Mount St Helens

It's been said that before the cataclysmic eruption of 18 May 1980 Mount St Helens was the prettiest of the high Cascades. Spirit Lake is documented in countless family photo albums and home movies, with families, mountain and lake cloaked in happiness and sunshine. But in a matter of seconds a huge bulge the mountain had formed over the course of a few weeks collapsed in a magnitude 5.1 earthquake and 1300 feet of the summit and northeast flank along with 15 vertical miles of ash were flung into the sky. In the process 230 square miles of forest was leveled by the 300 mile per hour blast and the lake was matted with logs, mud and ash. Over 50 people were killed, including Harry Truman, long time Spirit Lake resident and inn keeper. I remember seeing him on TV when I was a little kid saying he wasn't going to leave his mountain, despite orders from the "authorities" and letters from school children. I guess he never did.
Looking at the north side and south side of Mount St Helens is like looking at two different mountains. In contrast to the destruction and grayness on the north the old growth forests still stand and the mountain is beautiful and somewhat symmetrical on the south side.
Before 1980 the volcano had last been active in 1857 and, based on growth rings in trees, many eruptions of various sizes have occurred in the past 500 years, with evidence of major eruptions dating back for 20,000 years. Unlike mountain chains and other geological formations volcanoes do not need millions of years for perceptible change to occur. A formation inside the crater of Mount St Helens has grown nearly 300 feet in just the last couple of years. And as evidenced by the 1980 eruption, a volcano can destroy itself in seconds. I stopped at the Toutle Trail #238 and walked up to a large field of boulders the mountain had flung out of her bowels in a previous eruption. The area around this boulder field was desert like, mostly grass and rocks, with beargrass in bloom and a few scrubby pine trees. I assume the ash still kept the ground from bearing forth like it did in every other direction just a half mile away. The spot offered great photo opportunities.
The trail cut through the boulders and rose up on to the mountain. Here in the shadow of that old blast stood a traditional forest of hemlock and doug fir. There were a few old growth trees mixed in the forest. The trail crossed over a few raw areas of ancient lava flow but for the most part the substrate was a rocky soil of decaying rock and the detritis of generations of needles, cones, and dead trees. As I climbed patches of snow became more frequent until at last I was stopped by snow just short of Butte Camp. I climbed up on a rocky outcrop and ate a lunch of beanie weenies, potato chips and an orange. The air was warm but the wind was cold where I'd been sweating. I took a few more pictures then headed back down.
That evening I drove out to FS 25 and turned off onto FS 9300 to find a place to camp. Just across the Clear Creek bridge I turned down onto a little dirt path where one truck was already parked and a tent set up. I drove to the end of the path and set up camp. My neighbors for the night were burley men with long beards and axes stuck in the trees of their camp. Someone had shot an arrow into a nearby tree and there were .22 rifle shells lying in the mud. But I didn't have to pay the $15 fee for a camp site.
I sat on the rocky creek bank, thinking it didn't look any different than creeks in Tennessee except there were no little fossils to look for. Just flat rocks to skip and get my dog wound up. At one point I looked up the hillside and through some big cedars I noticed an absolutely huge Douglas fir. I walked up the steep embankment and stood at the base of the tree. Unbelievable. It was eight or nine feet in diameter at its base. Looking around I saw any number of really large doug firs, all with breast height diameters of six feet or more. This was the largest concentration of really big trees I'd seen in Washington and later research confirmed that the Clear Creek and Quartz Creek corridors harbor the largest intact stands of old growth left in the state. There were little pink tags tied to vine maple saplings throughout the understory. I've spent a bunch of time in the national forests of Washington and I know that clear cutting an area is a common practice. You see it all over the Olympic Peninsula and Cascade Mountains. I doubt that is what is in store for this forest of old giants but you never know. I have no problem with timber harvest, I want wood floors and toilet paper but I hate the thought of the remnants of a six hundred year old tree getting jammed in a copier machine or winding up in my mailbox as an unsolicited, pre-approved credit card application. (Actually old growth soft woods are usually used for structural applications but you get the point.)
That evening after dinner I drove farther out FS 9300, going up up up. All along the lower part of the road the massive trees dominated. How they survived the logging of the 1890's and early 1900's I don't know. As the elevation increased the air grew more chill. Three elk does jumped across the road, much larger and heavier than deer and not nearly so agile. At the crest were beautiful views of the sun setting over pointy tree lined ridges to the west. To the east the snowy slopes of Mount Adams glowed in the 9:00 p.m. sunlight. A volcano standing over 12,000 feet, she is what I consider to be the wildest and most remote mountain in the Lower 48. A few years ago naturalist and author Robert Michael Pyle wrote about this area in a book called Where Bigfoot Walks. The premise of the book was not that he was looking for Bigfoot, only assessing if this remote wilderness could hide and sustain such a creature. In the end he decided it could.
If you visit Mount St Helens and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest you may not find Bigfoot, but you will find quiet, solitude, and beauty in a wild country where the power of Nature simmers uneasily near the surface, revealing itself in dramatic displays of destruction and renewal.