Mt St Helens, 27 Years After

I visited Mount Rainier and Mount St Helens in the same day yesterday, which was very cool. St Helens was never nearly as massive as Rainier, but it used to be equally beautiful, a symmetric white cone rising above the Portland area to the north. Of course, that all changed on May 18, 1980 when the mountain blew its top. The north side of it was blasted away, radically altering Spirit Lake, washing water and volcanic debris hundreds of feet up the adjacent mountains and sending ash thousands of miles to the east; I had a light coating of ash from the eruption on my car in Denver the next day. My mom watched the eruption from her living room window in Portland...quite a spectacle.

I enjoy going back to the mountain every decade or so to see how the landscape is recovering. The volcano is still steaming...the lava dome in the crater continues to build slowly, and centuries or millenia from now, the cone shape may return...if there's not another major eruption. The landscape adjacent to the north side of the mountain is revegetating slowly, but outside of the most extreme blast zone, forests with trees 20-30 feet high are thriving.

These trees are one of the eeriest results of the eruption. Notice that they're all lying in the same direction, instead of being jumbled as would normally be the case. Of course, they're all facing away from the mountain; the blast knocked them down in an instant. The new trees to the right of the picture are in an area where perhaps the heat and intensity of the blast were less than to the left, which was directly exposed to the eruption without any intervening terrain.

This lake is just over a small ridge from direct exposure to the volcano. It still devastated the area...the old spars were trees in an old growth forest that were snapped like matchsticks! But probably the heat from the blast was not as intense as in areas with absolute direct exposure to the eruption, so the soil fared better; and now a healthy new forest is well underway.