Mt St Helens Photo Dump

Here are some snaps from my trip up to Mt St Helens. First, a view from about 2/3rds of the way up the road to Johnston Ridge Observatory. The most remarkable thing about my visit was how impressive the magnitude of the eruption remains were, and I tried to capture a sense of that. Here on the right (obviously) there is the mountain, and that hump on the left is Johnston ridge. The gray area in the middle is where a lot of the mountain went. It's a bit tough to see, but the valley in between the two used to be roughly 600 feet deeper.

Here's a bit of a melodramatic video about the eruption, but it does have a nice (I believe genuine) slideshow of pictures of the scale of the initial landslide. Also don't miss this great set of contemporary pictures.

Here's Coldwater Lake, which is on the other side of Johnston Ridge from the mountain. It's a lovely little place created by the massive sediment dam of the eruption.

Here's a panorama I took of that same place (click to embiggen).

And I thought this was a cute boardwalk.

Now here's the view from Johnston Ridge. Again, it's hard to really grasp from my crap photography, but check out those little rivulets and how far they've dug into that massive pile of mountain guts.

Here's some fine detail (click to embiggen):

And another panorama.

I'm in The Dalles right now, and headed to Spokane tomorrow. More updates to follow! Next time I'll see if I can't shape these pictures up some more with Photoshop or something.

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