Mount St Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington

I had been looking forward to my visit to the Mount St Helens National Volcanic Monument. I actually remember some of the excitement around the eruption of the volcano in 1980. Since I wasn't yet 3 years old I suspect I have no memory of the event itself, just the awe that lingered around the event in the years to come. Nevertheless, Mt St Helens is history that I felt I had a relationship with.

Driving north into the National Monument is a bit like seeing a "before" photo. The coniferous forest is cool and dense, a mixture of old growth and second growth trees.

The "after" photo wasn't quite what I'd anticipated, although I don't know why. It seems silly to have expected to see ash lying around a charred and blackened landscape 27 years after the eruption, but somehow I did.

The National Monument preserves the site for study and recreation, allowing scientists to observe nature's recovery from the shock of the blast. There is certainly evidence of recovery, with young trees and shrubs starting to grow back, but the evidence of the blast wave is still visible everywhere.



There are trails where you can walk among the trunks of the trees that were simply uprooted by the blast. A few naked trunks remain standing, their branches and bark seared off in the initial explosion. Wildflowers and grasses grow on what were once heavily wooded slopes.



Many of the fallen trees were washed from the hillsides down into the glacial lakes. This is lake cedar. The white you see is not ice, but many thousands of white tree trunks floating on the surface of the water.

This car was thrown an astonishing distance from its initial location not far from Mt St Helens. It wound up on a nearby hillside, squashed and scorched.

Looming over all the destruction that it wrought so many years ago is the decapitated hulk of Mt St Helens. With smoke rising steadily from the crater it still looks every bit an active volcano. Peculiarly, the molten rock pushing up from its core is gradually healing the mountain, rebuilding a new peak to replace the one that was blown off in the eruption.

The end of the scenic drive is a very, very long flight of stairs (of which this is only part) leading up to the Windy Ridge Viewpoint less than 5 miles from Mt St Helens. Looking away from the smouldering volcano you can see the extent of the damage it wrought, stretching out in the distance towards the glaciated peak of Mount Adams.