After staying the night in Kelso, Washington, we began our journey to our destination for the day, Mount St. Helens. My undergraduate degree was in geology, and I have always wanted to see Mount St. Helens. The stories that I’d heard an the pictures I’d seen of the eruption in 1980 were incredible and so we made sure to add it to this trip to the Northwest.
It’s a fairly long drive up highway 504 to the top of Mount St. Helens and the Johnston Ridge Observatory. Along the way there are a number of visitors centers run by different agencies. We stopped at the Washington State’s Secrest State Park which had some awesome exhibits and an incredible model of the volcano.
We also stopped for a bit at the Cowlitz County Visitor Center. They had helicopter rides that were $200 a head, so that was too pricey for us. There was also a dense cloud cover, so they weren’t flying anyway. That ended up being an ominous sign for the day.
On our journey up the highway it was hard to even find the mountain, and sometimes the clouds were so thick that they obscured the road. It was a bit discouraging. All this way, and we weren’t even sure we were going to get to see the volcano.
We waited around at the Johnston Ridge Observatory for a long time hoping to get a clear view and every time that it seemed that it might happen more clouds rolled in. Occasionally, I got some pictures of parts of the mountain, but I never actually got a complete shot. Kind of disappointing.
However the view was spectacular and there were lots of other features to look at.
Hummocks, which were pieces of the volcano that were carried away during one of the avalanches, were clearly visible.
The area of the pressure wave caused the trees to all fall the same direction and you can still see those.
There was huge thick ash deposits laid down as part of the eruption and those were eroded away by new stream.
New lakes were formed.
Perhaps amazing of all was the magnitude of the avalanches. When the volcano are erupted the avalanche actually came down and up and over the ridge where the observatory now is and then continued on down the valley.
You could see places where trees that had been knocked down carried away and buried in the ash were now visible.
It was quite humbling to see the massive power of this volcano. In the end we had to give up without getting one clear view of the entire volcano, but it was still an amazing day. On the way down we stopped at the Cowlitz County visitor center and had a late lunch – early dinner at the Fire Mountain Grill.
As this was a one day diversion from the coast, we headed back toward the Pacific Ocean, on the south side of the Columbia River and drove through Astoria, Oregon. At the top of the hill that overlooks the city, we saw the Astoria Column, which has historical events carved on it. There were some great views of the Columbia River from the top.
Columbia River/Pacific Ocean view from the Astoria Column hill. We are looking towards the Station Camp area that I talked about in Day 11.
After Astoria we went on to our hotel (Shiloh Inn Suites) in Warrenton to do our laundry for the last leg our trip. Sue waited in the laundry room with the laundry and I kept going down to check on her. We only had a couple batches to do but there was only one washer and dryer and the dryer was taking forever. After an hour of drying and the first batch not even close to done we grabbed it and when off to try and find the closest laundromat in Warrenton. It was closed. We also went to Astoria, and the only one we could find was also closed. So we headed back to the hotel figuring that we were going to be up till early hours trying to get our washed done. I mentioned to the front desk that the dryer was going very slow and the head housekeeper heard and offered to dry our clothes in the hotel dryers. So we were done in 30 minutes. While we were doing that she pulled out the dryer to vacuum the vents and found it was completely clogged, letting no air get through. So that was the problem.
All ended well and we were extremely grateful to that housekeeper who was willing to go the extra mile for a couple of guests and help us out. I left her a nice tip the next day and we left a good note about her on TripAdvisor. So that ended day 12 of our Northwest trip.
Here’s all of our pictures from Mount St. Helens:
And from Astoria:
Here’s the map for getting to Mount St. Helens
And the Astoria Column:
The next day? Back to chasing Lewis and Clark and lighthouses.
