This has taken me forever to finally post because there are so many things I want to share, and our internet connection has not been cooperating! Last Tuesday was an incredible day. The weather was gorgeous and the views were amazing. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work on Mt. St. Helens... and it sounds like there might be another chance to go back up! We'll see how the rest of the summer pans out. For the rest of this post, though, I'm just going to upload pictures, and I'll include the stories in the captions. You can click on any of the pictures for a larger view.
We had a little bit of time to kill when we reached our landing site, so the other interns and I went to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, where there's an overlook. It was really foggy early in the morning, but our first view of the mountain was amazing!
The summit of St. Helens emerging from the fog. From Johnston Ridge Observatory (JRO).
The only way to travel!
The view of Mt. St. Helens from our landing site at the gravel yard.
Scientists waiting for their turn to fly. Ben is sitting on the tailgate with the handheld GPS unit. Mike is standing with his back to the camera- he's the one I worked with up on the mountain. Mt. St. Helens is in the background.
My first view of the volcanic landscape from the air. It's amazing how gray so much of the land still is, 30 years later.
Getting closer! The mountain sure is beautiful.
The North Fork of the Toutle River was dammed by the debris and pyroclastic flows of the 1980 eruption, which caused the water level of Spirit Lake to rise about 200 feet! The volcanic gases and debris nearly destroyed the lake, but today there are signs of life again, including fish (introduced by fishermen), birds, and plants. There are still trees floating in the water that were thrown there by the blast.
One of my favorite pictures. Mount St. Helens over Spirit Lake.
This is what the crater looks like as you prepare to fly into it...
And this is what YOU look like as you prepare to fly into it!
The glacier and snow melt and run down the mountain in streams and waterfalls.
Now we're getting there... we're in the crater now! The big bulges in the middle are lava domes. This is how lava is produced at volcanoes like St. Helens. It's hard to see here, but there are two separate domes. One was built after the big eruption in 1980 (from '80-'86, it's the smaller one in front), and the other (bigger) one was built in the most recent eruption, from 2004-2008.The optical illusion as you fly into the crater is so strange! Everything is SO HUGE, it looks so close! But then you keep flying up, and up, and up... and nothing gets any closer! It just gets bigger.
For scale, here's tiny little Mike standing on part of the 1980-86 lava dome. Can you see him? He's the tiny little speck at the top of the mound of rocks just left of center.
There's still magma deep beneath the surface of the volcano, and it's hot enough that the groundwater boils! At the surface of the domes, the steam is released through the rocks as fumaroles (steam vents). It's so strange to be standing in the middle of a snow field in a t-shirt, sweating because the ground is steaming!
The rocks of the crater walls tell scientists a lot about the history of the volcano (how it was built over time). They are full of streaks and carvings where huge rockfalls tumble down the slopes. It's a little eerie, because as you work on the domes, you hear rocks falling all around you. But the crater is so big, you have nothing to worry about!
There's Mike, looking for tools on the lava dome. You can see my footprints through the snow to my worksite.
Here's part of my project: dig through these feet of snow to find an 8-inch round PVC cap, which covers some measurement equipment! For scale, I hit my head on that horizontal bar while shoveling.
Looking up from my shoveling site to the new (2004-08) dome, which is also steaming. It's much bigger than the old dome!
Making progress! (luckily the reserves came in later, and we got it done in record time)
Here's the amazing view looking north, out of the crater. Spirit Lake is over my right shoulder, and Mt. Rainier is in the distance. I'm holding a tiltmeter, an instrument that measures the shifting (tilting) of the ground. I was digging for one of these in all that snow!
BIG boulders and LOTS of snow... I'm standing down at the bottom right!
This is how Mount St. Helens erupts lava... as rocks!
The snow is melting from the ground up because of the steam!
"KG was here, 6/22/10"
St. Helens dome in the foreground, Mt. Rainier in the back.
My other favorite picture. I never got tired of the view from the crater! Mt. Rainier over Spirit Lake.
Here you can see the two domes a bit better. The lower mound (left) is '80-'86, the higher one is '04-'08. We're back in the helicopter and getting ready to fly back down.
This ridge was the first part of the dome built in 2004. It came up just like that (as a "whaleback"), and cut the glacier growing in the crater right in half!
This made me feel even luckier to get to work where I do.
What an incredible experience. I am really, really lucky to get to do such cool things. If you're still reading this, thanks for making it through a long one!
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