Mt. St. Helens

So, as it turns out, I picked a terrible day to go to Mt St Helens. It was quite cloudy, and at no point in the drive was I able to actually see the mountain. Additionally, once I reached a certain altitude on the drive there, all of the scenic overlooks were still full of enormous snow banks. And finally, the road was closed a ways before the mountain. But it was still interesting. I checked out the visitor center, learned a bit about the eruption, and still got to see some of the landscape around the mountain, if not the mountain itself.

This bridge is at the very edge of the blast zone of the eruption.


This is what it looked like when I got close to the mountain.


And this is a neat thing from the visitor center. It illustrates the quantity of ejecta (in cubic kilometers) that left the volcanoes during their eruptions. The tiny one, front and center, is Mt. St. Helens. To the left is the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia. To the right is the 1912 eruption of Mt. Katmai in Alaska. And the huge one in the back is Mt. Mazama, the volcano that created Crater Lake here in Oregon.