Mt St Helen's

I'm wondering if our travelling companions have an ulterior motive in planning a tour of some of live and resting volcanoes in the High Cascade Mountains stretching from Washington through Oregon to California These include Mts Baker, Ranier, St Helen's, Adams,Hood, Mazama and Shasta.

Today it was the turn of MtSt Helen's in Washington State, which erupted spectacularly in May 1980, which is only yesterday in historical terms.
It is the most documented and predicted of volcanoes, and although there were scientists monitoring the earthquakes which began two months before in March 1980, when it finally blew the side out of the mountain horizontally on the 18th May, no one was more surprised than they, who had expected a vertical eruption and not quite so soon.

It was a devastating occurrence and completely altered not only the height of the summit by about 1,300 ft, but much of the landscape within a huge area, creating new lakes and geological features.

Since 1980 there have been several more eruptions, but none as cataclysmic as the first.
The vegetation is growing back with trees covering the bare rocks again and only the area of the mud slide in the foreground of this blip looks bare and wasted.

We were safe from an eruption today, and even managed to escape what the weather tried to throw at us. There was wind, rain, thunder and lightening and a downpour, but miraculously the clouds parted for our various photo shoots.

This blip was taken from the Visitor Centre at Johnston Ridge 7 miles from the volcano epicentre, a ridge where David Johnston, the chief scientist, had chosen to set up his monitoring equipment and who was killed when the side of the mountain blew out, he having badly misjudged the time and direction of the eruption.