Big Bada Boom

Twenty-six years ago today, Mount St. Helens erupted. Death and devestation for miles. I was a month shy of four years old and all I cared about was why wasn't my tv show on? All six channels were showing the same story. Surely one of them could have been showing Sesame Street! Of course, now cable tv has solved that problem. . .

A year and a half ago, the volcano started rumbling again. Nothing near as violent, but smoke and steam and growing lava domes. Only recently have people been allowed near the mountain.

Before that, though, I got to climb St. Helens. It was a lovely late-September day four and a half years ago. Sunny and hot.


Everyone looks like they're at the beach, but they're atop an unstable cliff! Constant landslides echoed throughout the crater, even 21.5 years after the eruption.


This view has certainly changed in the past year. This is looking straight down into the crater, looking at the lava dome that formed in the mid-1980s. Now this view would probably be blocked by the new "shark fin" lava dome. It makes me wonder about the term "geologic time." People refer to it as if the planet moves slowly and mountains grow slowly and canyons erode slowly. But it sure looks to me as if the mountains grow quickly and then just sit around for centuries before changing quickly once more.

And now a view of Washington's largest volcano, Mount Rainier, with Spirit Lake in the foreground.


When will Rainier erupt? When will the Cascadia fault give the entire region a magnitude 9 shaking comlete with tsunamis? On their average schedules over the past millenia, they're both about due.