Well the day started off relatively slow. This entire weekend I, as well as my girlfriend and her mother, have been running a garage sale of many different kinds of antiques that they inherited from a sad and unfortunate loss in the family. We were scheduled to run the garage sale from 8am in the morning until 5pm. With it being Mothers Day and all, we knew the traffic was going to be light.
About 1230pm, my girlfriend got home from work and she surprised me with a sandwich from Subway. Best thing ever on an empty stomach. She instantly noticed that the traffic had been slow all day by seeing how much money we had made. She suggested that we should close shop and go for a drive, but to where, we were not sure yet. We have in the past few weeks talked about going up to the observatory a few miles away from Mount Saint Helens on a ridge called Johnston's Ridge. Great place to learn about the mountain and view the north side of the mountain. This observatory gives you a great view of the side that blew off.
As we started to drive up there, we couldn't help but stop at every viewpoint and taking a few picture of the valley floor below, which was cleared out by the pyroclastic cloud during the mountain's explosion back in 1980. All you see on the valley floor were a bunch of little rivers crisscrossing, headed out to the Washington coast.
We came to a point in the day when we realized that it was running late. It was about 430pm and we knew that the observatory closed at 600pm. We decided to stop going to all the viewpoints so that we could at least spend an hour up at the observatory learning about the mountain and watching the two short videos they had up there. On the final stretch to the observatory, we came around a hairpin turn and noticed instantly a car stopped in the middle of the road but we were not sure why at the time. Suddenly, what looked like a fox, ran from in front of the car to the right side of the road. I decided that I did not get a good enough look at it and asked Olivia, my girlfriend, to turn around so that we can get a better picture of him. We were not sure if this animal was a large fox or a small coyote but later on we were told by a forestry ranger that it was a small coyote. After we took a few pictures we proceeded up the mountain to the observatory, which was about another eight miles.
Once we finally got there, the first thing we did was go to the lookout, just outside the building to take a few pictures of the volcano, but it was hard to see with all the snow on it as well as the clouds that engulfed it. We went inside the building, paid the $8.00 entry fee per person and started looking around at all the educational displays that they had around the room. After that we watched two fifteen minute movies, the first one being about the nature and habitat around the mountain and how the wildlife is slowly coming back to live on the mountain again, since the blast that happened 34 years ago. The second movie was about the geology of the mountain and what the explosion consisted of. What we learned, set me straight about volcanos and not all of them do damage with lava. This mountain in particular damaged itself and its surroundings by mostly rock slides and the pyroclastic cloud.
Once we were done with the videos, we sat and listened a ranger talk about everything in his own words which lasted only a few minutes. We then proceeded outside where the sun had finally come out and gave us a more clearer view of the mountain besides a few clouds still in front of it. While we were outside, we were observing all the trails that we could hike that would lead us to either Spirit Lake or to the actual Volcano itself. These hikes ranged from a mile in length all the way to a ten mile round trip. The good thing is we both like to hike and I do not foresee us passing up on great opportunities in the near future.
One hike that we did was called the Eruption Trail, which was the small one mile hike. All this did was lead up to a small peak outside the observatory so that you can see the valley floor a little better. This view made it great for pictures. What we found funny is that you could get fined $100.00 for just stepping off the marked trail, mostly because of the greens that were growing all over the ground. This made sense because they did not want these ruined after years upon years of recovery since the eruption of 1980. After we were done with Eruption Trail, we decided that it was about the time that we should head back down home. When we started to drive down the mountain, we did not stop at any viewpoints on the way, just so we could get home in a timely manner. The only thing that slowed us down was that a car had a tire blow right in front of us. We stopped to offer assistance but he politely declined and we went on our way. The trip down the mountain took only half the amount of time that it took to get up there.
The day in entirety was a great trip. I got to spend it with my amazing girlfriend as well as getting to see some beautiful views. On the way down we immediately started to plan out what we were going to hike, when, and with who. We are hoping to do a few of them this summer, as long as time and weather permits it.
