We went to Mt St Helens this weekend. It was an incredible place to visit. I have seen lots of volcanic evidence in my life but to be on a volcano that erupted so recently was cool. We got to the mountain just in time for a ranger talk and she was full of excellent information that we all found interesting. As always a picture tells a thousand words so here are some pictures from the trip.
The whole crew in front of the Volcano. Except for me of course who took the picture!
Meta Lake. This lake was iced over when the mountain erupted. It is only 8 miles from the mountain but because of the ice over the lake the fish, frogs and Crawdads survived and are thriving. We had fun catching the crawdads.
If you look closely you can see the tsunami line around spirit lake. When the mountain erupted it unleashed a huge landslide that splashed into spirit lake. This caused a tsunami that went 800 feet up the mountain, pulling thousands of huge trees back into the lake. Over time 70 percent of the trees have sunk, but a bunch of the lake is still tree covered.
Seeing the way the trees blew down was cool. The closer we got to the blast zone the more downed trees we saw. Chas is sitting on this downed Douglas Fir that was probably 200 feet tall and 500 years old when the mountain erupted. There were thousands of trees laying down in the direction away from the blast. Seeing just how big these trees are and how they snapped was amazing. In this case the tree was on a north facing slope that was covered by snow when the mountain erupted. That preserved the topsoil and has allowed new growth.
A stunningly beautiful waterfall. This was 14 miles from the volcano and you couldn’t tell the mountain had ever erupted here.
3 comments:
Great picture of Chas and his Giant Crawdad!
Amazing place!!!!
Looks like an amazing place to visit! Check out Nat'l Geographic from a couple of months ago. Great article on how the mountain has come back to life.
Post a Comment