Mt. St. Helens: Ruin and Recovery

Mount St. Helens - Ruin and Recovery

Thirty-one years ago, the Washington Volcano blew up and ruined nearly the entire region. But gradually, Mother Nature is picking up the pieces.

"Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the moon looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there."

This was the comment made by President Jimmy Carter on the scorched landscape left after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens thirty years ago on May 18, of 1980.

Mount St. Helens Begins to Rumble

Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens, which lies 96 miles south of Seattle, Washington started on March 16, when a 4.2-magnitude tremor was recorded. On March 27, the first eruption happened when a 250-foot wide vent opened up on top of the mountain. Ash shot 10,000 feet in the air, and this peculiar rain of ash caused static electricity and lightning bolts. The National Guard erected road blocks to keep people from getting into the area, but these were easily avoided by using the many unguarded logging roads in that area.

And Washington’s Governor Dixie Lee Ray found herself faced with angry property owners when she declared a “Red Zone” around the area. Eventually, Ray relented and allowed the people to get their items, after they signed a waiver absolving the state of any responsibility for their safety. On May 17, a caravan of 20 such property owners, many of them sporting t-shirts which proudly proclaimed “I own a piece of the rock!” went to their homes. Another such caravan planned to depart at 10:00 a.m. the next morning. But by that time, all that they would own was a fistful of ash and pumice.

May 18, 1980 - Mt St. Helens Explodes!

This was because on May 18 at 8:32 a.m. with a sudden 5.1-magnitude earthquake and eruption that shook the mountain, the entire north side of the peak began rippling and blasting out ash at 650 miles per hour. The mountain literally collapsed in on itself. A cloud of ash, rocks, gas and glacial ice raced down the side of the mountain at 100 mph, and fourteen miles of the Toutle River were buried up to 150 feet deep in the debris. And that “piece of the rock” of which the property owners so proudly proclaimed ownership became a river of molten lava which at a temperature of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, flowed for miles around the blast zone.

Keith and Dorothy Stoffel Escape

“Within a matter of seconds, perhaps 15 seconds, the whole north side of the summit crater began to move simultaneously. The nature of movement was eerie. We were amazed and excited with the realization that we were watching this landslide of unbelievable proportions. We took pictures of this slide sequence occurring, but before we could snap off more than a few pictures, a huge explosion blasted out…” recalled geologists Keith and Dorothy Stoffel who were flying over the summit of Mt. St. Helens in a four-seat Cessna airplane when the blast occurred.
“ (The clouds) were billowing up, almost in big pillow sort of structures, and at that point of course, we were terrified… and we weren’t sure that we were going to make it out of that situation at all.” Their pilot had an idea that it would not be good to stick around for too long, and putting the plane into a steep dive, gave it full throttle and just managed to outrun the ash cloud. They landed safely at Portland International Airport.

Thousands of Acres Are Torched

The plume of ash belched out for nine hours; easterly winds carried it across the state and as far away as Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 17 days, it arrived again on the west coast, having circumnavigated the globe. Beyond that inner blast zone, trees were flash-burned and knocked down, forming what came to be known as a “blow-down zone”, in which every last tree, several million board feet of Douglas Fir, Cedar, and Hemlock covering over 86,000 acres were mowed down like so much tall grass.
Outside this “blow zone”, the blast had been strong enough to kill the trees but not to uproot them. In this, the “scorch zone”, they remained standing where they had been, with their leaves all burnt, and their branches shriveled up, and curled into a kind of macabre fleur-des-lis. The human toll had been steep. Fifty-seven people died overall from suffocation, burns and other assorted injuries.

Nature Leads the Recovery From Mt. St. Helens

Happily, the once barren and devastated blast zone has since that period of destruction become a natural laboratory for the study of how an ecosystem recovers from catastrophe. Scientists had expected that the renewal of the once densely packed evergreen forests would begin very gradually with the drifting of seeds and the migration into the area by animals from nearby.
But what paced this recovery was in fact the species that managed to survive the volcanic blast because they were protected by snowfall, topography, or in some cases, just plain luck. For example, little pockets gophers survived in some burrows, and tunneling as they ate roots and bulbs, they pushed fertile soil to the surface, which became beds for wind-borne seeds.

Elk Seed "the Pumice Plain"

On this re-born “Pumice Plain”, the elk population has soared. The elk hooves have broken up the crust on the soil, aiding in its erosion, and helping mix ash with the soil. The hoof prints gather detritus in which plants can grow. And the Elk dung spreads seeds which spurs even more growth.

But nature herself pointed the way to this from the first: on that Pumice Plain, a barren 3.750 acre open range, as early as 1981 delicate purple prairie lupines were poking their way to the surface, becoming the first precious bits of color in what had once been a devastated and sterile gray landscape. The recovery would take long, but it was definitely coming.

Sources:

"Mount St. Helens - The Eruption and Recovery of a Volcano" by Rob Carson, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, WA., 1990

"The National Geographic Magazine", May 2010, "Mount St. Helens - New Life in the Blast Zone." by McKenzie Funk, National Geographic Society, Washington, DC.