Mount St. Helens South Flank

Our adventures last Sunday took us to the southern flank of Mount St. Helens.

As we drove towards the mountain, I thought back to Adak, Alaska where we were living when the now famous eruption of Mount. St. Helens took place in May 1980. At 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, Mount St. Helens erupted. Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of the mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. It blew out that huge chunk you see missing in the picture above. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown down or buried beneath volcanic deposits. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. Temperatures reached 660 degrees and the pyroclastic flows contained 24 megatons of thermal energy. The eruption lasted 9 hours but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape had been dramatically changed within moments.

Our drive took us through the small towns of Battle Ground, Yacolt, and Cougar and through some gorgeous scenery including mountain lakes, forests, and, of course, killer views of the volcano. I couldn't help but imagine what it must have felt like in these tiny places when the mountain exploded. Along the way we saw signs instructing us to tune into AM 630 for travel advisories. The radio informed us that some roads were closed due to flood damage and others blocked by snow...in July!

Pressing on, we headed for a place called the Ape Cave which I had read about years ago on our first trip to Mount St. Helens. The Ape Cave is actually an empty lava tube, left behind by an ancient eruption of the mountain. As it turns out, it's a popular destination and since we had been in lava tubes before, we decided to hike one of the mountain trails instead...we encountered just a few people this way.

Walking through the forests on the southern (undamaged) flank of the mountain is an awesome experience. The forests themselves explode in green of every imaginable shade. Every now and then the trail would turn hard and it became obvious that we were walking on six foot wide lava flows that crossed the trail. In the middle of the trail we came across a mountain orchid of some sort (I don't know orchids very well), all by itself. It was an amazing piece of art and we never saw another one the whole day.