Mount St. Helens

Why here

At 8:32 on the morning of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with a force this country had not seen in living memory — the most disastrous volcanic event in United States history. A sideways blast tore across the land to the north, pyroclastic flows swept the slopes, and in a single morning a familiar mountain became a crater. Most landscapes were finished long before anyone arrived to admire them. This one was remade inside a single human lifetime, and the raw evidence is still everywhere. Two years after the eruption, Congress set the ruined country aside and made an unusual decision: to leave it alone and let it come back on its own, with nothing planted and nothing cleared. So the ground here is some of the youngest anywhere, and the forest returning to it is doing so unaided, plant by plant. This is the rare place where you are not looking at scenery. You are standing in the middle of land still being made, and every stop in this note is another angle on the same unfinished work.

The story

Mount St. Helens is one of a chain of young volcanoes down the Cascades, its slopes built from dark basalt and andesite — the same kinds of lava still being laid down across this corner of Washington. For most of the twentieth century it stood quiet. Then, in March of 1980, the mountain woke: explosions, small blasts of steam, and shudders that went on for weeks. On the morning of May 18 it broke loose in a catastrophic eruption, a sideways blast and pyroclastic flows that made it the most disastrous volcanic event in the nation’s history.

Two men anchor the human story. Harry Truman ran a lodge on the shore of Spirit Lake, just north of the peak, where scout camps and summer lodges had drawn visitors for generations. He refused every order to evacuate and died when a pyroclastic flow buried the site under a hundred and fifty feet of debris. David Johnston, a young Geological Survey scientist watching from a ridge six miles north, was the first to radio that it had begun, moments before the blast swept him away. His body was never found, and a ridge here now carries his name.

In 1982, Congress made the wreckage a national monument and promised something unusual for public land: to leave it be, and let it respond on its own terms. It has been doing exactly that ever since.

When it's best

Time a visit for the warm months. The high roads and ridges on the east side, including the winding drive to Windy Ridge, hold snow well into early summer and close in winter, so late summer and early fall open the most of the monument at once. That is also when the pioneer plants are at their best — fireweed and pearly everlasting coloring the gray ash where the forest is still returning. Mornings tend to give the cleanest look into the crater; on many afternoons the peak grows its own cap of cloud, so the earlier you stand at a viewpoint, the better your odds of a clear line to the mountain. Autumn thins the crowds and sharpens the air, though the first storms can close the eastern roads without much warning.