Washington: Mount St. Helens

Driving up the interstate from Portland to my brother Joe's house in Seattle, I realized that I was a little ahead of schedule.  So I decided to take a detour to visit Mount St. Helens.  After all, I had just seen Crater Lake, which has been quiet for the last several thousand years.  Why not go see another volcano whose last major eruption was just 30 years ago?

First, a little background.  Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18th, 1980, when I was just a few months old.  It had been rumbling for months, so the area had been evacuated, and only roughly 150 people were killed (normally there would have been hikers and mountaineers all over the area, plus people in the towns within the blast zone).  When it finally occurred, the eruption was big enough to blow ash 80,000 ft high, and the debris was scattered over eleven states.  Trees within 8 miles of the mountain were obliterated.  Outside that range, trees up to 19 miles away were knocked flat by the shock wave, all falling away from the mountain.  And outside that range and inside protected valleys, trees died standing, killed by the heat.  When the ash settled, the entire north side of the mountain was gone, and new lakes and stream beds formed in the valley below.  (Thank you, National Park Service, for your awesome brochures and info centers.)

Here is my first view of the mountain, from forty miles away:

As I got closer, I started to see some of the rivers of ash and downed trees that rushed down the valley in a flash-flood of debris:

 And the mountain kept looking bigger as I got closer:

Finally, I got as close as I could.  The volcano has been been quiet since some steam came out in 2008.  The "smoke" in this picture is actually 30-year-old ash that is being blown around by the wind. 

 Amazing!  Another amazing thing to me is that most of those trees that blew over or died standing are still around.  Here is a picture looking at a hill opposite the volcano.  If you look closely, you'll see a bunch of faint gray lines all going across the hillside, from the lower right towards the upper left.  These are tree trunks, all knocked over, pointing away from the blast. 

Here's a closeup from that last picture.  You can see not only the flattened trees, but also the protected pocket below the ridge where the trees were left standing.  They were killed by the heat, but not knocked over. 

Wow!  What an explosion!  Mount St. Helens was definitely worth the side-trip.