Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens, Washington

Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens - August 22-23

Mt Rainier

We basically only did a drive-by of Mt Rainier on the way south, so the only pictures we got were from a distance.  As you can see in the picture below there was an amazing circular cloud formation just to the north of Mt Rainier. It looks like it was likely caused by wind turbulence blowing around the mountain, forming the cloud into the circular configuration. 

Pretty cool…

Mt St Helens

Mt St Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. Here are before and after shots of the mountain taken from a location down the Toutle River Valley about 12-15 miles away. These were on display in a visitor center from the same location as the original pictures were taken.

Here is a current picture taken from a hilltop just next to the Visitor Center.

You can see that although the valley is still covered with ash from the eruption on May 18, 1980, most of the vegetation has come back, but not without the help of man.  Almost all the covered areas were replanted by Weyerhauser Corporation with 18 million seedlings of various species that originally grew there.

There were lots of beautiful flowers on the hike up to the Toutle Valley site hilltop, so naturally, here they are for you to enjoy too.

It is a beautiful drive up a scenic road to get to the Natl Volcanic Monument Park Visitors Center.

After a brief visit to the Visitors Center to see at all the displays of the eruption, we started an unplanned trek on one of the long hikes to get a little further around the mountain. YIKES !!  The distances of the trails are in miles.

We were awarded with this view of the mountain.

Notice how deep the ash is where the water run-off has eroded through.

The mountain next to Mount St Helens is still littered with fallen trees blown over by the eruption.

Here is a blow-up of a section of the above image showing more detail of the trees killed by the explosion.

In the below image you can see that the wildflowers are thriving while the tree trunks continue their decomposition.

This is where we ran out of  camera battery, physical energy and because it was an unplanned strenuous hike we also ran out of water all at about the same time, so we shortened the long hike, and made the trek back to the car...

There she goes again, climbing onto another bear’s lap. Gotta keep my eyes on her all the time.

I think she was attracted by his suspenders and lunchbox.

More ‘tree art’. Here is a ‘Multi-Tongued Fire Plug Eater’

And an Elephant Dragon

That's it for the mountains for now.