While the rest of the country is still moaning about snowpocalypse or snowmageddon or whatever other bad not-even-puns you people are using for this winter, the Pacific Northwest has had beautiful weather.  Today’s forecast was sunny and clear with highs in the 60s, so McKenzie and I put on our hiking boots and drove north to Mount St. Helens to take advantage of the perfect hiking weather.

I just got a new DSLR camera and this was the perfect excuse to test it out.  A helpful ranger at the visitor center in Castle Rock, Washington, suggested the Hummocks Trail on the northwest side of the mountain — one of the few hiking areas that’s open in winter.  It’s about an hour’s drive from the visitor center up Spirit Mountain Highway to the trail head, and then the trail is an easy 2.5-mile loop with spectacular views of Mount St. Helens throughout.  Here are some of my pictures from the drive and the hike.

This is the view of Mount St Helens from the visitor center:

Some views from the drive:

Debris from the blast, and by “debris,” I mean the entire north face of the mountain, gushed through the Toutle River Valley, traveling 10 miles in 14 minutes.

A few spots on the drive offer views of nearby Mount Adams, the peak in the middle of the shot below:

The best views of the crater are from Johnston Ridge Observatory, which is closed in winter, but you do get some nice close-ups from the highway.

Inside the crater, the cone is rebuilding itself.  The rate of growth is surprising — geologists estimate St. Helens will be back to its pre-blast height in as few as 200 years.  The 1980 eruption reduced the summit by 1,312 ft, from 9,677″ to 8,365″.  That’s a lot of mountain.  Isn’t this earth amazing?

One of my favorite parts of this drive is the new growth forest.  Young noble firs have such perfectly geometric trunks and branches, it was like driving through computer graphics.

The rest of the photos are from our hike on Hummocks Trail.  We were walking over rock deposits that used to make up the peak of Mount St. Helens — in a way, we summitted the 1980 mountain!

The trail takes hikers to the edge of the valley carved by the debris flow from the 1980 blast.

Life is slowly but steadily returning to the blast zone.  Eventually, forests will cover most signs of the eruption, and wildlife will flourish here, but 30 years since the big blast, the evidence remains clear.  The stumps on this hillside are all that remains after the volcano wiped out the trees that once stood here.

The eruption launched this tree like a spear into the ground miles away from the blast (at least, that’s what I imagine happened here):

When I learned about the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in elementary school, I pictured a mountain blowing itself to smithereens, but even 1,312 feet shorter, Mount St. Helens remains one of the giants of the Cascade Range.  It’s now one of my favorite places to visit on a day like today.  Read what I wrote about my first visit here.

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