”Now that is our best room. It`s no smoking,” said the gruff man who runs the Lone Fir Resort and Liquor Store in a town called Cougar near what is left of Mt. St. Helens.
He peered into our car and then at us. We tried our best to look puffed out. Given that we had spent the afternoon hiking in a pitch-dark cave, that was not too difficult, and he sent us down the wide avenue lined with huge campers.
This part of America is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, the southwestern corner of Washington state, 50 miles north of Portland, Ore.
For those who grew up nearby, Mt. St. Helens will forever be seen in the mind`s eye as the perfect snow-capped rounded peak accompanied by Mt. Adams close by and Mt. Hood farther south.
But geologists knew its beauty was begot of youth (it is less than 50,000 years old) and that made it very dangerous indeed. Long before it blew its perfect peak into history on May 18, 1980, it was the stuff of legends.
To the Indians the mountain was personified as a lovely maiden named Loowit-spawning T-shirt slogans in 1980 of ”Do it Loowit” when it was threatening to blow. As legend had it, she provoked two young warriors, Wyeast (now Mt. Hood), and Klickitat (Mt. Adams), into a fire and brimstone battle for her favor.
When it was her turn, Mt. St. Helens erupted continually from 1831 to 1857. Then it went into a deep sleep.
When it next rumbled, Jimmy Carter was president, Thatcherism was an infant ideology, 50 Americans were held in Tehran and Andrei Sakharov was in exile in Gorky.
Up on the northeast slope around the stunningly beautiful Spirit Lake the cantankerous Harry S. Truman, aged 83 and owner of Mt. St. Helens Lodge, defied the evacuation: ”Hell no, I won`t go,” he said as he swigged a bourbon and Coke.
Cougar, the last town before the roadblocks on the southeast slope, was swamped with people waiting for ”the big one.”
The only problem was that you cannot see the mountain from Cougar because it is too close, and when ”the big one” arrived on May 18 with an almighty blast, 2,500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, anywhere near the mountain was way too close.
But in the end, the mountain blew not up but out to the northeast: 1.6 billion board feet of timber fell like so many matchsticks, 63 miles of road was covered, Spirit Lake boiled muddily and Harry S. became buried history, one of 57 casualties.
The eruption lasted for 12 hours and rose 70,000 feet. When the ash cleared, the mountain was 1,300 feet shorter, a mile-long crater had appeared and much of the forest became a gray plain.
The destruction was, and remains, awesome, and I had forgotten that. I had also forgotten that this is a mountain, not a theme park. No one is selling tickets, no one directing traffic or serving tea. In many cases, there is no paved road. In some cases, there is no road.
Do not worry about crowds; instead, worry about skidding on gravel.
And the weather. Unless you are in it for the cross-country skiing, do not go in winter or spring. Trails and roads are generally open from June 1 until the snow closes the roads in October. We went in early September and experienced predictably unpredictable weather: a day of blazing sun followed by one of fog, wind and rain. Naturally we spent the former hiking in a ”lava tube” cave and the latter peering for a look at the truncated mountain.
The tube is called Ape Cave, the longest intact lava tube in the United States. Just over two miles long, it was discovered in 1951 about 1,900 years after it was formed by an eruption that sent the ropy pahoehoe lava basalt flowing. Eventually, the flow crusted over and the lava drained from the tunnel.
Its name is a reference to the huge, hairy Bigfoot (also called Sasquatch) monster that is supposed to roam nearby.
The next day dawned wet and windy. The rain did not relent, so we hit the gravel road up to the Lahar viewpoint, just inside the eastern boundary of the Volcanic Monument.
The 110,000-acre monument site was set aside by Congress in 1982 for research, education and recreation. Except for erecting a few composting toilets-the mountain motto is ”odor free by `93”-and paving some wheelchair and child-friendly trails, the area is off-limits for development.
Here was our first glimpse of the destruction: it was lunarlike, a horizon of rubble from the lahar or volcanic mudflow (there was no lava in the 1980 eruption) that came down the mountain at 60 m.p.h. as a pyroclastic flow of fiery, broken rock, 700-degree Farenheit gas and ash.
I learned all this at the Visitor Center, not the ”informational signposts” at Lahar trail, a beautiful path that winds its way down through moss, ferns and 100-year-old Douglas firs to the canyon transformed by the mudflow.
For instance, the sign overlooking the lahar-scarred Lava Canyon said:
”Flowing, tumbling, churning, winding around itself in intimate oneness, water, carrying sediment, polishes and smoothes the black lava.”
Sickbags on alert, we wandered back up the path. Mt. St. Helens is a place of poetry. It is a pity the humans do not stick to septic tanks.
