Mount Saint Helens

We headed off to Mount Saint Helens. There’s no direct way to get there. As the crow flies it would have been quite short. As we went was 2 – 3 hours. The views of Mount Saint Helens are remarkably beautiful; the mountain is covered in strips of snow. It turns out that the volcano became active again in 2004 (hence the sale on the “here we go again” t-shirts from 2006), and this day was no exception with pretty continual wisps of steam coming from the center of the crater.

There are a ton of visitor centers, and it’s tough to tell which is about what. We stopped at the free Forest Learning Center, which close observation of the nature of the exhibits shows it is probably brought to us by the forest products company, Weyerhaeuser, which owns most of the land in the area.

Some areas of the mountain have been reforested by Weyerhaeuser starting in 1982, and some of those have been fertilized as well. Other areas have been left to recover on their own. It’s very interesting to see which what has happened where. The least amount of re-growth has occurred on the crater side of the mountain. The opposite side of the mountain almost looks like a regular mountain with snow capped peak and forests.