she'll be coming 'round the mountain

One of my goals is to take advantage of this cool area in which I now live and see some of its major sites. This Saturday, a couple of friends and I went down to Mount St. Helen's for a day trip (about three hours each way). This now makes two active volcanos that I've been able to see -- this one and Kilauea in Hawaii and I musts say that I find them fascinating.

The shot was taken from the Johnson Observatory, which is the closest visitor's center to the crater (about six miles away). What I find so interesting about Mount St. Helen's is how the top literally looks like it was scooped out -- it's even cooler to see flying over the top in a plane and looking straight down.

Everything you see down the mountain and toward the bottom of the picture is still barren of vegetation. You can even see some downed trees that, for some reason, have never been removed. Btw, you can also hike around the volcano with a permit, and my co-worker said she walked almost right up to the crater's edge.

A zoomed-in shot of the dome. You can see the puffs of smoke confirming that this is still an active volcano. The dome itself has been rising for the past year and a half, and scientists are estimating that if it continues at the same rate, then it will take 10 years to look the way it did before the eruption on May 18, 1980.

It's about a 50 mile winding drive up to this particular visitor's center, and what surprised me the most is how much of the vegetation has come back due to major replanting efforts. As you get closer to the visitor's center, then you see the evidence of the blast with thousands of dead trunks, left over from when the trees were snapped off from the blast.

What was interesting was how much the weather changed as we drove up to the top. Seattle had the worst weather I've seen since May, with fog rolled in quite low. And the fog didn't let up during our the 120 trek down I-5. We were about to head on down to Portland for lunch instead, when we decided to just hit the first visitor's center and see if someone could tell us the top was clear. Sure enough, it was bright, sunny and about 20 degrees cooler than the base (the pictures don't seem that clear due to a haze from the volcano). So, don't trust the base weather, if you're ever going to journey to the Mount.

And....that would be all the shots I have, thanks to my lame ass Canon battery that was working fine the last time I used the camera and then suddenly died on me after two shots without much of a warning. Needless to say, I was a little annoyed at driving that distance and getting only two measly pictures. My next goal: Vancouver, B.C.