Mount St. Helens

We went for a short "drive through" and ended up spending two entire days. 

The first day we went to the Johnson Observatory directly across from the crater's north side.  You enter from the West from Castle Rock, Washington.  It's about sixty miles to the end of the road.  We spent the entire day seeing the two films, attending a ranger talk, viewing all in the museum, eating the lunch we had brought, and taking a hike. 

On the way back West we stopped at a view point, then stopped at a newly created lake that formed after the eruption, and then tried  to go to the The Mt. St. Helens Forest Learning Center,  a partnership between Weyerhaeuser Company, Washington State Department of Transportation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, but it was closed. We then stopped at a place that had a lot on the history of Spirit Lake and of Harry Truman who owned a lodge there and refused to leave and was one of the 57 who perished the day of the eruption.  Our final sop was the Visitors Center almost back to Castle Rock but it had also closed.  But there is a great boardwalk behind it through a marsh with great views of the mountain.  The marsh is a great birding spot but not this time of year.

The next day we decided to move on the south side of the mountain.  The eruption was on the north side of St Helens so the south still has forests and looked more like your "typical" volcano shape.  The drive South is equally as far as the one on the north, and goes east out of Woodland, Washington. 

The Ape caves are a 3/4 mile lava formed ice caves, which you go into with your flashlights.  Inside the temperature is a constant 40 degrees.  The hike inside is really worth it.  Less than a mile away from the cave is a 2,000 lava flow over trees.  The spot where the trees grew are holes in the lava.  And where the trees fell lava moved around then leaving tunnels where the tree trunks once stood.  Again, you can crawl through these lava.tree trunks.  

We went up as far as we could to the south facing side of Mt St Helens.  The views were awesome. 

But............  that was not enough for us.  We decided to go further east and then north on a not so well maintained Forest Service road to Windy Ridge, the view from the northeast into the crater.  It is about a 1 1/2 hour  drive each way.  The road goes through the heart of the blast zone where millions of trees were blown down or where the dead trunks are just left standing. 

The road ends overlooking Spirit Lake and the crater.  There's a 300 step stair to the top of a mountain for a spectacular view of the lake and the crater.  Spirit Lake is still filled with downed trees from the eruption, now thirty years after the eruption took place.  

Needless to say we were still driving out of Mt St Helens at dark.  We stayed in Hood River, Oregon and ate and slept with views of the Columbia River.  We sat down for dinner well after 9pm.

We highly recommend you go to Mount St. Helens if you have not made the trip.  Maybe you will no take two days like we did but it is very worth the time.  

Our pictures from Mt St Helens can be found at the following link:   https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=glevpalmer&target=ALBUM&id=5645072565560172209&authkey=Gv1sRgCM3gqNPkk4eFTQ&feat=email


Last year the PBS show NOVA had an excellent show on Mount St Helens as it was the 30th anniversary since the eruption.  The show runs a bit under an hour and is well worth it.  The link to the show is:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/mt-st-helens.html