5 of us (in one car) arrived at the giant parking lot of Johnston Observatory ~8am. Headed east (farthest end of the parking lot) on the Boundary Trail, which goes along a flowering ridge overlooking the blast zone. It's more or less flat, if not slowly loosing elevation. Brooke caught up on us. She's super fast, but that still caught us in surprise. Stay left at the junction with the Truman Trail and cross the pumice plains to the junction with Harry’s Ridge Trail. There, you can see Spirit Lake and many logs still floating on the surface. Keep left on Boundary Trail. 
Now, elevation starts to rise steadily, and flora changes from dry penstemon and paintbrush to strawberry, mariposa lily, even some columbine. Every step, the view gets better, and soon you could see Hood, and Rainier. Today, we saw dust cloud in the distance. All the way to St. Helens Lake and an stone arch for the only reliable shade of the day. Later, on the drive home, I realized that you could see this arch from the road!
At the next junction, there's a snow patch. Flat and easy. The left trail goes down a bit, not sure to where. We continued on the snow patch. After 5.5 long miles, finally hit Coldwater Peak Trail. Going up again in many switchbacks (nothing steep). Greener and wetter, patches of buttercup, western pasque flower (some already in fluffy seed), some beargrass and avalanche lily. Rosy Spiria was just starting. Towards the top, there were 2 small snow patches under the shade of a big rock. The 2nd one was a bit sketchy. On the way down, we followed some boot track to avoid these 2 snow patches. On the very top, there're some pink penstemon on the rocks, a lot of antennas, maybe for seismic monitoring, or for cellphones.I got a ride back home around 6:30pm.
