Camping weekend

Once I start work, it's going to be hard to find 'fun' time since I'll be working full time and still trying to make progress on my PhD. We decided to get one good camping trip in before I started, and because it was Memorial Day weekend and we didn't have a campsite reserved, we got a jump on things are left Wednesday morning, with a plan to come back Sunday. It was perfect, we had the campground to ourselves until Friday, all of the hikes and waterfalls and scenic overlooks were deserted until Saturday, and we missed all the traffic.

We headed south to the area around Mt. St. Helens, which is also close to Mt. Rainier National Park and Mt. Adams.  All three mountains are active volcanoes, which is weird to think about. Obviously, Mt. St. Helens has erupted the most recently - the 35 year anniversary was the day before we arrived at the park.

We spent two days exploring Mt. St. Helens National Park - one day on the north/east side and one day on the south-southeast side. We didn't get a chance to see the western side, but since this is really close to home (about 2 hours), we'll be back. 

The lake you can see in the picture below was there before the eruption, but was ringed with resorts and the surface was 200 feet lower than it is now.  If you look closely at the water, you can see white/grey logs covering a huge portion of the surface; those were trees uprooted during the avalanche and are still floating today. That's crazy. 

After the eruption, a lot of the downed trees were removed and new trees replanted (particularly in valleys around water to stabilize things) but in some places you can still see how the blast topped trees in waves.

On the south side of the park there's a lava tube (Ape Cave) that was formed by a lava flow...as the lava poured down the mountain, the outer shell cooled and hardened into a tube, and the liquid lava inside eventually flowed on through, leaving the tube intact. Now you can walk through it...it's totally dark inside, and actually while we were there, filled with kids on a school field trip (I forgot we did run into some people one day!). It's also really cold inside!

Farther along the road is the site where a huge mass of water (heated groundwater and melted glacier triggered by the eruption) mixed with rock and mud and debris slammed down the mountain, scouring out valleys and leaving this behind:

 The flow also removed trees and earth down to the bedrock, which is now slowly growing back, but revealed this gorgeous canyon and now waterfall:

Finally, we stopped at a few waterfalls. This first one is Iron Creek waterfall.

 This is Lower Falls on the Lewis River. This one was pretty spectacular.

I can't believe such cool things are now practically in our backyard!