Forty-two Years

On May 18, 1980 Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington state.  One of the first trips Tammy and I made as a married couple was a trip to see Mount St Helens and I took a moment to scan a few of the photos we took when we were there.

Even then there was evidence that nature was recovering from the devastation that followed in the immediate aftermath of the eruption.  This 30th Anniversary retrospective looks back at the event and talks about the recovery over time.  I have not viewed more than a tiny bit of this, so I can't say how good it is.

And, here is a 40 year anniversary piece that focuses on the recovery of the area.  I found this to be very informative and is worth watching - especially since it is only a bit over six minutes long.  If you want to appreciate the changes since the eruption and invest even less time, take a look at this time elapse by NASA's Earth Observatory.

If you take that last link, I encourage you to watch Spirit Lake.  You can see the mass of floating logs moving to different locations on the lake over time.

If you have the patience to watch a webinar, this one by Dr. Eric Wagner from the University of Washington looks promising.

The photo above is what Spirit Lake looked like during our visit.  From this distance, the logs do not look like much.  But, many of the trees floating in the lake were wider than we were tall.  These were not little trees.  It says something that even in 2016, the last frame of the NASA time elapse, there are still trees floating on that lake from the eruption.

If you would like to learn more about the waterways in the area the  USGS information on Spirit Lake and other bodies of water in Mt St Helens area can be found at the link provided here.  

I still think this last photo is my favorite from this trip.  We hiked down to the edge of the lake from this point and I still remember the signs warning people to stay OFF of the floating logs.  But, more important, I remember just standing at this viewpoint and being awed by the destruction.  Trees that had once been fifty to one hundred feet tall were devoid of branches and laying flat on the ground - except for a few sturdy ones that looked like oddly placed telephone poles amongst a pile of matchsticks.

I wonder if we will decide to walk there again to experience the intrusion of green into what had become a barren landscape in 1980?