"Vancouver, this is it!"

We visited Mt. St. Helens during Labor Day weekend and were awed by it's beauty and magnificence.  What a testament to the power of the earth!  I'm always amazed at the photos of ash pluming from the mountain that morning of May 1980.  And the photos of the forest trees, stripped of their branches, and lying like matchsticks on the hills are unbelievable.  It's almost more than my mind can comprehend.  "Vancouver, this is it!" were the last recorded words of David Johnston, a volcanologist who witnessed the 1980 eruption and died in it by doing so.  We visited the Johnston Ridge Observatory which was named after him and located on the ridge where he died during the eruption.

Since I've lived so close to the mountain all my life, I've known its history pretty well.  But with our visit, I learned some new things about the eruption of 1980.  The beautiful Spirit Lake, which is located under the glorious beauty of the mountain summit was a tourist destination with resorts, cabins, and camping locations.  When the mountain erupted, it forced mud and debris into the lake so vehemently that it pushed the lake water to the opposite shore over 800 feet high.  When the water dropped back down, it pulled all the dirt, trees, and vegetation with it back into the lake where, even today, the logs from the trees lie on top of the lake.  Now the logs are slowly sinking to the bottom of the lake (in a standing position since the root ends are heavier than the tops) where they are becoming a petrified forest underwater.  Cool!  If you go and visit the lake today (which is only accessible now by hiking to it) you can see the 800 feet of bare rock where the water stripped the earth of its covering.  The surface elevation of the lake also rose about 200 feet because of the debris that was dumped into it.  Amazing.  We didn't get to visit the lake, but someday I'd like to go there and see it in person.

The eruption also changed the landscape of the mountain so much that it created two lakes that weren't there before--Coldwater Lake and Castle Lake.  It also blocked the outlet to Spirit Lake. With nowhere for the water to go as it drained into these lakes, the water levels continued to rise until the threat of overspilling and causing another catastrophic event downstream was imminent.  So, they built a drainage tunnel for Spirit Lake and spillways for Coldwater and Castle Lakes to prevent this from happening.

It's awesome that we can visit places like this with such abundant and physically evident geologic histories.  Hopefully we can spend more time there and explore even more in depth the history of this great volcano.