Vacation 2015, #9 - Mount St. Helens

Continuing on with our vacation post from last summer (I WILL get thru all of these!) with a stop at Mount St. Helens. I have been wanting to visit this place since I was a wee lad toting newspapers around the neighborhood when this thing was lighting up the press!

And so, we stopped on our way from the Seattle area to the Portland area.

Two fine looking young specimens adorning the marker of the National Monument.

Calebber on the wall overlooking the North side of Mount St. Helens, or if you'd rather, the side that got the snot blown out of it back in 1980.

Robby, same wall, same mountain...

Aunt Molly doing the same!  Smiling willingly for a photo, I might add.

And finally a shot of mountain itself with all foreign bodies removed from its foreground. Much more impressive in person as you could really tell how much of the mountainside had been displaced.

The "mud river" from the eruptions is where I probably could have spent a LOT of time.  To think that there were mature pine and other trees completely covered is stunning.   Something else that was stunning was how far that muddiness went down stream as you can sort of tell in the next shot.

This is merely a satellite shot from google maps showing the road we were on (hwy 504) and that mud extended for over thirty miles alongside of that highway.

More mud a bit closer up.

The Mobile Chaos Unit in their splendor.

I look a lot better from a little distance so I included this shot as well.  I believe we stopped at a lookout point called Eagle Rock or Eagle something-very-similar-to-that.  We had a ways to go to get all the way down to the nearest lookout point and time was beginning to be of the essence.

And that about does that...  Next up on the list?  I dunno...  somewhere South of here!