While in Southern Washington we are staying in Chehalis so that we can visit both Mount St. Helens and Mt. Rainer.

We visited Mount St. Helens on a day that started off really cloudy and foggy and when we arrived at the visitors center we were fogged in.  We were concerned that we wouldn’t see anything but the rangers assured us that we would drive up through the fog and then it would be clear.  And, it was!

Mount St. Helens is not a real high mountain at 8,300 ft.  But, the crater…it’s HUGE!  It really did blast out the whole side of the mountain!

Jeff and I were both really impressed and decided that if we had a top 3 list of places we’d been to so far, this is on that list!  (the others are Yellowstone and Carlsbad Caverns).

We were surprised to find that the mountain is not being quiet right now.  It’s growing again!  Inside the huge crater is  dome that is building up and there’s a little amount of steam coming from it that is visible to the naked eye from the Johnston Ridge Observatory a few miles away.  There have been small eruptions since the big one in 1980 as well!  Yipes!!  People in this area talk about eruptions like we talk about earthquakes in Southern California…something to laugh about and maybe be prepared for, but not too scary.

In the pictures below I’ve labeled one that was taken before the eruption, one shortly afterward, and one that we took that shows how much the dome has grown since the eruption.  Also included are several more of the area including the devastation that still exists today for several miles around the volcano due to the ash (as deep as 20 feet in some places) and the downed trees that are still scattered all over the place.  The forests for several miles around are new forests, planted in the 80s to replace all that was totally destroyed when the mountain erupted.