Tuesday, July 19 - Day 3     A world engulfed in green. Stringy moss adorns even the smallest of trees. It clings upon rocks and the very ground. Moss that basks in the cool 52 degree morning as I munch on an apple packing up. The cycle is all gassed up from a late stop yesterday. I am ready to hit the road. The air smells so good here, I wish I could bottle and sell it to the rest of the world. I’d make a fortune.     A short time later, the bike is hauling up this mountainside, the motor a steady soothing drum beneath me. My first glimpse of the mountain through the trees is one of awe. I crest a small rise, the trees break and there it is. I have to pull over just to stare at it. The motor idles softly in neutral. I just sit there, looking at it, drinking the view. It’s huge, intense, beyond my ability to absorb. It’s like trying to comprehend The Grand Canyon (which I tried a year ago).     It’s a mountain with the top missing. Not like slowly missing but just plain missing. And no trees, you know they’re supposed to be there, but they aren’t. This is the Pacific Northwest; there are trees everywhere except here. And everything is a ruddy gray color. Even the snow is dirty gray. Directly below me is a massive valley smooth with fresh trees all the same age. The whole scene blows my mind. I struggle so deftly to comprehend the scene and realize I can’t.     This is a strange, strange land. Dreamy sweepers, up down hills, carved mountain edges and trees missing their tops. It’s like some godlike creature with a giant scythe cut a path slicing thousands of trees in half. It looks as if he were mowing grass. The trees oblivious to the change continue to grow.

My first view of Mount Saint Helens

I round a corner in the road and there are no living trees. No life, nothing. Instead, trees lie upon the ground, an ever present gray color and barkless. Thousands of them, everywhere, they lie strewn about lying upon the ground pointing in the same direction. An entire mountainside devoid of life, frozen time that lies staid upon the ground silenced forever.

The mountain comes into view and steam rises from its northwest side. Within its crater, a cone has begun to form. What is beyond belief is it’s obvious to me where an entire mountainside collapsed and slid into the former Spirit Lake. The lake seems little more than a giant mud hole now surrounded in dead trees.

This place is a moon-like desert in the middle of the Pacific Northwest. From the lookout point closest to the mountain, the road dead-ends there. I climb a nearby hill of volcanic ash. The ash looks like sand with a sprinkle of pea gravel, but it’s very fine and very gray. It coats my boats and dust clouds shoot up each time I take a step. At the crest of the hill, I rest on a gray barkless log. I just sit there staring into the mountain.

What's left of Mount Saint Helens

The mountain was a very picturesque snow topped cone before it erupted in May of 1980. It had lain dormant for 123 years since 1857. Starting in March of 1980, the University of Washington seismology lab started noticing earthquakes taking place leading up to the eruption. As many as 20 occurred just in March. An eruption was a bit unpredictable yet inevitable.   A bulge began to grow on the North Slope and a crater at the top of the mountain quickly formed. Soon the crater was 1600 feet across and 500 feet deep. Many people were warned to leave the area. One, Harry Truman, a guy who lived in a lodge on the edge of Spirit Lake refused to leave. I remember reading about him in that National Geographic article. He and some 56 others perished on May 18 when the mountain erupted shooting ash 80,000 feet into the atmosphere.

Spirit Lake

The eruption was so violent, the entire side of the mountain slid down into Spirit Lake at 150 miles per hour. So much material slid down the mountain in mudflows of melting snow and debris, the level of the lake filled entirely up, doubling in elevation. Day became night as far as 125 miles away as the ash pouring out of the mountain entered the atmosphere and then fell back down. Most of it initially headed to the northeast. The ash reached so far into the atmosphere, it actually traveled around the world.     In nearby cities like Yakima and Pasco, it was if it were snowing. The ash clogged air filters, froze business, schools and killed thousands of nearby animals. In these nearby towns, it even collected in piles in the streets. Huge quantities of ash rushed down the west side of the mountain wiping out everything in its path. The ash even washed into the nearby Columbia River Basin clogging the river system.         When I was a kid, we even had a vial of this ash. Some relative came out after the eruption and brought back the package. Leave it to us Americans to package dirt and sell it as something wonderful.     I wonder though as I sit on this hilltop, am I this small? I imagine as if I was looking down upon myself surrounded by this ever-present gray ash. A speck, just another form of life careening wildly through time unknowing what tomorrow holds. Could I even begin to imagine a mountain exploding? The shockwave itself from the mountain is thought to have been traveling at faster than the speed of sound. The explosion of hot gases is what mowed down the trees creating this moonscape of lifelessness.     The pictures etched in my mind as a child I try to recreate but I cannot. The scale is too massive. Before me is an entire mountain etched in gray. I sketch it into my journal and then walk back down the hillside to the bike.     The road north is new pavement, an inviting fresh path cut into the mountainside heading away from Mount St. Helen’s. It’s twisty and surrounded in dead trees strewn about the mountainside. On a distant mountainside, there is even a sort of line in the sand, where the trees start and the destruction ends. Entire valleys miles wide were wiped out as the blast traveled through the mountainous valleys to the north decimating an area of 280 square miles.

Note the direction of how the trees lie

Note how the tops of trees were mowed off

Utter devastation from the eruption

Some hillsides escaped unscathed

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