I fell asleep last night to the sounds of shuffling tents and chattering of people and dogs. Not my idea of a camping trip, but the absolute silence of 1 AM made up for the distractions.
It's weird when I go camping. I have a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night for no good reason. Sure, I'm uncomfortable, but that hasn't prevented me from sleeping in the past. Maybe it is to experience that uncanny silence and darkness, where your view is only illuminated by the moon and stars that shine through the trees.
Of course, there are small noises in the night too, simply the activity of the forest coming through to take advantage of the food leftover by clumsy campers. That's why you always lock up your food in your car: to make sure your campsite is not pillaged by the creatures in the night.
I woke up again around 5 AM, to a glow of a sun about to come up in half an hour. I promptly fell back asleep though, in the warmth of my sleeping bag against the mid 40 degree weather of the mountains.
My next distraction came at 7 AM, with the yelling of kids and the barking of dogs as the minute hand slid past the quiet hours into the loud hours. I tried to go back to sleep for a while, but I couldn't shut it out. Around 8 AM, I was not too happy, and decided to high-tail it out of there.
I took off towards a place called Blue Lake Trailhead. I figured: "I have all the time in the world! It's only 9:30 AM!" The car climbed alongside a rising ridge, and in usual mountain fashion, overlooks were plenty and stunning:
Finally, the climb plateaued in a very thin forest littered with boulders. Rockfalls were everywhere, and the trees were all dead and splintered. Eventually I figured it out: This must have been remains from an eruption. Maybe the 1980 eruption? I'm not sure.
At first it looked like a logging operation, but when I pulled up on the final leg of the gravel road, I saw the path of an eruption flow. Little did I know, this rock flow would lead me to the lake, which I believe was also formed because of damming from said eruption. The trails lead up and down alongside the flow, and eventually out onto the road of rock.
All this time there was rushing water off to the western side of the flow. Its noise was straight out of a recording of nature you find in Target. The trail was not far, only a mile in, but it was stunning to cross such an alien looking landscape. And of course, all this time the giant herself always loomed above me, visible through the clouds at different points.
The lake itself was serene. It was cold. Glacial melt I was assuming, or snow runoff? And it was blue. The water was so clear, I would have gone swimming if the outdoor temperature was not 55 degrees.
Hell. I thought about it anyways, to live life on the edge. Then I remembered I was at least 50 miles away from the nearest medical clinic, needless to say a mile out from the actual road. The idea of hypothermia was enough to encourage the carpe diem right out of me.
I sat at the lake for a bit, playing my fiddle and reflecting on life. It was one of the few times where I could actually play without fear of annoying anyone. There were obvious campsites at the edge of the lake, complete with fire pits, but I wasn't about to haul all of my camping gear a mile at a time across rock and ash to try to set it up. Where's your horse when you need one?
In the end of the day, I spent about an hour up on the freezing pumice plane, playing away, wishing the clouds would vanish for the sun to come out and warm my bones. It did eventually.
Mount Saint Helens, or in the Klickitat language: "Loowit", has captured my imagination ever since I arrived here. As a little kid I always was fascinated with volcanoes, and never did I think I would "grow up" to come to play around the very volcano I watched documentaries about back in Ohio. Her very power and presence is commanding. It dominates the horizon with Mt. Hood (Wy'east), but St. Helens is malleable. It has exploded, eroded, glaciated, and steamed; something that large chunks of rock should not do.
The mountain symbolizes the impermanence of the earth, the very thing that we take for granted. When looking, you can tell: There is more to this than meets the eye. There is always something else behind all of these wondrous things we can see in our everyday world.
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