As usual, the third Saturday in September is set aside for an open house at Classic Foods in Portland, Oregon. It was excellent weather, a great turn-out and delicious food. Typically, I spend the night in PDX and enjoy breakfast with Jake and friends. This time, I decided to try a hike near Mt. St. Helens. The day before I loaded up on maps at REI. One option was to try to summit but it is a permit based system with only 100 permits per day. Checking online, all of the permits were spoken for so I scaled back my expectations, which was probably for the best, because I was not really prepared for a rigorous climb.
Instead, I spend the night in Kelso and drove to the Johnson Observatory where the Boundary Trail accesses areas north of the mountain. The Johnson Observatory overlooks the blast path on the mountain and signs on the trail point out areas where the debris flows washed down leaving scars almost 500 feet up the side of the river valley. The mountain was shrouded in a smoky haze from a series of fires burning in the Mt. Adams area.
The trail was dusty and smooth rolling down and up a ridge heading east. In some areas shrubs and grasses were beginning to take hold, in other places, the ground was still bare, more than 30 years after the eruption. Signs everywhere warned hikers to stay on the trail to preserve the natural recovery of the fragile landscape.
The grade of the trail was gentle although in a few places it traversed a steep slope where a misstep would lead to a long, unfortunate roll down a rocky slope. A sign identified this section of trail as "more difficult" using a blue ski slope designation. On the return trip the same section of trail is labeled "most difficult" leaving one to wonder if there the trail designers perceived a directional difference or only had one of each sign.
I caught up with a German expat who was photographing the mountain. He told me that he had climbed St. Helens the day before and had picked up a standby permit the day before. Apparently there is no charge to reserve a permit which leads to a number of cancellations.From the spot where we chatted we could see Spirit Lake for the first time. The surface of the lake is covered with hundreds or perhaps thousands of weathered, gray logs blown into the lake during the 1980 blast.
A short time later, the trail came to a tee; Peter headed down to the right and I continued up to the right. After traversing the northern flank of a ridge, the trail steepened slightly and switched back and forth across a colorful slope, dotted with red huckleberry bushes, grey stumps hinting at a violent end of their former selves, and a few new conifers.
After clearing the ridge, the trail drops sharply and passes through a
keyhole passage in a jagged rock formation. The hole is about 20 feet
wide and 10 feet tall, creating a short tunnel on the top of a ridge.
St Helens Lake pops into view at this point and it too is covered with logs that look like matchsticks from above.
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| Logs on St. Helens Lake |
About 1/2 mile past the keyhole, a spur trail heading to Coldwater Peak turns left and sharply up.
I could see the radio towers on the peak from miles away so I decided to give it a go. Soon, the trail became diffuse and splintered between the ripening berry bushes. I veered left, which turned out to be a mistake. Various tracks appeared only to disappear after a few yards. Based, on the scat, it seemed likely that bears rather than hikers had cleared the way. Unfortunately, my attempt to scale the peak was thwarted by a 50 foot vertical wall, on which sat an assortment of towers and antennae.
On the return trip, I looked back toward Coldwater Peak and noticed the hillside was covered with trees, blown down in an instant, by the incredible force of the volcanic blast.
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| Hillside littered with trees blown down by the volcanic blast. Coldwater Peak is in the left center distance. |
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