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I was promised a "mostly sunny" day today, so I checked out my window first thing in the morning. Sure enough, Mt. Rainier smiled back, so I raced out the door and up the hill to Paradise. I drove through several layers of clouds, and I worried that I would not be able to see the mountain once I got there. But I had nothing to worry about.

It was absolutely quiet up top, with only a few cross-country skiiers and hikers present. A handful of photographers roamed the grounds with giant lenses.

On the way back down, I got a picture of the Nisqually River (on the left). So much different than 2 days before (right)!

The Mt. St. Helens National Volanic Monument is one of the biggest science experiements in the world, frequented by biologists and geologists. The biologists are watching life come back to the land, while the geologists are working on predicting the next big eruption. You are very restricted where you can walk in the area, because of the ongoing experiments and because of the fragile nature of the recovery.

There are two approaches by road to this volcano, which had its last major eruption in May 1980. From the east, you can go up to Windy Ridge and get great views from there. I have taken this approach several times before, the first of which was in 1990. You drive through a forest for a long, long way, and then suddenly you go around a corner and BANG -- the ground is full of giant trees, lined up next to each other in parallel, from where the blast knocked them flat. However, the Windy Ridge approach is buried in snow now (they're predicting a late July opening!), so I had to take the western approach to Johnston's Ridge.

I have not been up this road before, nor had I visited the observatory at the end, so I was happy to try something new. The drive down US 12 was very grey, and once again, I worried that Mt. St. Helens would be in the clouds. She was cloudier than Mt. Rainier, but I'll take it -- it's probably the best day I get on this trip.

The picture takes some explaining. You are looking at the north side of the mountain. There are clouds sitting in the crater, so it's obscured a bit. In front, all of the brown you see is the Pumice Plain. This was covered with a layer of ash and rock from the 1980 eruption. It was thought that nothing would ever grow here, since it was covered hundreds of feet thick. You can see a haze of green here now, 31 years later.

Looking to the right from this view, this is what you'll see:

The brown piles of dirt are called hummocks. This is the former top of Mt. St. Helens, scattered across the Pumice Plain, continuing to as far as 17 miles from the blast. These pictures are taken from the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which is 5 miles from the mountain. The ridge is named for the geologist who was monitoring the mountain, at what was believed to be a safe distance, on the day of the eruption. He broadcast pictures and narration from the eruption until he was killed, one of 57 people who died that day.

(By the way, I'm reciting these details from memory, based on the ranger talk I heard... please do not cite these facts as reliable or a source!)

A bit further downhill is the Hummocks Trail, which is down in the valley you see below and to the right side of the picture. This provided a better view of the return of life in the area.

The elk in the area have been responsible for introducing seeds of new plant life to the area, which means some non-native plants as well as native plants. As you get further from the immediate blast zone, more life survived. The eruption happened in mid-May, when there was still significant snow on the ground. That means small trees, which were fully buried, survived. Also, the pocket gophers survived deep underground. Pocket gophers eat the roots of plants, so they had food after the eruption. When they came to the surface, they brought up the nutrient rich soil and mixed it with the nutrient poor ash that now covered the area. This provided an area for the first plant, the lupine, to take hold.

These plants made the gopher happy, because they have tasty roots. The lupine was able to colonize the bits of forest soil next to the gopher holes. This was the first plant found on the Pumice Plain, 5 years after the eruption.

As the lupine grow, flower, and die (they are an annual species), they left more nutrient-rich material for other plants to use. The photo below is messy, but it's a great example of how additional plants have grabbed on to a small area colonized by a lupine.

Finally, just a few pretty pictures to round out the day... Here is the North Touttle River, looking away from Mt. St. Helens. This river carried most of the material from the pyroclastic flow, and the river was ultimately buried in the mud and ash for a time.

Here is a tree in the same area, tenaciously clinging to a hummock. Life is pretty amazing.

Looking back towards Mt. St. Helens, with more hummocks in the area:

As I finished this trail, it was time to go back to Mt. Rainier. The show was over anyway -- Mt. St. Helens had been hidden by the clouds once more.