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RE: The Mountain that Lost its Crown
Wow. That's an amazing photo. Had the opportunity to spend about three month helping out at a visitor center about 30 miles down the road from Johnston Ridge. It was a lot of fun.
One thing that made the eruption more devastating was that lateral blast. Most folks were anticipating a typical vertical eruption, and that's what caught people off guard.
The thing I find most amazing though at Mt. St. Helens, is how quickly life is returning the valley. So much so that, in some places, you'd think nothing ever happened. But then you just have to look up and see the mountain. :)
Thanks for your reply! That's cool that you worked there at a visitor's center. It's true, there's a lot of life that has sprung up there, and as someone who never saw it in the years following the eruption, it's hard to know what was old and what is new - maybe because so much of the devastation wasn't just from lava, which just covers the soil in a layer of rock, but from the landslide of mud and detritus that knocked out so many of the trees but didn't discourage new growth. It has a totally different feel to a place like Iceland, where eruptions from a hundred years ago look like they could have happened yesterday.