Plan a road trip to Mount St. Helens this summer! 🗻🚙 What's open, what's closed (there were two landslides in the spring), what's family-friendly.

Here's a link to my story in The Seattle Times.

The most popular route to visiting Mount St. Helens is 504. It’s a dead-end road, so you’ll have to double back the way you came. There are three visitor centers currently open, each of them family-friendly, accessible, with restrooms and large parking lots.

Our favorite is the second one: it has a playground, and the free visitor's center is considerably swankier than the others (there's Weyerhauser money here).

It is entirely worth your while to drive 1.5 hours around to the south side of Mount St. Helens to walk through the lava tube. Ape Cave is named for the scout group that first explored it. Very easy, very cool. You’ll need to reserve a $2 timed ticket on recreation.gov; spots are limited to protect the cave.