A long weekend around Mt St Helens
Last weekend Christine and I took a 3.5 day vacation away from Seattle. On Friday we drove down to Lake Trout, WA for a couple of days of camping and rafting to celebrate our friend Sam’s 30th birthday. We extended the trip until Monday to celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary.
The rafting was a ton of fun. We went over a 10 foot waterfall and hit a bunch of other Class II, III, and IV rapids. Our guide kept the flatwater part interesting by having Nate (Sam’s husband) guide the raft.
Another group goes over the 10 foot waterfall.
Nate takes over for our guide and leads us down the river. He made the boring flat part of the river more fun by making sure that we never went straight.
Sadly the goal was to suprise Sam for her 30th, but the Forest Service made this difficult. We were all going to meet at Atkisson Group Camp (aka Atkisson Sno-Park), but the Forest Service directions are very very wrong. Their directions say “Highway 141 north 15 miles to Forest Service Road 2400 (5 miles south of the town of Trout Lake). Turn northwest 3.5 miles to the Group Camp.”
At 15 miles on Highway 141 you are nowhere near National Forest and are in the middle of some rural housing. There are a lot of dirt driveways, but few have signs and none are marked as Forest Service Road 2400 and few even go northwest. All of the cars trying to get there drove up and down this stretch of 141 trying to find the camp.
It turns out that the camp is all the way at the end of Highway 141, near mile marker 29. It is on a road called Forest Service Road 011. Once we all found the camp (at about 9:30pm, 3 hours after the first folks were to arrive) we had a wonderful dinner of garden burgers and turkey burgers and chatted and watched the stars.
Saturday after the rafting we hung out at the group camp again and grilled up some Salmon and other fresh fish. Since this group camp is really a sno-park it had an abundance of asphalt and somehow we all ended up spending more time sitting on it than on the dirt.
It was a good time.
Sunday we said goodbye to everyone but Nate and Sam and headed west towards Mt St Helens. We took the slow and scenic route on the logging roads and stopped for a few great views:
Sam, Nate, Alex and Christine standing in front of Mt Adams
Mt St Helens (notice the missing top) from the south
Once at Mt St Helens we drove up to the Ape Caves. This is a roughly 2 mile long natural tunnel that was made with hot lava during an eruption 2000 years ago. You can walk the length of it accessing it from two different entrances. We didn’t really have the right footwear and lighting gear to walk the whole thing, so we explored it from both ends,starting with the top.
The upper entrance into Ape Caves
The ceiling had this strange silver reflective glow
A cavern illuminated only by the flashlights of other groups walking through
Returning to sunlight and warmth
After a few hours of exploring the caves we found a resturant for dinner and bid goodbye to Nate and Sam.
On Monday Christine and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary by going to Mt St Helens. We’ve lived in Seattle for 10 years and have never been to Mt St Helens. Sadly it was a little hazy that day,but it was still an incredible place to visit. The mountain errupted 26 years ago and foliage is just starting to come back. I imagine that the moon might look like this if life started to take over. Here are a few photographs from that day:
Fallen trees in the foreground with Mt St Helens in the background. These trees were blown over during the eruption.
Coldwater Lake was formed when falling chunks of Mt St Helens clogged up Coldwater Creek. It didn’t exist 27 years ago.
Life starts to return on Mt St Helens. You can see how brown the terrain is just in front of the mountain, but how green it is around the mountain. The lake is Casper Lake, which was created during an earlier eruption.
Mt St Helens was an incredible place. I hope that we don’t wait 10 years to return again.
There are many more photos. I hope you enjoy them.