Carol writes: When John Muir made the above statement, he surely wasn’t viewing Mount Rainier through the smoky, downright unhealthy skies we were experiencing in mid-August. When we arrived at our next “camp home” in rural Silver Creek, Washington, over 400 wildfires were burning in Canada. The dreary, hazy skies we were seeing were caused by smoke that had drifted south from Canadian lands to the north.
From our Silver Creek base camp over the next week, we had two destinations on our must-see list—Mount Rainier and the other side of Mount St. Helens.
The skies in our campground didn’t seem bad on the day we decided to make the 80-mile trek to Mount Rainier;
however, as we got closer to that grandiose peak, ugly smoke-shrouded hills along our route made us question if we would even be able to see the mountain at all!
Our first stop at Box Canyon, about 8 miles from the peak as the crow flies, revealed our first vista of Mount Rainier, emerging as an otherworldly image behind a haze of wildfire smoke. At this point, in a happy/sad moment of reduced expectations, we were happy just to be able to see it at all! But we had hopes of better visibility as we drove closer…
Spirits soared at Reflection Lake! Visibility wasn’t perfect, but good enough for a rare pic of the two of us. This was to be our best vantage point of the day…
Closer yet, at the next viewpoint, the incredible mass of 14,410-foot Mount Rainier loomed before us. In the foreground of this photo I deliberately included the friendly young couple we talked to, so I could illustrate the drama of the scale.
In a generous spirit of camaraderie, the couple lent us their binoculars so we could locate a group of climbers making their way down from the summit.
While our visit to Mount Rainier wasn’t as optimal as we would have liked, our disappointment was trifling in comparison to thousands who have lost so much in forest fires this summer…
We decided that if the hazy skies didn’t improve over the next few days, we would skip a planned 2-hour drive to Windy Ridge, the eastern viewpoint for Mount St. Helens. Three weeks earlier we had visited the mountain from the western side at Johnston Ridge.
By this time, Al had discovered a great website at weather.gov that provides maps of air quality by county, including forecasts for the coming days. Al said that if we waited two more days, skies over Mount St. Helens should improve and we would have a 2-day window for more ideal visibility. That plan turned out to be golden…
Since the Windy Ridge side of Mount St. Helens offered a much closer look at the mountain, the evidence of what took place on May 18, 1980, when the volcano blasted 1300 feet off its top, was much clearer.
Immense forests of mature pines were blown to Earth in an instant in the direction of a 300-mile-per-hour lateral blast of searing gas, ash, and rock.
Trees more distant from the blast zone were stripped bare of bark and limbs, leaving thousands of tree skeletons upright as stark reminders of the Mount St. Helens cataclysmic event almost 4 decades ago.
Baby forests of trees have sprouted up over the intervening 38 years
as twisted and shattered dead trees slowly decay and return to the earth as nutrients for a future forest. Slowly, the Earth is healing…
The only evidence we found of the horrendous human tragedy was at the Miner’s Car Viewpoint, where the rusted remains of the Parker Family’s green 1972 Pontiac Grand Prix has been left in place as a reminder of the 57 lives that were lost.
The legend of one soul that perished has lived on in song about Harry Truman, who refused to leave his home and the lodge that he ran as a business, even though there had been warnings of an impending eruption for two months.
David Johnston, a PhD volcanologist, had been studying Mount St. Helens for only two months.
He spent many days on the mountain, which he described as “dynamite with a lit fuse.” He perished at his observation post 6 miles from the summit in the first minutes of the eruption and landslide. On the west side, Johnston Ridge Observatory has been named in his honor.
Our first view of Spirit Lake, the jewel of Mount St. Helens, was breathtaking!
A massive number of trees that surrounded Spirit Lake were washed down into the lake during the 1980 eruption, forming a massive log raft. Over the decades, many logs of the floating raft have sunk, but a sizable chunk still remains, pushed by the wind into an arm of the lake.
It was heartening to read that Spirit Lake is no longer a toxic sludge hazard but is once again cold and clear, with more aquatic life than before the eruption.
At the end of the road at Windy Ridge, while I stayed below, Al elected to take the 368-step climb 200 feet up for a more spectacular view.
I was quite content to experiment down below
with arty photographs of the “slightly smoky lady” behind the fireweed…
Before we left Windy Ridge, we hiked along a gravel road that was closed to cars of visitors, but as a hike it was perfect and brought us to our closest point to the mountain.
Although we had been to Mount St. Helens only a few weeks ago, we were very happy that we persisted and also went to the east entrance. I don’t think we could have adequately appreciated this monument to Earth’s power without seeing up-close evidence of mass destruction interspersed within the rebirth of a vibrant ecosystem.
We had read that Mount St. Helens erupted several times in the 1800s, but none of these eruptions was a lateral blast and probably didn’t wreak quite as much havoc as the one in 1980. Thankfully, the land and the lakes surrounding this active volcano are quite adept at healing…
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