Our 40 Day Grand West Coast Adventure has finally started! We are with a great group of people. 15 rigs, in total. That includes the Wagon Master and the Tail Gunner, whom we know! (They were our Wagon Masters on our Alaska trip.) We had a Welcome Dinner the first night and headed to Mt. Saint Helens the next morning!
Our first stop on the bus trip was the Visitor Center. From there we got our first glimpse of Mt. Saint Helens. We were in typical Pacific Northwest weather…drizzly and foggy! So the following pictures don’t show off the volcano very well.
From there we went up to Johnston Ridge Observatory. Mr. Johnston perished/died when the top of Mt. Saint Helens blew off in 1980. It was expected to erupt and he was the person that notified the authorities that it was erupting. There had been several earthquakes that indicated activity below the surface of the earth. It formed a bulge on the north side of the mountain, which is what erupted. It blew down and scorched everything in its way. It caused lava flows and mudslides. Lakes were filled with lava and some no longer exist. New lakes were formed from the melted mountain snow. The rock and ice crossed a ridge 1300 feet high and roared 14 miles down the Toutle River. About 150 square miles of forest was either blown over or left dead and standing. Gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. It turned the day into night. The eruption lasted almost 9 hours! What chaos it caused. People had been evacuated up to 2 weeks before the eruption. Air traffic was affected. The jet stream caught the ash and carried it around the world! The landscape was forever changed. It is beautiful now, with plants and animals adapting to their new world. The volcano continued to erupt until 1986!
I just told you a whole lot more than you probably wanted to know!! It’s so amazing how God created this interesting earth! I wish our pictures were better, but we were happy to see as much as we did!
From Kelso, Washington, we were off to Warrenton, Oregon. As we crossed over from Washington to Oregon, there is a huge lumber mill. Lumber is shipped to all over the world from there. The Columbia River is a working river, like the Mississippi River.
More later!
Grand West Coast Adventure 