Our last stop before arriving home was at Windy Ridge Viewing area in the Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument. There are two routes to view parts of Mt St Helens. Windy Ridge is on the east side of the mountain and it's a challenge because it's so far out there! When planning our trip I decided to drive through White Pass and enjoy it's views and then do a side trip to Windy Ridge. Good choices on my part!
We drove through parts of Gifford Pinchot National Forest which was beautiful.
Big slide!
Neat to watch the slide created water falls
We roll on...
As we make our way to Mt St Helens the fog rolls in.
After a long drive, we made it!
Here's a great video talking about and showing the eruption of Mount St. Helens: May 18, 1980
There is still a lot of devastation from the blast.
While there are a lot of burnt and blown down trees, there's also a lot of new growth.
It's a bit eerie driving to the viewing area
Fall colors!
We made our way to Miners Car. This is the site of the remains of a car that was blasted by the 1980 eruption. The power of the blast tossed the car around, filling it with sand and rocks. The car was owned by four miners, who were killed in a cabin nearby.
As we move on the fog is still rolling in.
The first glimpse of Spirit Lake
All that grey are trees turned logs from the 1980 eruption. It's just mind boggling to me the amount of logs in Spirit Lake.
Such a pretty view
As we drive down there are more view points. You can still see so many logs hugging the shoreline.
The further we go the colder it gets.
Soon the snow will arrive
Finally we arrive at Windy Ridge viewpoint.
To get a better view you can climb all of these stairs!
Up I go! Too cold and windy for D'light.
View from about midway up. You can see the parking lot below.
Some growth but still pretty barren.
Up, up, up
Almost there
Made it to the top!
Mt St Helens is hidden by the fog. But according to the information sign, here is the lava dome that was created from when the eruption occurred in 1980 and the dome continued to form through 1986.
There is also the sugar bowl lava dome which erupted 1,150 years ago.
And the the crater glacier
Spirit Lake and you can see in the background the pumice plain created by the blast.
Mt Rainier also hidden by the fog!
There are trails to hike
But the fog is thick and I need to get back to the car so we can head home.
It is a beautiful view
and time to go!
Off we go and this would be well worth coming back and sticking around for a couple of days.
We head out and we made it home in about four hours!
What a fun trip and in case you missed them here are the previous posts of this series:
I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your photos. They make me want to go for walks and enjoy nature with a rattie, and take photos. I'm thinking of adopting, hopefully soon, but I also need to take a photography class.
ReplyDeleteThank you Nona! You comments are why I blog. So much to see and do when we are out and about. I've never taken a photography class just lots of practice. If you roll back to my earlier blog posts you can see my picture taking has improved over the years. Happy to hear you enjoy my blog and thank you for your kind words.
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