Washington State, Day 1: Mount St. Helens

We provided breakfast for the last morning of the Gathering, helped clean out the fridge and snack stores, and Rich drove us back to the airport to get our rental car. By 11am, we were on the road to Mount St. Helens, which is roughly two hours from Portland. We stopped first in the state park area and got our first good views of the volcano:

I took a short walk down the path to the lake and found this friend slithering across the path. He ducked into the bushes before I got my camera, but I could still see him :)

Our next stop was the corny "research center" with a giant bigfoot statue and also an A-frame house that was buried in the explosion and just left as it was:

For some reason there were chickens walking around. This one kept pecking our car

I was amused that you could see the chickens on the back-up camera

We spent the day winding our way up the road to the main visitor's center, which is at the very top of the mountain. There are several vistas along the way and we stopped at most of them:

This is a new bridge built after the explosion. This spot is the very edge of the explosion zone

Entering the official National Monument

We stopped for a walk around Crystal Lake, which was one of the new lakes formed by the volcanic eruption:

Lots of wildflowers here, too:

As we got closer, you could really make out the blast crater and the glacier inside of it:

At the last stop before the top, we were in the "knock-down" zone, where the trees were literally blasted off of their roots. Many of the trees and their shredded stumps are still visible:

We made it to the top around 5pm, in plenty of time to see the film and be as close as possible to the crater. Sadly, while we watched the 20 minute film, the fog rolled in, and by the time they dropped the curtain in the visitor's center, the mountain was completely obscured. We had planned to walk a little ways along the rim, but you literally could not see that there was a mountain there, and shortly after it began to rain. We were glad we had so many good views on the way up so did not leave disappointed: