As we haven’t had internet access we hadn’t managed to post what was written below, so to update, today we visited Mnt St Helens – the only erupting volcano in the lower 48… Coooooooool! We had to drive along the longest dead-end road in Washington State – 51 miles to be precise and then back again, but the end of it was well worth it. The Volcano is pretty big, but the area surrounding it is amazing. All the trees are still laid flat from the 1980 blast, the river bed still covered in mud slide (up to 1000ft deep in places) and, well, basically it looks like a war zone. We watched both an excellent film and attended an excellent ranger talk. The most amazing thing? There are two Glaciers up in the crater! The volcanic ash reflects the sunlight allowing the glaciers to grow, it’s the only recorded place in the world for glaciers to be forming at present. If you can see in the photo they’re forming around both edges of the lava dome in the centre of the crater. At the moment the volcano is depositing about a truck load of lava every 40 seconds and there was quite a bit of steam at times, as well as constant earthquakes.
We couldn’t walk up to the crater as you have to apply in advance for special passes, so just enjoyed the views from the observation deck before heading towards Oregon’s coastline. We eventually got there about 5ish, completing our East to West Coast – Wahoo! And took a leisurely drive to the next campsite with the sunsetting to our right… sigh… this is the life :-)
Tomorrow hopefully we’ll hit the Oregon Sand Dunes Recreational Area… and according to our sources we’ll be able to see how well Charlie Camel copes with the dunes! Pass us the shovel someone…
2 comments:
Don't be silly! Charlie has his own shovel...and if you think we're digging him out of a sand dune, you're got another think coming!
Ron says...Apart from the odd bit of TV footage, this is the first pictures of the crater I've seen..having flown into the USA for the first time in 1980, the day Mt St Helens erupted. Strange to say that altho NY is on oppposite coast, and over 3500 miles away, the weather patterns on that day went completely haywire, resulting in the nearest I have known to having been involved in a major aircraft disaster, landing eventually on a wing and a prayer on a small local airfield on the side of Lake Ontario and this in a DC10, the equivalent of a Jumbo...to see a line of aircraft 17 long behind us was surreal. Major problem, no landing rights, and who had a credit card big enough to refuel a DC10!!!! The sky in NY on the wednesday following the Sunday eruption was the colour of Charlie's paintwork and the first Star wars film was premiered that week as well!
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