Mt. St. Helens Road Trip, or, Anna Visits the Splody Mountain

With userinforavyngyngvar visiting us over this past week, one of the things we wanted to do was drive down to see Mt. St. Helens. userinfosolarbird and I have after all lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1991–and we’d never once actually seen this famous volcano. Plus, since this was Yngvar’s second visit, I wanted to give him a shot at seeing something cool a little farther afield than the immediate Seattle area. Ergo, I took Thursday off with the plan to allocate that to going to see the splody mountain.

As plans went it was a good one. It did however go significantly agley, as it were, when I chose poorly in selecting our actual destination at the mountain. Silly me–I thought that something calling itself the mountain headquarters would be, oh I dunno, near the mountain. But it turned out to be on the south side, way past where we needed to be. So Dara wound up having to do quite a bit of extra driving, and we wound up reaching where we needed to be–the Johnston Ridge Observatory–after the facility had closed.

Fortunately though we were still able to park in the parking lot and walk around quite a bit, which gave us ample opportunity to see not only the mountain, but much of the surrounding terrain. Here’s what we saw, including a couple of pics from my iPhone!

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