Mt. St. Helens Road Trip, or, Anna Visits the Splody Mountain

[annathepiper]

With ravyngyngvar visiting us over this past week, one of the things we wanted to do was drive down to see Mt. St. Helens. solarbird and I have after all lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1991–and we’d never once actually seen this famous volcano. Plus, since this was Yngvar’s second visit, I wanted to give him a shot at seeing something cool a little farther afield than the immediate Seattle area. Ergo, I took Thursday off with the plan to allocate that to going to see the splody mountain.

As plans went it was a good one. It did however go significantly agley, as it were, when I chose poorly in selecting our actual destination at the mountain. Silly me–I thought that something calling itself the mountain headquarters would be, oh I dunno, near the mountain. But it turned out to be on the south side, way past where we needed to be. So Dara wound up having to do quite a bit of extra driving, and we wound up reaching where we needed to be–the Johnston Ridge Observatory–after the facility had closed.

Fortunately though we were still able to park in the parking lot and walk around quite a bit, which gave us ample opportunity to see not only the mountain, but much of the surrounding terrain. Here’s what we saw, including a couple of pics from my iPhone!

Even 29 years after the eruption, much of the area right around the peak still looks like empty moonscape. There’s not much foliage at all yet, save for a thin film of green around the base. Further out from there you get more scrub and bushes, as well as a lot of skeletonized trunks of trees, some fallen, some still upright. Seeing those was rather spooky and surreal, and really rather made me think of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion–which really wasn’t entirely off.

Shattered Trees at Mt. St. Helens

Then further out still there were big areas full of a bunch of strangely young, strangely similar trees, as if someone had tried to restore the area by filling it with clones of the same plant or something. It looked like a giant Christmas tree lot.

At the ridge we were able to follow a winding trail up to an observation point even though the building was closed, and that was neat. It was quite cool just to see what kinds of life had come back to the ridge; there were a whole bunch of large insects, but also wildflowers of various types, and one really rather brave chipmunk. I was pleased to see the chipmunk there. Yay, mammals back on the mountain. ^_^

And of course there was the mountain itself. It’s very easy as a modern-day American to use the word “awesome” lightly, but it’s really appropriate in this case, and in the sense of “awe-inspiring” rather than just “neat”. I intellectually knew that the eruption had been powerful, of course. But actually seeing the mountain, with its huge gaping hole in the side, drove home for me what kind of titanic forces must have been at work. I still can barely bend my brain around it.

Mt. St. Helens 9/10/09

And it will probably surprise none of you that my writer brain was thinking, “So how big was the demon that broke out of the mountain to cause that, then?”

Props must be given to the nice ladies at the headquarters who were very helpful in pointing us to where we needed to go, and also to the nice clerk in the nearby store who tried to help us out as well. And I should mention the tiny gas station/shop where we stopped on the way down off the mountain, mostly notable for an older Asian couple running it and two cranky yappydogs in the back who didn’t like it when we took turns looking for the loo.

It is probably a measure of how attached I have become to my iPhone that I played with it all the way down to the mountain and all the way back. Some of this was going through my GBS Favorites playlist for Yngvar’s benefit, but some was also using the Google Maps app to track our location by GPS, which proved helpful a time or two. On the mountain proper, though, there was no Internet to be had and not much phone service either–and even the GPS kept kicking out, unable to keep track of where we were.

And yeah okay fine, I am enough of an Internet geek that I was all YAY when we made it back to I-5 and suddenly my phone was talking to the world again.

I’m very sheepish that I screwed up our ability to visit the actual observatory building, since I’m sure there must have been all sorts of fascinating data about the mountain to learn in there. But still, getting to see the mountain itself was worth it. All in all, a satisfying trip!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Westercon was in Portland right after Mt St Helens blew up. So we had to drive up to it and check it out. Couldn't get very close at that time (still too many roads damaged), but we got a look a the moonscape.
We saw it a few years ago when Westercon was in Portland again. It is actually looking much better.
A lot of the trees that look like clones probably are. The commercial lumber companies have come in and planted plantations of trees. All the same tree, all at the same time. They have always owned the land and did the waves of planting and harvesting, going through in clumps, but then St Helens blew it all up at once. So currently a lot of the trees have the same planting time. I suppose they will stagger the harvesting to get back to the stages system again. But trees take 20-30 years to get to harvesting size, so this will take a long time to get back to what it was.
Can't believe you hadn't gone to see it yet. I would probably make the trek more often, but we only go if we drive to Portland or Seattle.

[annathepiper]

Re: the trees, *nodnods*, that makes sense.

And yeah, I've been out here since 1991 and never actually got to see it! Long, long overdue. I'm glad we went. :)

[tiggymalvern.livejournal.com]

St Helens is truly awesome to see. We did the same as you, and got to Johnston Ridge after it closed - but that meant we were the only people up there instead of surrounded by crowds, which was awesome :-)

I strongly recommend you take a longer trip and drive up the east side of the mountain. The landscape out there is boggling, with hillside after hillside of blasted trees all lying in perfect parallel, and in beautiful circles where the hillsides meet and eddies were created. And Spirit Lake, with its floating raft of tens of thousands of white tree trunks. The east side really gives you a feel for a pyroclastic flow....

[annathepiper]

Good to know! I can only imagine how that must look too! But it'll all be a question of when.

[prettyshrub.livejournal.com]

You have seen the most visually stunning part, but the visitor's center shows the before, during and after pictures which really help to understand what happened. I do recommend that you track down videos to watch.

I was living in Eastern Washington at the time, a ten-year old. My parents and I were driving to Fairchild Air Force Base for their open house. We saw this huge black cloud rolling towards us, and it didn't look like any rain cloud we'd seen. We turned on the radio to discover that yes, the mountain had finally erupted.

The radio was telling everyone to head home, so we got back just as the ash started falling. It fell for hours and was probably, oh, at least a quarter inch thick. For a few days we had to stay inside with all the windows closed, and we weren't supposed to run fans to keep the ash from being stirred up. It was already warming up weatherwise, so it got pretty hot in the house.

When we went back to school, or really, anywhere, everyone wore those white masks to help keep the dust out. It was weird and the landscape was very surreal.

[annathepiper]

Oh, I totally want to see what's in the visitor's center and I'm bummed we didn't get to go in there.

I knew about the ash falling--I was looking stuff up like that when I was writing Faerie Blood, trying to figure out how old my heroine was when the mountain blew, since she would have been here and I have an offhand remark about that in the text. So I could visualize what it must have been like... but it's better to hear from someone who actually did it!

Yeah, I should find pictures.