On Friday, I drove back up towards Portland. It was a cloudy, rainy day so I took the opportunity to run some errands before heading farther north towards Mt. St. Helens. Unfortunately, when you're on the road in a new area, it takes longer to do everything since you don't know where anything is. So I wasn't too productive, but the day wasn't too nice so it didn't matter much. Of course, as my brother suggested I could've asked people where things were and that just might have made it easier. The other thing I found out is that the Portland area has horrible traffic. I wasn't even near the downtown. I don't think it's a place I'd want to live. Since it was a rainy weekend, I had no problem finding a decent campground not too far from Mt. St. Helens National Monument. And what a deal - $12 with free water fillup and a dump station. Just my kind of place.
It was still cloudy and a little rainy in the morning, but I headed up towards Mt. St. Helens anyways. I was told, by my brother again, that it would be worth it. It is pretty incredible when you see the devastation caused by the volcano eruption even several miles away. It's a little harder to imagine now though, because life is starting to come back in many areas around the mountain. Not in the closest areas, but further away lakes are coming back to life and so are the forests. The eruption did not include a lava flow, only a pyrocastic (sp?) flow. Don't ask me what that means though. The other interesting stories were about some lunatics who actually caught the collapse of the crater and the eruption on film and lived to tell about it. 1 photographer was with some friends at a lookout only something like 17 miles away. The blast from the eruption traveled at 300mph so it didn't take long to catch up to them, but they somehow survived. There was also some other nut who owned a lodge on Spirit Lake only a few miles from the mountain. He said he was going to stay no matter what and he wanted to die there. Well, he got his wish and his lodge was in a spot which is now in the middle of the lake. The pictures didn't come out all that great because of the clouds. I couldn't see inside the crater and only caught glimpses of the mountain through the clouds. In case you're wondering, in the pictures of Spirit Lake, the light spot on the one end isn't snow or ice. It's a huge logjam that has been in the lake since the day of the eruption, 25 years ago. It's a lot of the dead trees that were on the hillsides that got washed back down into the lake. At one of the viewpoints I let Abbey out and was watching her when I heard some noises. I looked down the hill and saw 3 big elk trotting off.
As if that wasn't enough for one day, I drove the backroads through Washington towards the Columbia River and crossed it at Cascade Locks. Abbey had been stuck in the RV most of the day, so after I found a campground we took a short hike. There are trails that run a good part of the Columbia River Gorge. Unfortunately, they are paved and can be quite crowded and there is a lot of noise from the highway. She needed to get out and the one near our campsite wasn't crowded at all so it was still a decent walk. The other unfortunate thing is that our campground was situated between I-84 and railroad tracks. They even have a warning sign that freight trains run all night and they are required by law to blow their whistle at the crossing which seemed like it was right outside my bedroom window. I can attest to the truthfulness of the sign. Needless to say, I didn't get a very good night's sleep, though the hot shower with unlimited water in the morning made up for a little bit of it.
Spirit Lake
Elk
Storm Clouds