ride on the bookend days but the time on and around the mountain was a little more leisurely. Because we had more time we decided to add the Trail of Two Forests to the agenda on the Friday when we visited the Ape Caves. This year also saw the introduction of a trip t-shirt for all the participants (one of each residing on the wall of fame in room 611 at Vanier)

It was wet, chilly and snowy all weekend long...our first run in with inclement mountain weather. We got to see the bottom third to half of the volcano but a low flat cloud deck obscured our view of the volcano (the next year was much worse but that's for a different post)

This was our group shot at the Ape HQ

No snow on the way in to the Ape Caves this year

One thing we did change up with the Ape Caves was Bourget. Unfortunately, Bourget could no longer make his way up and through the upper caves so he stayed with the lower caves and headed up back to the bus with those that did not want to scramble through the upper caves.

We did add, however, the chance to squeeze down through the bottom end of the lower caves into a small chamber that you have to shimmy on your belly to.

One thing Bourget liked the students to do was to turn off all their head lamps and lanterns to get the sense of how dark it is in the caves. Of course there'd always be someone who tried to "break the tension" with a slasher movie comment

The Trail of Two Forests has some very cool lava casts from where trees stood during runny basaltic flows. Students can crawl and clamber through a few which is always a good time.

This was a cold one...not like the last four years

Funny how when it's cold outside the exhibits inside the JRO become much more interesting for the students

Our Trail of Destruction hike views

The weather on the hike went from patches of sun to...

snow

All told, however, the views of the volcano were still pretty decent given the changing weather and this gave us a better idea of what to expect