Click for a large (450K) 360° panorama of Mt. St. Helens from Windy Ridge.
Meta Lake, eight miles from the mountain.
We thought about doing another ride, but the weather looked iffy so we spent a day touristing at the Mt. St. Helens blast site.
A winding road snakes its way through the forest up to Windy Ridge, the closest you can get to the volcano on its northeast side. At one point, you come around a bend and suddenly you are in the blast zone—everything on the right side of the ridge is green, everything on the left side is blown down.
A crushed, rusting car has been left next to Meta Lake as an exhibit. A family of three had driven up to their mine the day before the eruption and were killed by it. The blast threw the car sixty feet.
Spirit Lake.
The Windy Ridge road runs above the east side of Spirit Lake. Spirit Lake is approximately the same size as Donner Lake. The 1980 blast and massive landslide raised the lake level by 200 feet, and a wave splashed 500 feet higher. Nearly half the lake surface is still covered with floating logs.
The view from the Windy Ridge overlook.
From Windy Ridge you can see Mt. Adams to the east and Mt. Hood to the south, but the dome in St. Helens’ crater is obscured by a ridge. However, smoke, dust and heat distortions constantly billow up from volcanic activity in the crater.
Walking back down the 360 steps.
When I first visited the area in 1986, the blast zone was uniformly gray. A few years later, significant patches of green growth began appearing.
Twenty-five years later, however, there are still very few trees on the ridges, although there is some undergrowth.
“Look pensive, yet alluring...”
We hiked down to Spirit Lake to have lunch on the “beach.” When I first hiked this trail nearly twenty years ago, the trail was lined with small trees, stripped clean and bent over double (insert Tijuana joke here) by the force of the blast.
The route is now lined by bushes, with a few large logs still blown over the trail. The water, once a sulphuric lake of death, recovered very quickly. It’s a terrific place for a swim in the summer.
An example of the force of the blast.
On the way out, we stopped at the Bear Meadows viewpoint (site of the famous photographs of St. Helens exploding) and hiked up the Strawberry Mt. trail.
The trail is short and steep and comes out on a sharp ridge next to Strawberry Mountain. You can literally straddle the blast zone—the east side appears completely unaffected, and the west side is bare.
We made it to the top just as it started to rain, and then hustled out of there, headed for the Oregon coast.
Iron Creek Falls, on the road north to Randle.
We stopped at the Gnat Creek Campground—which is just a few picnic tables next to the highway—about twenty miles outside of Astoria, heated up some soup in the rain, threw a tarp over the truck to cover the leaky shell windows and hit the sack.
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