Mt. St. Helens, Part 1
Sunday, we got out early to go to Mt. St. Helens. We recently saw a documentary about the eruption and wanted to go down and check things out for ourselves. It is conveniently located… you guessed it, about two hours from Tacoma.
On our way out, we stopped at Balloon Roof Bakery, just a couple of blocks from our new residence.
The bakery is named after The Balloon Roof Dance Hall, which once hosted the likes of Duke Ellington. I don’t know what the Balloon Roof Dance Hall was named after. We got a couple of ham and cheese croissants and a Macha pistachio cookie and were on our way.
We also brought our coffee maker. Our truck is a hybrid,
equipped with a 7.2kw generator. That generator came in handy in Missouri, as
it provided power for things like air compressors on our farm that had no other
source of electricity. We have used that feature much less since our move –
essentially zero. We plug our laptops in a lot, but a lot of cars will power a
laptop.
With gas knocking around $6 a gallon, we have appreciated it
being a hybrid, though. When I moved to Washington, my mileage went up by
2-3 mpg. Was it better gas? Fresher air? A hotter spark from our new lease on
life? Nay, it’s simply that I’m driving slower. The speed limit is usually 60
mph or slower here, and if you’re on I-5 anywhere between Tacoma and Seattle,
you’re pretty happy when you’re doing 40 mph. The EPA rating on my truck is 24
mpg, but in Missouri I could never do better than 22-23. Here I routinely get
26 mpg. It just takes me longer to get there.
I know there will be other truck drivers who read this who
say, “You don’t need a hybrid for that, I can get that in my truck!” And I
believe that you did, on that day on the freeway, with the cruise control set,
a light tailwind and a bit of a downhill grade. The hybrid is giving me
mid-20s every day in city driving, where the non-hybrid trucks the size of mine
are getting in the mid-teens.
But back to that generator – we finally used it. We got our
fancy pastries to go, and tailgated with fresh coffee at Mt. St. Helens with
our coffee maker plugged into the truck. You would think you could get coffee
there – but you would be wrong.
Our breakfast picnic spot was in the parking lot of the Forest Learning Center. It’s an impressive
building in an unbelievable location, perched high on small mountain overlooking a valley, river, elk and other creatures. The learning center is an impressive museum with top-notch forestry exhibits. It has to be the best museum on forestry in the country, if not the world.
It feels like a National Park museum, and it is on that same
standard of professionalism. You do have to remember, though, this isn’t a
National Park or a state park; it’s owned and operated by Weyerhaeuser, a timber
company. At one point, Weyerhaeuser was the largest landowner in the United
States. They needed to own a lot of acres, to cut the trees and plant them
back, and cut them again. That was before Stan Kroenke got really good at
whatever it is he does to make money, and gained the title of the largest landowner
in the U.S. Stan needs to own a lot of property, in order to later sell it at a
profit so he can acquire more property. This buy low, sell high practice seems
to be working out for him pretty well.
I love hiking through and camping in undisturbed forests. I
love giant, old trees. But I also like wood. I like cattle and I like beef. One
can hold these two things in tension. Logging companies often get vilified
because logged-over forests are so ugly, and destructive to wildlife that lives
there. But I still love solid wood furniture and hardwood floors. I’m glad we
have protected forests, but I’ve got no grip with logging in general.
All that being said, as a journalist I recognize that the
information being presented in the Forest Learning Center is coming at me from
an apologist perspective. One of the displays in the museum has a large
headline that literally says, “We Harvest Less Than You Think.” Sounds a little
defensive.
Post breakfast and museum tour, we hit the trail. A National
Monument (Mt. St. Helens is a National Monument, not a National Park) staff member recommended
a trail to us that started a mile down a highway that was closed due to a
massive landslide that occurred a few years ago. We parked right before the
closed gate, in the parking lot for the Hummocks (not a typo) trailhead. The
parking lot had several cars in it, and all of them were on the Hummocks trail.
Ann, Mary and I turned our backs on that trailhead and started walking the
lonesome highway.
Ann noted that walking down the middle of a highway with no
cars and no other people felt a bit post-apocalyptic. It did feel like we were
searching for other survivors. It was like that until we got to the trailhead,
about a mile away. From there it was just nice, peaceful hiking.
The initial trail was a bit steep, but nothing compared to other trails we have been doing lately. It was
heavily wooded. We knew there was a lake below us, but we couldn’t really see it.
Then we got to the ridgetop. The views at that point blew us
both away (Mary cares nothing for views). We felt it was Swiss-Alps caliber.
Maybe it was the perfect weather, or our very relaxed pace, but it just couldn’t
have been much better. Right before we started down, we met a woman hiking with
her Shiba Inu. It looked like an Akita puppy, but it was a 12-year-old dog. She
had been hiking the trail all day, and we were the first people she had seen.
She was the only person we saw all day.
We barely scratched the surface of the Mt. St. Helens area, and didn’t even see the crater, blast zone or lava tubes. We’ll be back.
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