Mount St Helen's Basecamp

Tuesday

Marrionberry pie here we come

Quick chat after our drink

It would have been so nice to just sit in the sun Astoria, popping out for a nice cup of coffee and a browse round the shops, however, our vacation must go on! Today we start our assault on Mount St Helen. You think about going up a mountain (in a car this is, lets not get silly after all) and more or less you see it and then you drive up to it. Well the mountains they have over here it is not quite that simple. We have moved East from the coast via the Merry Berry Pie shop, where we had some Marrionberry pie, and are now camped at the closest RV park (bar one, which we didn't like) to the summit. Which is about 50 miles away, that is about how far Doncaster is from Manchester. So our visit tomorrow will mean a round trip of nearly 90 miles. That will get us to the closest observation point - Johnson Ridge Observatory. This will enable us to see into the crater that formed in May 1980 when the whole north side of the mountain collapsed. Even then we will still be 6 miles away from the summit.

View of Mt St Helen above Longview, WA

The latest news says that the magma is building beneath the mountain and it has been seen to move - this we will investigate tomorrow, if it hasn't blown up before then.
Meanwhile, being camped close to a lake means that there are some reflective views of Mount St Helen for me to photograph, so with a full moon close by I took some pics tonight, here are some of my favourites. Some the quality is poor, but I could not leave out a bald eagle flying over and being harassed by a smaller bird (crow?), or the heron doing some evening fishing, the picture shows what I think is a trout being eaten by it. It is a shame that I couldn't put a soundtrack on them as the frogs were quite amazing, very deep, almost a buzzing sound.