After church services, we changed clothes and headed north to place most of us remember hearing about – Mount St. Helen. This was on the list of “must sees” while in Washington, but we discovered it was closer to our camp in Oregon than when we were camped near Seattle. It was a little over an hour away but well worth the trip. There are four Visitor Centers leading up to the Johnson Ridge Observatory, which is the closest to St. Helen and each one told us the clouds were really bad and you would probably not see anything. Cloudy seems to be a way of life up here, but we were too close and had come too far not to stay and see what we could. It was a 47 mile drive from the first Visitor Center to the last and just like yesterday, the roads through these mountains are littered with cyclists in high gears peddling like mice in a wheel and not making much headway. I can only ask why.
View from the Johnson Ridge Observatory. Mount St. Helen in the cloud.
Originally this mountain had an elevation of of over 9000 feet and after the eruption in May 1980 its elevation had reduced to a little over 6,000 feet. There was a lateral explosion that erupted out the north side and blew material out at 450 miles per hour. Then the mudslides began created 1.1 billion dollars in damages including timber and personal property, plus 57 people’s lives. Much of the debris wound up in the Columbia River and reduced the water level to 30 feet. All this happened in 190 seconds. How’s that for statistics!
Valley to the left of MSH showing some devastation.
Mt. St. Helens sticking its head out from clouds
The vegetation is regrowing but its easy to see that all of it is less than 30 years old. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see fallen trees everywhere. Scientists also found a lava cap in the center of the cavity that had blown out and the cap was growing daily and reached an elevation of 1000 feet within months. This cavity and cap became a perfect place for snow to accumulate protected from the sun and ultimately became a glacier.
Just when people thought things were quieting down, in 2004 MSH started erupting again. This time it pushed its material to the surface rather than by explosion, again filling in the crater but this time it was at the rate of one dump truck per second. Today the crater has regained approximately 2,000 feet of elevation of the 3,000 originally lost, but the area will never be the same again.
damaged tree remains everywhere
Mount St Helen Volcanic Monument was establish to forever study and learn about this reality of our planet because there are many volcanoes and most of them are active and it will happen again.
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