Mt. St. Helens

May 18, 2008



This Sunday, after going to early service, we headed to Mt. St. Helens. It was the 28th anniversary of the big Eruption of Mt. St. Helens.



We love going to Mt. St. Helens. The drive is so beautiful and the mountain and its history has God's thumbprint written all over it. We most love to go to the Johnston Ridge visitor's center. It is the closest visitor's center to the crater of the mountain and is an absolutely spectacular view. I highly recommend paying the entrance fee and watching the included movie about Mt. St. Helens. I also recommend listening to the guided talk about the mountain. This is always good and was especially good this last weekend.



Here are some pictures:







This is Abigail on the car ride up. She has been playing with her toes a lot lately, even sucking on them! It is so cute! Abigail is so far, my best car ride baby. She likes to be held a lot at home, but she's mostly content in a car. It's nice.











This is a picture of a very long bridge spanning a big valley on the way up to St. Helens. This picture was taken from inside my van as we were driving. It doesn't really capture the impressiveness of the bridge or the highway.

 







This is a picture of the Toutle Valley on the way up to Mt. St. Helens.









This is a picture of some trees that were knocked over by the blast. You can see they are facing the opposite direction from the mountain.









This is a picture of the mountain with a clear view of the Toutle River flowing away from the mountain.









This is that guided talk. Here is the mountain before the 1980 explosion and after.









This is Jon and Abigail in the foreground, listening to the guided talk.









This is Mariah and Natalie listening to the guided talk.









This is one of the coolest comparisons of the talk because Jon & I have been able to slowly witness this change in the mountain. This is a before the growth of the crater in 2004.









This is the mountain on Sunday, May 18, 2008. You can see how much the bulge in the crater has grown. The size of the growth can, of course, be deceiving because of the distance we are from the crater. During the talk the speaker shared that they bulge grew more than the height of the Empire State Building.