Mount St. Helens - An Awful Place

For the last chapter of my book on the Cascade Mountains, I plan to write about Mount St. Helens. This, of course, has sent me down many pocket gopher holes seeking out the science and history, as well as further exploration of what I consider to be one of the most amazing landscapes on Earth: beautiful, unusual, inspiring, life affirming, and hopeful. One aspect of that dive is language and the words used to describe what happened and is happening at the volcano.

In 1981, the USGS published the magisterial The 1980 Eruptions of Mount St. Helens, Washington. Weighing eight pounds and totaling 844 pages, 62 scientific studies, and a map, Professional Paper 1250 (or the Twelve-Fifty in the lexicon of St. Helensologists) is a stunning account, from the mountain’s reawakening on March 20, 1980 with a “swarm of earthquakes” through the May 18 eruption to the months of research that followed. It is not a document to be taken lightly.

Not surprisingly, the first volcanic eruption in the continental United States since 1917 generated a dynamic vocabulary of descriptions, as geologists sought to convey the staggering magnitude of May 18. Initially, it’s simply the impressive numbers. A nine-hour long explosion of rock and gas and ash and debris shot up more than 88,000 feet into the stratosphere at an average speed of 100 mph. Peak temperatures of the hurricane strong, ground-hugging, life-killing pyroclastic flows reached 1300°F, hot enough to melt metals such as lead and aluminum. A rocky, icy, ashy avalanche swept down the mountain with a total volume of 3,662,261,734 cubic yards, the largest ever recorded on Earth. Total dead: humans-57; birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arachnids-uncountable.

These are numbers almost beyond comprehension, of the most studied and scientifically analyzed geological event in history. And, then there are the words used by the researchers: Startling. Awesome. Quivering. Seared. Vigorously. Spewed. Destroyed. Reamed. Devastated. Darkness. This is neither the typical language of a serious and sober scientific report nor the language of a tame, or tamed, landscape. These are the words of scientists who appear to be, excuse the pun, blown away by what they saw. It is a vocabulary of change—forceful, potent, and energetic. Clearly something happened, and something of epic, unparalleled proportions.

I have been fortunate to visit Mount St. Helens numerous times in the past two decades. I have hiked to the summit twice (the first time on September 24, 2004, just one week before the mountain came back to life after being quiet since 1986) and traveled with scientists several times. Last weekend, Marjorie and I spent three days at the volcano. We camped for two nights about 11 miles northeast of the crater, at the northern edge of the tree-removal zone and took three hikes: along the Green River, up to a former lookout site, and out on the Pumice Plain.

Big Trees, Paintbrush, a Gazillion Western Toad tadpoles

As happens every time I go down to the mountain, I was astounded and surprised. We saw old growth forest, in an area protected by topography; a salvage log zone, where nearly every living tree is a same-sized Douglas fir around 40 years old and nearly every dead tree is a tipped over mass of roots and sawed off stump of a huge (on the order of 6 - 10 foot diameter), ancient western red cedar or Douglas fir, or what’s left from the ravage; roads and parking lots and visitor facilities being taken over by plants and animals (a sign of both too little money for upkeep and how a dynamic, recovering ecosystem reasserts life); polychromatic fields of lupines, paintbrush, yarrow, hairy cat’s ears, and mosses; more tadpoles than I have ever seen in one place in my lifetime (upwards of a gazillion!); robust Douglas firs and noble firs skyrocketing upward, some doubling in size since 2020 (some more than 20 feet tall); and ant farmers tending their aphids on lodgepole pines.

For me, the word I would use to describe Mount St. Helens is awful, as in full of awe. The word awe came to English from the Old Germanic (ego) and Old Icelandic (agi), which the OED defines as “a feeling of profound reverence or respect, mixed with fear or dread.” That is certainly how I feel at the volcano. I see it as a holy and sacred place, unique in its beauty, astonishing in how the plants and animals have responded to the devastation, and inspiring in how scientists have responded to the devastation by devoting more than four decades to teasing out the stories of change and transformation, stories that will never be finished, as the mountain and its ecosystems will never be static or stop adapting and evolving. But I further know that Mount St. Helens is still very much an active volcano, which should cause anyone to fear that potential.

Mount St. Helens is one of my favorite spots in the world and every time I visit I come away surprised, rejuvenated, and full of hope. I am simply awful.