Mount St. Helens

Most volcanoes you visit are postcards — symmetrical cones, snow on top, a sense of permanence. Mount St. Helens is the opposite. It is a mountain that is missing a piece of itself, and the piece is still lying all around you. On the morning of 18 May 1980 the north face collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history and the volcano erupted sideways, flattening 600 square kilometres of forest in minutes and dropping the summit by 400 metres. Fifty-seven people died. What is left is a horseshoe crater gaping toward the north and a blast zone that, more than forty years later, still looks like nowhere else in the Pacific Northwest.

I had seen photographs, but standing at the Johnston Ridge Observatory — named for a young volcanologist who was monitoring the mountain from that ridge and was killed by the blast — none of it prepared me for the scale. You are looking straight into the open crater across a valley that was scoured down to bedrock, and you can read the whole event in the landscape: the direction the trees fell, the grey wash of the pyroclastic flows, the new lava dome slowly rebuilding inside the crater like the mountain is quietly trying again.

Johnston Ridge and the view into the crater

The main approach is from the west, up the Spirit Lake Highway, a road built specifically to bring people to the disaster. It climbs for an hour and a half from the interstate, and the further you go the more the forest changes — from ordinary Washington timber to a strange even-aged plantation (replanted after the blast) to, finally, the open blast zone itself, where the hills are still bristling with the silvered skeletons of trees knocked flat in 1980 and never cleared.

Johnston Ridge Observatory sits at the end of the road, directly facing the crater about eight kilometres away. The interpretive displays are genuinely moving — survivor accounts, seismograph traces from the morning of the eruption, the geology laid out plainly. But it is the view that holds you. Lia and I stood at the railing for a long time without saying much. There is something about looking at a mountain with a bite taken out of it, knowing exactly when and how it happened, that quiets people down. (Note: access to Johnston Ridge has been affected by road damage in recent years, so it is worth checking conditions before driving up — the southern and eastern approaches offer alternatives.)

Life coming back

The thing nobody tells you about a blast zone is how alive it is. The eruption was supposed to have sterilised everything, and for a while it had. But the recovery has been one of the great natural experiments in modern ecology. Wildflowers — purple lupine especially — were among the first to return, fixing nitrogen into the ash. Elk moved back in. Pocket gophers that survived underground churned the soil. We walked a short stretch of the Hummocks Trail, which winds through the giant debris mounds left by the landslide, and found ponds full of frogs, willows, and birdsong in a place that was, within living memory, grey moonscape.

It is a strange and specific kind of beauty — not pretty, exactly, but profound. You are watching a landscape rebuild itself in real time, and you are early enough in the process to see the bones of the catastrophe still showing through.

When to go

The Spirit Lake Highway and the high viewpoints are typically open from late spring through October, depending on snow — the upper road is closed and buried in winter. July and August give the best chance of a clear view into the crater and catch the wildflowers, which are extraordinary in mid-summer. Bring layers; the ridge is exposed and windy even on warm days. Check current road and observatory status before you go, as access has shifted in recent years. The whole thing makes a long day trip from Portland or a stop on the way north to Rainier.