In Our Backyard: Solo Hiking at Mount St. Helens

Posted

The day dawns, yellow sun rising to cloudless blue. My hike sits at the end of the valley from my living room windows. I’ve picked my trail at Mount St. Helens and can’t wait to get on the road, leaving a full half hour before I planned to leave.

On the day of the hike earlier this summer, my car is the only one in the Hummocks trailhead parking lot. Hummocks is a child-friendly interpretive loop. My chosen Boundary West trail — heading to Johnston Ridge Observatory — branches off of it a half mile in.

The trail zigzags through the North Fork Toutle River Valley, the spoiled mountain ahead, through alder thickets that provide shade in this valley made a wasteland in May 1980 after 600 feet of debris filled it. It’s a rich green now, and hums with life.

The red vines of wild strawberry network across the moss, connecting the once barren land back to its roots. Ants scurry across the trail. Birds sing in the trees.

The valley is full of hummocks, a graveyard with the insides of the displaced mountain entombed beneath soil and vegetation. Scientists, I read, have mapped each hummock to where it used to be on the mountain.

The trail narrows as it heads up the side of a bare face, loose gravel underfoot. My fear of high open places, aeroacrophobia, kicks into gear. This must be the “sketchy” part I read about in a Washington Trails trip report. I plant my poles and take it at turtle pace. I can do this if I watch where every footfall is going to land.

Suddenly I lose the trail. It definitely isn’t the direction I’m going. I look to my left. There is some indication that it goes straight up. It seems odd, but then everything about a volcanic eruption site is odd.

I take a deep breath and tell myself others have done this and I can too. I make the 90-degree turn to face the slope, then glance to my left again. There’s the trail; it’s a switchback! I nearly weep as relief floods my body. I was concentrating so hard on my feet, I didn’t know what was coming up.



Finally arriving at the top of the ridge, I stop to breathe. I did it. The trail wanders, on the level now, through foxglove, lupine, daisies, paintbrush, pearly everlasting, penstemon and prairie dandelion. The blankets of yellow, red and white stretch across the acres of meadow.  

Snow-covered Mount Adams peaks up over a distant ridge, in contrast to the nearly bare St. Helens. I see a plume of smoke rises from behind the dome in the crater. The mountain is smoldering beneath its dead, gray, dry, desecrated facade, biding its time until its return to violence. Meanwhile everything around it is coming back to life, defying what was or what will be. Now is all there is.

I decided as I hiked I would take in the spectacular documentary at the observatory, especially since I can get in free with my Senior Access Pass. I sit in the new amphitheater and eat my lunch, while I wait for the next start time.

It’s odd to be in civilization in the middle of a wilderness hike, but the flush toilets and water bottle refilling station are not unwelcome.

The movie has been updated with new footage of the recovering landscape, but the same breath-stopping footage of the eruption, the same surprise ending. At its conclusion, I head back to the trail.  

I’m in my car three hours later. I stop at Coldwater Lake and soak my tired feet for a few minutes before heading home. A shower and a beer on the deck are calling my name, along with the view of a distant mountain.

•••

Gretchen Staebler is a Pacific Northwest native, transplanted to the Southeast and back again 36 years later. She blogs and shares photographs of her beloved Northwest at www.WritingDownTheStory.com.