On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
After this week, I only hav 4 submissions in the queue, not enough for even a full week next week. Unless we want to take a break, now would be a great time to send something in if you have been thinking about it!
We added Mt St Helens to our original Washington itinerary on the recommendation of several friends. It’s an impressive site, seeing the results of half a mountain blown away at 650 mph. This is the only NPS site I can think of where the movie in the visitor center gets your attention more than the site itself. It was a documentary of the eruption and the aftermath.
The best views are from the farthest point up the road, the Johnston Ridge Observatory. Unfortunately, it was closed when we were there due to the road washing out in Fall 2023. It is expected to be back in service Spring 2025. We went as far up the road as we could and took a small walk at Silver Lake. Small because the temperature was in the low 90s that day.
Mt St Helens and in the foreground, a delta at Silver Lake. The delta is formed from ashflow from the eruption in 1980. You’re looking at 44 years of recovery.
A closer look at the crater left by the eruption
Flowers at Silver Lake. These are foxglove, I think.
Flowers at one of the viewpoints. I don’t know what these are.
Mt St Helens with steam rising where the glacier on the mountain meets volcanic activity.
Spirit Lake. This is where 83-year old Harry Truman had a lodge on the shore. He said this was his home and he wasn’t leaving when they called for an evacuation. He didn’t survive. He and his lodge are underneath the lake and the 120 feet of ash that became the new lake bottom.
The blast zone. USFS and Weyerhauser took different approaches to recovery. Weyerhauser salvaged 850 million board feet of lumber from the blown-down timber, then started a reforestation program, eventually planting 18 million seedlings by hand. USFS took the approach of natural recovery, focusing on research and recreation in the National Monument.
Our campsite at Seaquest. This was a state park on the road that leads to Mt St Helens. It was beautiful and the sites were nicely spaced out. I’d put it in the top five of any state park we’ve been in.
My favorite view from our campsite. I talked to a park ranger and she told me the trees were all approximately 200 ft tall and 100 years old. There’s a big mix of species in the park but most of these are probably Noble Firs.
Bill Hicks
Thanks for the pics. I miss the NW. The second plant looks like scotch broom, beautiful, but it is an exotic and invasive species. I believe it was brought in on purpose. I think you are correct that the first plant is foxglove. I think it is an exotic as well, but I don’t think it is considered problematic.
Ten Bears
It was even more impressive from fifty miles away on a clear May day. Thanks for the update …
p.a.
Thank you. I have a small vial of Mt St Helens ash from a Washington classmate who lived in the ash fallout zone. Very fine, tiny grains.
Steve
“USFS and Weyerhauser took different approaches to recovery”
I’m curious about how the areas differ now that they’ve had some time to recover.
frosty
@Steve: What I saw was that the Weyerhauser area was almost completely reforested and the USFS area still looked bare in a lot of places. Natural reforestation appeared to be much slower.
WaterGirl
So interesting! And beautiful, of course.
Gvg
In Florida, natural recovery would be problematic if not impossible because there are already so many exotic invasive species that would overwhelm natural specie adapted to a slower pace. I don’t think we would even consider it. Some of the invasive plants are very flammable for instance, more so than the native fire adaptive species. Plus the scary animals like boas and toxic toads….We would do natural replanting as fast as we could. If the gop objected(and some might) I think they would get run over.
We have a crazy government, but so far they haven’t messed with FEMA Florida. Same initials, and a lot of normies down here don’t always realize they are different and separate. I think the feds get credit in Florida for some of the state agencies competence since Andrew. In fact I have watched other states in the past few decades and wondered why they haven’t learned from our mistakes. Past US presidents who cared poached Florida’s FEMA leadership repeatedly.
It’s also related to the costs to the state of always having to pay to remove various exotic plants by the tons every year that impact agriculture, infrastructure, waterways etc. It’s never ending and costs a lot, plus there are big public volunteer days to pull by hand certain kinds. Letting a big area be bare to seed itself “naturally” in Florida would be a public relations disaster.
Geo Wilcox
@frosty: Natural recovery is always slower. We took ruined farmland and created a forest on one half and left the other to go fallow and recover naturally. The forest is full canopy but the natural areas still have just a few trees but lots of shrubs, thickets, and wildflowers. They both look beautiful in their own way.
Nelle
I was in church just south of Seattle that Sunday morning when St. Helens blew. Somebody said he’d pay the cost if my husband would fly us up for a look. So that’s what we did. My husband quickly rented a plane from his flying club at Boeing Field and we flew up to about 6,000 feet, well to the northwest and out of the emergency zone. The two things I most remember are listening to the spare and urgent tones of the emergency broadcasts as they were trying to rescue people (helicopters) and looking at the roiling, boiling mass of ash. I knew it was moving extremely fast and yet it looked frozen at the same time. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
I’m always impressed with the professionalism of air traffic controllers and pilots. In this era of error and supreme confidence of dunces using unbridled (and illegal) power, I reflect on a time of respect for expertise and professionalism with nostalgia and sorrow.
Mike in Oly
The yellow flowers are Birds-foot Trefoil, not the dreaded scotch broom. Oh, and the trees are Douglas Fir, not noble. It is too bad the road was closed. The Hummocks Trail is one of my favorite hikes in western WA. Fantastic views of the mountain and gives one an up close look at the recovery zone and how nature is reclaiming the new land. We live in such a beautiful State!
Helena J Montana
Lovely pictures, thanks! I was there a couple of years after it blew and already greenery was starting to cover the ground. When we got out of the car, we were swarmed by chipmunks who thought we would feed them. If I’d known that was going to happen I would’ve stopped on the way to buy them some food.
RaflW
Thanks for these wonderful photos and write up. Mt St Helens was a highlight of our OR-WA trip maybe a decade ago.
Scout211
Thanks for the memories, frosty. We camped there in August of1979 for a few days. The area was beautiful. We returned in May of 1985 with our youngest, who was born in 1980 just before the mountain erupted. The contrast between 1979 and 1985 was stunning. Everything was different in the blast zone area: plants, trees, terrain, everything! It was unrecognizable. It’s nice to see your photos from 2024 and the recovery still continuing.
I love our National Parks.
Glidwrith
I literally started my science career with a 7th grade project using Mt St Helen’s ash and bush bean plants. Took 2nd in the Oregon State competition too, after a coin toss.
J.
Looks beautiful!
munira
I was living in Bellingham when Mt. St. Helens erupted, and we heard it all the way up there. It shook the house, and we thought maybe it was a sonic boom.
SOinCO
IIRC, the explosion took off 1,300 feet of the previous mountain top.
I stayed at the Spirit Lake lodge the summer before the explosion and thoroughly enjoyed canoeing in the crystal-clear water of the lake. It felt like I was suspended above the lake bottom enjoying the view of millions of multi-colored rocks sparkling in the sunshine.
Matt McIrvin
The way old Harry R. Truman became a beloved folk hero by refusing to evacuate (along with his 16 cats) now seems like a harbinger of our ongoing national suicide.
JustRuss
Did a backpack around one of the lakes near Mt. St. Helens years ago. There were wild strawberries growing along the trail. The berries were the size of a small marble and incredibly delicious. Hiked to the top about 10 years ago. One of the hardest things I’ve done, but worth it.
Dmkingto
This brings back memories! In the summer of 85, I spent 2 months up there on a research crew. Fantastic summer! It was a joint research project of Oregon State & the Forest Service (the PI was Dr. Jerry Franklin). We were a crew of undergrads from around the country doing a revegetation survey throughout the blast zone and surrounding areas. Our field leader was an OSU PhD student named Peter Frenzen. Peter went on to become the staff scientist for the Mt. Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument until he retired in 2017.
That was some of the hardest hiking I’ve done in my life. Quite often we were carrying 4-5 ft. long steel fence posts (to mark the end points of our transects) and sledge hammers. I think we were the third year of a planned 5-year study. We got to go into all kinds of areas that were still closed to the public (and would remain closed for a few more years). Hiking on the debris flow was surreal – particularly when we were overflown by bombers or attack helicopters (the local military bases seemed to enjoy doing overflights). Very post-apocalyptic feeling.
The first time I saw Spirit Lake was one morning on our way to a research area. We stopped at a public overlook a few hundred feet above it. It was the closest the public could get to it at the time. I remember thinking it had a large, nice looking beach at one end. When we came back that afternoon from the days research work, we stopped at the overlook again. Now the beach was at the other end of the lake! Got out my binoculars and got a better look – what I had taken for a sandy beach was thousands of bleached white tree trunks floating in the lake (trees that had been blown down by the blast). The scale was hard to believe. They had gotten pushed from one end to the other by a change in the wind direction during the day. A few days later we actually got down to the shore of the lake. Probably not the smartest thing. There were serious concerns about various noxious bacteria in the lake, including Legionella bacteria.
We also got to do a quick helicopter tour inside the crater, and later my first and only helicopter backpacking trip. We got dropped off by a helicopter 2-3 at a time on top of a peak (whose name escapes me) and then spent a couple of days hiking down the mountain while we ran a bunch of alpine transects.
Damn, that was 40 years ago!
BigJimSlade
@Mike in Oly: There are lots of little flowers that are similar. I see some down here in LA (in the Santa Monica Mtns). I was looking at a flower site to identify them, and then in the next tab I opened up, which will show me a picture from Flickr – this is what came up.
Mike in Oly
@BigJimSlade: The flowers are very similar, but the rest of the plant is not. Scotch broom was the bane of my existence at a previous garden. Is it as noxious a weed in CA as it up here in WA?
Tehanu
Nice pictures. I’ll never forget the videos of the eruption. I have a favorite Christmas tree ornament made from the ash.
Winter Wren
Great captures!
Death Panel Truck
@p.a.:
When I was seventeen i had a whole Ziploc bag of the stuff. My grandparents happened to be on Highway 12 near the summit of White Pass that morning, and they gathered up a bunch of it. I have no idea what happened to my bag of mountain.
worn
Well, I’ll be damned. I did not expect to see Seaquest Park mentioned on Balloon Juice!
During my period of underemployment during the great recession, a good friend & I did a lot of hunting for carnelians (a type of agate) in the Salmon Creek basin in the hills a couple of miles north of the park. We were up there about once a week, traipsing around in the muck and thick underbrush.
Then things recovered and I’ve been on the cubicle squad pretty consistently ever since. This post is a reminder that I need to rearrange some aspects of my life to recapture personal time to spend outdoors.
Back then I always wanted to stay in one of the yurts they have at the park. Now that my 7 y.o. niece has moved to Portland, this is a useful reminder that it’s a good time to make a reservation!
More relevant to the post, I’ve climbed St. Helens twice (1 step sliding back down the mountain for every 2 steps up up there in the ash-only zone above the timber line), but it’s been at least 15 years. It is really amazing the degree in which the lava dome has grown in that time.
Thanks for the pix!