Visiting Mount St Helens

When we were coming to this area, Carl asked if we would be close to Mount St Helens... our original travel plan did not have us very close, but we decided to make some changes and ended up in Chehalis which is not far from the National Monument. Friday was predicted to have relatively clear weather, so we decided to make the drive and see if we could see the mountain.

We knew from research online that the road to the National Monument's Johnston Ridge Observatory was temporarily closed due to a landslide that had taken out the access road. The road is not anticipated to be open again until 2026. So, we'd need to access other facilities and not have quite as close a view as we would have it it were open.

We stopped first at the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center -- a Washington State facility.

Information about places to learn about and see Mount St. Helens

We saw a video at the Visitor Center that identified the events that occurred the months and days before the eruption, information about the eruption itself, and aftermath. I looked to see if that video was on YouTube, and I didn't find it, but I found this one which was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec30uU0G56U&t=8s

We had heard about the massive numbers of trees that had been blown down by the blast and wondered if any had been harvested -- we found this information in the visitor center.

Mount St. Helens before the blast...

Mount St. Helens after the blast

A view of the inside of the visitor center

A view of Mount St. Helens from outside the visitor center. It was 30+ miles away from this point.

Even though the other information centers would be closed by the time we got to them, and we knew we could not get to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, we decided to drive further east toward the volcano on SR 504.

At Elk Rock Viewpoint - about 10 miles away

At Coldwater Creek bridge, the end of the road - about 7.5 miles away...

... and a relatively clear view too! This was the closest we could get with the road closure.

On our way back we stopped at Castle Lake Overlook and read through the information boards...

A little over 8.5 miles away -- the clouds had moved back in but we could see a little of the peak. In the middle of the picture is Castle Lake which was created by the eruption debris damming up the Toutle River.

As we drove, we were also mesmerized by the trees...

... these were in the Weyerhauser commercial forest land, there were signs in many places indicating when they were planted -- so all the trees in a large swath would have been planted at the same time.

To our eyes, they looked blurred as they were all of a similar size and all seemingly identical. The photos don't really capture how neat they were to our eyes.

We stopped at an overlook at a bridge -- the information boards here were sponsored by Weyerhauser.

The bridge was quite impressive -- you can also see where forest harvesting is proceeding on the far side of the bridge.

It was quite an interesting afternoon. We had specifically chosen to go later in the day because the weather forecast indicated that we would be more likely to have clear skies -- but by making that choice, we missed out on seeing the other two information centers, Weyerhauser's Mt St Helens Forest Learning Center (https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/company/values/citizenship/mount-st-helens/visit/) and the U.S. Forest Service's Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center (https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/giffordpinchot/recarea/?recid=40401). The lady at the Washington State Visitor Center who talked with us gave a glowing recommendation of Weyerhauser's center.