Mt St Helens: epic glissading with the scouts

We had a small group of scouts climb Mt St Helens on May 9th via the Wormflows route. The climb was a success, but it was a long day with a bunch of challenges. We drove up on Friday night but due to traffic only made it to the trailhead at 10:30pm. We had planned to camp up at Chocolate falls, so by the time we hiked in and setup camp, it was already midnight. The falls didn't have any water, so I had to go pretty far upstream to find a large pool that we treated to refill for the day and for breakfast. Lots of groups going up on Saturday morning woke us up pretty early, especially the folks camped closer to the trail. We ate a quick hot oatmeal breakfast and were on the trail by 6am. The snow started much higher than normal, so lots of rock scrambling on the ridges before we got to snow. It was a hot day, so we ran low on water pretty quickly, had to refill using clean snow several times. Got to the overlook ridge at 1pm, sat around for a while and then decided to try to make it to the real summit and this is where things went south. The traverse over to the real summit had some steep and icy snow sections and despite chopping steps with my ice axe, one of the scouts ended up slipping and sliding down the face. At this point we aborted the summit attempt, sent another scout down and got ready to glissade down. Since we had traversed to the summit, we had to do a bunch of traversing back, but eventually we made it to the established glissade chutes and had a great time following those down. The chutes ended up diverging from the ridge trail and going down the creek bed, so we (along with the other scout groups) ended up down there. Here we ran into a steep rocky section and another hiker who had broken her hand, so we escorted her down and helped her get off the snow and back to the trail. Got back to camp pretty late, packed up, hiked out and drove home. Next time would stay another night, as driving home after doing the climb was exhausting.