If you had visited the Coldwater creek area in the summer of 1980, you would have found a lush and well established conifer forest with a couple of lovely little creeks (sharing the name of Coldwater) pouring down from the nearby rocky but well forested mountains. If you were to climb from the river bed up to the local ridge and find a nice rocky patch cleared to the South you would have been treated to a majestic view of Mount Saint Helens, glorious in her strong timberline and surmounting snow and glaciers. If you had talked to the Geologists hanging out at their Coldwater II encampment they probably would have pointed out to you the interesting bulge that they were observing in the North facing slope of Mt. Saint Helens over there across the way.
They are up there taking readings on what they are pretty sure is an impending eruption. They would tell you that you really shouldn’t be hiking up here as the area has been closed to hikers and campers and even some of the local residents have been asked to leave. Around to your left you can just see a little piece of Spirit lake. There is a semi-famous resort there and even that has been evacuated of tourists, though several of the residence have refused to leave. They weren’t forced because they are around 10 miles from the Volcano and the geologists don’t really think they are in much danger. Probably get a lot of ash and such. They are really a little farther away than you and the geologists are sitting up here on Coldwater Ridge. But you need to head out. Most of the geologists are leaving this afternoon and only Dave Johnston is going to be hanging out to monitor the equipment. In light of the valuable data that they expect to get from their equipment, Dave considers it an acceptable risk. Some debris may rain down way over here, but he will have time to duck behind the ridge in a safe place.
If you are still alive today, then you took heed of the warning and got the hell out of there. Because the next day the volcano did indeed erupt, but it did so in a manner that was unknown to science and which caused an entirely different level of distruction than was imagined. Every volcano eruption that humans have records of has blown upward, shooting rocks and gas and steam more or less straight up into the sky. So you just need to be far enough away not to get hit by a falling boulder and also not in the path that the melted glacier is going to take as it comes sweeping down the hillside. These lavars, which could go different ways down the mountain, will be flowing in the historically established glacier runoff rivers, so where they are going is known.
Saint Helens did not explode upward. It exploded laterally. Laterally North. In fact it was sort of like a Cannon loaded with rocks and ice and it shot its cargo right at Harry’s Ridge. That is the Ridge 3 miles away from where Dave Johnston has his equipment. The blast traveled at speeds exceeding 500 MPH and Dave had just a few seconds to realize what he was seeing and say the appropriate swear words. Nothing was ever found of Dave or his equipment. There is now a National Park visitor center sitting near where he was camped. The Johnston Ridge Volcanic Observatory.
We are starting our hike to Harry’s Ridge there at the Observatory. It is a very nice building with architecture designed to blend into the terrain. It sort of looks like some sort of bomb shelter. The roof matches the local landscape with sand and native plants and a few blown down trees. The road that you take to get out here is called Spirit Lake Highway and used to go out to the resort at Spirit lake. All of that was destroyed and/or buried during the eruption, so now all of the roads and bridges from around 5 miles away are rebuilt since the summer of 1980. The road only goes to the National Park buildings, waysides, and viewpoints. Part of the beauty of the park is that, by design, it has been left to recover naturally from the event. Inside the park, blown down trees were not harvested, new trees were not planted, new animals were not introduced. Things were allowed to come by naturally and the scientists have been studying how they did so. For instance, there were certain species of salamander that appeared to have survived the blast, perhaps underground, and they repopulated rather quickly. The trees and plants are taking a while, I think because the fertile ground soil is gone or covered in meters of ash.
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| Johnston Ridge Observatory |
When I first visited the park, around 2005, there was still large areas leading up to the park that were filled with dead trees. The trees had not burned but had been killed by the intense cloud of superheated steam that had engulfed them. Many of those trees had been harvested by the lumber company that owned them and a new forest of Noble fir has been planted. There are some that were replanted in the late 80s and others much more recent. At that time, the road that runs up the south Coldwater Creek was devoid of large plant life and you could see the rolling hills of ash that had filled in the little valley, having come over the (now) Johnston ridge, bounce off the higher hills to the south and settle down here. Today, the valley is filled with low shrubs and 20 year old alders. Fir are starting to grow in places. This is all hiding much of the scars of 1980. More on those when we get out on our hike.
Standing at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, you can see out onto a blasted plane. When St. Helens blew it took out the North side of the mountain. You can clearly see into the blast crater, with the south half still intact. In the middle of the crater, a new dome of oozed lava has been slowly forming for the last 40 years. Around that dome, two new glaciers formed from the winter snows. Those two glaciers are the only glaciers in North America that are actually getting bigger. They are much studied. They recently grew around the bottom of the cone on the downward south slope and joined into one glacier. This is the glacier that feeds Toutle river, the main river that runs all the way to the Columbia and is a big recreational feature when it isn’t flooding with ash and poison and killing everything in its path.
We start our hike to Harry’s ridge here at the Observatory. There is a little paved path going East with the usual informative signs telling the story of the Volcano from slightly different visual perspecitives. Like most interpretive trails, it seems like the funding for the signs was from a different era. Now the signs are all faded and the nice photographs are almost undecipherable. There is one of those big brass tables that has arrows that point to and identify all of the nearby peaks. I like big brass tables, they age well. There is also a cement name wall as monument to the people that are known to have died in the eruption. I say known to have died because there well be many who were not known to be out in the blast zone and who were never recovered.
This part of the trail is called the Boundary trail and winds along Johnston ridge in both directions from the Visitor Center. It is a well maintain trail and just the usual small ups and downs for a ridge trail, at least at this part. The ground is mainly all ash and pumice with the occasional largish boulder hurld across the trail just to show off. The weather in Portland for the last week has been a heatwave, with temps up near 100. We had waited until a relative cool day, that the weather man had predicted for today. Down near the Columbia river, during our drive, we had been fogged in and were desirous of getting a good view of the mountain once we got up here. But not only did it clear up, but the sun came out with a vengence, and at our starting time of around 10:00 the temperature was already around 68, which was 5 degrees hotter than the predicted high.
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| Noble Fir - Funny Pinecones |
That is to say, things were getting hot. I really wouldn’t recommend going on this hike on a day where the temperature was predicted to be above 90 or so. The thing about hiking along a volcano blasted ridge is that you are pretty high up (5000 feet) and there is NO shade. All of the big trees were blown away in the blast and the flora is still doing a natural recovery. There are a few funny looking Nobel firs sticking up here and there, but they are not near the trail. If you get hot, try and hang out in the occasional bushy mulberry areas that happen in a few places on the hike. At this time of year (early August) there is also no running water to be found, so bring plenty to drink. I was carrying about 1.5 liters and found it to be adequate but not any extra. I am going to up my load to at least 2 liters on this kind of hike.
The landscape here is all white and grey but poking out everywhere is a profusion of wild flowers. So much color! Orange Paint Brush is everywhere, I have never see so much of it. Lupine is still in bloom, even this late in the season, along with dandilion. There is this very pretty little blue flower that I mistook at first for more lupine but on closer examination is a succulent. Have to look it up.
As we walk along the trail, we come on a regular basis to some South facing prominence where we can get a sweeping view of St. Helens and the blast area. As we travel further East, we are coming around to be more inline with the main thrust of the blast and to get more direct views into the center of the crater. For pretty much this entire hike we will also be able to look back and see the Visitor Center, with its shiny brass tower, and forward to Harry’s ridge and parts of the trail leading up to it. It puts a strange perspective on the distance you have to go. Not sure why but things seem much farther away when you can actually see them.
At around the 1.5 mile point the trail goes over the ridge and heads down the south side for a ways. My partner had a bit of psychic revelation at this point and predicted that she was going to regret having to go back up this part. Just as you start back up again, we were going around a little sharp rock peak, there is a junction with another trail that heads off into the blast valley and along the bank of Spirit lake. That is for another day, perhaps another lifetime.
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| The Coldwater Valley Debris field |
We now head up back over the ridge and down along the base of the little mountain that is called Harry’s Ridge. This area seems like it was a big in the shadow of the blast and may have been so desperately scared as other areas. There is more plant growth here and it may just be that this north facing side retains more snow and so more moisture for things to grow. We hike through a growth of Blueberry and (what I think is) Mountain Huckleberry. There is also a bridge across what I assume is a seasonal creek, though it looks SO dry right now. As I look around you can see that facing south we are looking at a bowl of a valley formed by the Johnston Ridge, Harry’s Ridge, and the mountains south of us. When the blast occurred it hurled ash and debris through the low part of Johnston ridge into this valley. The material bounced off the mountains and flowed south, leaving tens of meters of ash and rock covering all of the valley and filling the bowl. So much material blew through here, that down the valley a ways it blocked the flow of the Coldwater Creek to a height where it formed a dam that created a new lake, Coldwater Lake. This is a pretty substantial mountain lake and is only dammed by random debris. Yes, this is another foreshadowing.
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| Hummucks |
The other thing you can see as you look over this valley or out into the blast zone, are these round symetric bumps of ash. They are called Hummocks and they were created by the flow of the material (I am guessing oscillation patterns, I will research) during the blast itself. These same sorts of hummucks are in evidence around one slope of Mount Shasta, in California. They had puzzled geologists for years because no one could figure out how they formed. This was because no one had postulated such a large lateral explosion.
We hit the 3 mile point and truth be told, we are a bit tired. It has gotten very hot in the unbroken sun and we are standing in front of the sign that points up a steep hill and says “Harry’s Ridge”. I tell the people coming up behind us that I don’t know who Harry is, but I hate him. They don’t get it and suggest I try to have fun. Fuck, I AM having fun !! (sorry, did I say that out loud?).
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| Climbing Harry's Ridge |
A few deep breaths and take a look around before we go. We are standing on a new ridge that runs North South. Down below us we get our first magnificent view of Spirit Lake. Lets talk about that a little. The lake as it appears now is a moderate sized lake surrounded on all sides except the south west by sheer moutain cliffs. The lake looks almost like a man made lake, with a flat sloping edge over by St. Helens and then the little fingers of lake sticking up into the mountain canyons on the other sides. The waters of the lake are liberally covered with the skeletons of the hundreds of thousands of trees that were blown away from the forest to the south and into the waters of the lake. There are many places that you could probably walk across the lake (well, if you didn’t roll of the logs and die). There is no sign of any human activity on the lake. You can get down to it, but if you were to boat you would have to carry your craft a few miles to get there. I don’t know if there are any restrictions about using the lake, it certainly seems like there is room to, for instance, land a small pontoon plane like they use for accessing the lakes in Alaska. Lets continue up the ridge and get a better view.
The trail up the ridge is sort of carved into the dense low lying vegetation that is growing up there. Lots of Huckleberry and Strawberry. The Strawberry is producing berries. Hundreds of little tiny berries just growing everywhere covering the ground. Oh, don’t walk on them! My partner comments that there are all of these berries but no birds to eat them. We haven’t seen any birds at all except Hummingbirds. So strange to see hummingbirds any place but at a feeder in my front yard, but you do see them all of the time in the Cascade mountains. At the summit is a large tripod stacked with solar cells and monitoring equipment. The solar panels cast the only shade for a good half mile but we chose to have a seat over where we could see the lake. Another warning about heat and water. We were having a bit of problem with the heat at this point, I wish we had had my hiking sun umbrella. Of course that is a personal thing. At least one young woman passed us several times and she was just out wearing a jogging suit and only carrying a cell phone (no water). She ran past us on her way back down just as we got near the summit. Show off.
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| 40 year old debris in Spirit Lake |
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| Spirit Lake with Mt Adams in the background |
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Those flats are some 200 feet higher
than pre-eruption and form a dam
blocking spirit lake waters |
We eat our lunch while observing a very educational POV of the Mountain, The Explosion, and The Lake. In the early summer of 1980, Spirit lake was a well known but tiny resort community. There was a boy scout camp and a YMCA in a little collection of Lodges including Spirit Lake Lodge. These were all down on the lake shore and were very popular for swimming and fishing and canoeing and the like. The boy scout camp was down on the south shore (where it was flatter) and the navy had given them an old rescue boat to use to shuttle campers from where the road came in to the campsite. It was all very peaceful and old fashioned. And, during this particular summer, abandoned. Between the lake and Mount Saint Helens there was several miles of dense mature forest. The forest was full of trees and deer and bears and raccoons and squirrels and skunk and snakes and fish and just all sorts of wonderful things. When the mountain blew, all of that stuff was wiped out and thrown, with millions of metric tons of rock and ash, toward Spirit Lake. The lake water was actually blown up on the mountain side (at least temporarily) and the blast debris went everywhere, much of it into the lake bottom. A huge flow of the ash built up and blocked what had been the outflow of Spirit lake. The result was that the elevation of the lake was raised 200 feet. This puts the old boy scout camp and scenic lodge 200 feet below the current lake water level. 200 feet. There will be no recovery. The debris that could float eventually came up to the surface of the lake and is till there 40 years later. The debris dam that was formed at the south end of the lake is still there and the level of the lake has been rising since the explosion. The state has done some work to install a bypass tunnel to let the lake drain, but that tunnel is failing and it is unclear what would happen if the lake was allowed to fill. Would the makeshift natural dam fail and cause some catastrophic downstream flooding? Ideally we would leave it alone as such a neat science project, but the vacationers and fishermen down at the mouth of the Toutle may not enjoy that. (here is an article).
Once more I think about the huge forest that must have been growing down there in that blast zone. If you look south your can still see the white bleached tree trunks sitting up on the mountain side. They are all pointed in the same way, away from the blast. Harry’s Ridge is sprinkled with old stumps that all have that blasted look, not the usual lumberjack straight cut but more like something that got hit by a very Ironman and Thor during a big argument. Many of the blasted trunks are covered completely or partially in ash and sand and I noted that Harry’s ridge had the stumps, but I didn’t see the corresponding trunks. How far did they get blasted away?
We have had some water, ate our sandwhichs and cooled down a bit. Time to hike back down. We can still see the Johnston Ridge Observatory from here, off 3 miles or so in the distance, so we know how far we have to go. Perhaps if we get a move on we can stay ahead of the 3 older ladies who we kept leapfrogging. They didn’t want to hike with us because they said I go too slow. Note that they said this before they even walked with me. I probably need to develop some coping mechanisms.
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Turns out Harry's Ridge is inhabited
by a tribe of tellatubbies that photo bombed my partner.
Who Knew? |
The dinner tables were not quite large enough to sit a full pod, though we tended to sit with mostly our pod for meals. This gave a chance to have more shared conversation and really bad “a guy walks into a bar" jokes. Turns out that if you travel with teachers you are subjected to a vast supply of non-dirty jokes.
