A Little Detour to Mount St. Helens!!!

THURSDAY morning, I left Seattle and drove on to Portland. On the way to Portland, I detoured to Mt. St. Helens. For $6 you could get a pass to see the three main vista points, so I did that. What I didn't realize was that to get to one vista point (Johnston Ridge Observatory), it was quite a winding, long drive, which was okay --- but that vista point was at the END of the drive, and you had to backtrack that same drive to get back to the route to the next vista point! Then it was another long, winding drive to "Windy Ridge ". All the while I was driving that route, I was thinking to myself, "Boy, this better be worth it, or I'm gonna be pretty angry!!!" (I don't much like really long, winding roads high in the mountains.) It was worth it, because the contrast between the first vista (green) and the second "Windy Ridge" (the other side of the mountain) was quite dramatic. The second vista was pretty much TOTALLY DEAD of vegetation ---- even more than twenty years after Mt. St. Helens erupted, all the mountainside there is still just dead, jagged tree stumps and poles and sticks, hardly any green, tree trunks strewn all over the mountainside just like millions of toothpicks, and tree trunks all jammed up in the water. Barely any life there at all. By the time I had arrived at Windy Vista, it was about 5 p.m., so I decided not to visit the third point on the drive, which was the "Ape Cave", because I was pretty tired of the stress of driving those winding roads and my behind was getting tired of sitting in the car seat.

Here are two photos of Mount St. Helens as seen from the Johnston Ridge side. To the right in the photo above is Spirit Lake.

However, from the other side of the mountain, it is quite a different picture.

BELOW: These are the zillions of stairs I had to climb to get to the top of the Windy Ridge vista point. See my car there below in the parking lot????

BELOW: All that white stuff you see piled up against the edges of Spirit Lake are logs. When Mt. St. Helens erupted, rock, ice, and debris slammed into Spirit Lake, crossing a high ridge, and continued on, roaring 14 miles down the Toutle River.

It's astounding to me that more than twenty years later, all the devastation caused by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens is still so evident. But life is starting to come back to the mountain. Amid all the dead stumps, green is reappearing.