Danger on Peaks (2 page)

S
OME
F
ATE

Climbed Loowit — Sahaptin name — three more times.

July of '46 with sister Thea

(went to Venezuela & Cartagena as a seaman summer of 1948)

June of '49 with dear friend Robin who danced shimmering in the snow,

and again with her late that summer

1980: L
ETTING
G
O

Centuries, years and months of —

let off a little steam

cloud up and sizzle

growl        stamp-dance

quiver       swell, glow

glare         bulge

swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles

she goes

superheated steams and gasses

white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a

burning sky-river wind of

searing lava droplet hail,

huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,

shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing

cloud of rock bits,

crystals, pumice, shards of glass

dead ahead blasting away —

a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down

lightning dances through the giant smoke

a calm voice on the two-way

ex-navy radioman and volunteer

describes the spectacle — then

says, the hot black cloud is

rolling toward him — no way

but wait his fate

roiling earth-gut-trash cloud tephra twelve miles high

ash falls like snow on wheatfields and orchards to the east

in Yakima, darkness at noon

B
LAST
Z
ONE

Late August 2000.

An early plane from Reno to Portland, meet Fred Swanson at the baggage claim. Out of the Portland airport and onto these new streets, new highways, there's a freeway bridge goes right across the Columbia, the 205, piers touch down on the mid-river island, but there's no way onto it. This is the skinny cottonwood island that Dick Meigs and I used to sail to and camp on the sandbars. Blackberries growing around the transmission towers.

In an instant we're in Washington State, and swinging north to join the main 5. Signs for Battleground, Cougar. Crossing the Lewis River, the Columbia to the left, the Kalama River, the old Trojan nuke plant towers, then on to Castle Rock. Freeway again, no sign of the towns — they're off to the west — and we turn into the Toutle River valley on a big new road. Old road, old bridges most all swept away.

(Remembering two lane highway 99, and how we'd stop for groceries in Castle Rock, a hunter/logger's bar with walls covered solid by racks of antlers. The road east toward Spirit Lake first climbed steeply out of town and then gradually up along the river. It was woodlots and pasture and little houses and barns, subsistence farms, farmer-loggers.) Air cool, clear day, bright green trees.

The new Silver Lake Mt. St. Helens Visitors Center is close enough to the freeway that travelers on the 5 can swing by here, take a look, and continue on. It's spacious, with a small movie theater in back and a volcano model in the center large enough to descend into, walk through, and at the center look down a skillful virtual rising column of molten magma coming up from the core of the earth.

The Center's crowded with people speaking various languages. Gazing around at the photographs and maps, I begin to get a sense of what transformations have been wrought. The Toutle River
lahar
made it all the way to the Columbia River, some sixty miles, and deposited enough ash and mud into the main channel to block shipping until it was dredged, weeks later.

We go on up the highway. Swanson explains how all the agencies wanted to get in on the restoration money that was being raised locally (and finally by Congress). They each put forth proposals: the Soil Conservation Service wanted to drop $16.5 million worth of grass seed and fertilizer over the whole thing, the Forest Service wanted to salvage-log and replant trees, and the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build sediment retention dams. (They got to do some.) The Forest Ecology Mind (incarnated in many local people, the environmental public, and some active scientists) prevailed, and within the declared zone, zero restoration became the rule. Let natural succession go to work and take its time. Fred Swanson was trained as a geologist, then via soils went into forest and stream ecology research in the Andrews Forest in Oregon. He has been studying Mt. St. Helens from the beginning.

The Corps of Engineers went to work along the Toutle with hundreds of giant trucks and earth movers. Swanson takes a turn off the main road, just a few miles on, to a view of an earthwork dam that was built to help hold back further debris floods in the new river channel. The lookout parking lot had clearly been more of a tourist destination in the past than it is now, partly closed and getting overgrown with alders. Once the dump trucks stopped, the people didn't come so much to look. But there it is, lots of earth holding back what further mud and gravel might be coming down — for a while.

The color of the dam, the riverbanks, the roads, is “volcano-ash-gray.” New bridges, new road, this has all been rebuilt. Swanson says that for some years after the eruption there was no access into the west side of
Spirit Lake. To get closer to the lake and the mountain, people were driving a string of small roads north and around. You could drive up from the east to Windy Ridge. And then a new state highway from the 5 to the west side ridge above the lake got built. You still can't drive to the edge of the lake — all pumice, ash, and broken rock.

The new road is an expensive accomplishment. It runs above the old Toutle riverbed along the hillside with fancy bridges, then into the Coldwater Creek drainage (I hiked down this when it was old-growth forest, and trail was the only access); makes a big curve around the head of the valley and does a long switchback climb. In that upper cirque of Coldwater Creek there are plenty of old gray logs lying tossed about on the ground. Between and around the logs the hills are aflower in fireweed and pearly everlasting
Anaphalis margaritacea.
Little silver fir three to ten feet high are tucked in behind the logs, mixed in with the tall flowers.

Finally pull up to the high ridge, now named Johnston after the young geologist who died there, and walk to the edge. The end of the road. Suddenly there's all of Loowit and a bit of the lake basin! In a new shape, with smoking scattered vents in this violet-gray light.

T
O
G
HOST
L
AKE

Walk back down from the west side view ridge and drive back to Castle Rock and the 5. Start a drive-circumambulation of the mountain, going north and then east up the Cowlitz Valley. The Cowlitz River gets some of its water from the south side glaciers of Mt. Rainier and the northwest side of Mt. Adams. Dinner at “Carter's Roadhouse” — old place, slow and funky service, a bar, small press local history books for sale. Then swing south on a forest road to the Iron Creek Campground on the Cispus River and lay out groundsheet in the dark.

Next morning walk the gravelly bar of the little Cispus, duck under droops of moss from old-growth cedar, hot tea on the fir needles. Drive to the Boundary Trail, winding higher on ridgerunning tracks, break out around a corner and there's the mountain and then suddenly we are in the Blast Zone.

In a great swath around the lake basin, everything in direct line to the mountain is flat down: white clear logs, nothing left standing. Next zone of tree-suffering is dead snags still upright. Then a zone called “ashed trees” blighted by a fall of ash, but somehow alive. Last, lucky to be out of line with the blast, areas of green forest stand. A function of distance, direction, and slope. Finally, far enough back, healthy old forest stretches away.

New patterns march in from the edges, while within the zone occasional little islands of undamaged vegetation survive. In some cases a place still covered with snow and down in a dip. From Windy Ridge the carpet of floating logs on the lake is mostly at the north end.

Go out several miles walking along the ridge and onto slopes of the volcano. It's all ash and rock now, no forest regrowth here, and the sun as hot and dry as Arizona.

At the car again and drive to the Norway Pass road turnoff (from the mountain road see an arrow, shot and sticking in a dead tree, up high, and from the downslope side. Why? How?) and go north for a look down at the Green River valley and beyond that the high Goat Mountain ridge. Too far north up there to be affected. Down in the Green River valley one can see the distinct boundary between the unmanaged “ecological zone” of the Volcanic Monument where natural succession rules, and the adjacent National Forest land that had soon been logged and planted. The planting took hold well. In the natural succession blast zone the conifers are rising — not quite tall enough to shade out down logs and flowers, but clearly flourishing. But over into the “planted” zone it's striking to see how much taller and denser the growing plantation is. Well, no surprise. Wild natural process takes time, and allows for the odd and unexpected. We still know far too little about it. This natural regeneration project has special values of its own, aesthetic, spiritual, scientific. Both the wild and the managed sides will be instructive to watch for centuries to come.

Baby plantlife, spiky, firm and tender,

stiffly shaking in the same old breeze.

We camped for the night on a ridgetop with long views both ways. A tiny fire, a warm breeze, cloudless starry sky. The faint whiffs of sulfur from the fumaroles. In the morning, cloud-fog rising covers the sun. Fog comes up the Columbia Valley and fills the deep-cut side-canyons clear back to here — floats awhile past our nearby truck.

Sit on folded groundsheets on the ashy pumice hard-packed soil and pick up our conversations again. Fred clarifies distinctions such as “original” and “restored.” What's old? What's new? What's “renew”? I then held forth on the superiority of the Han'-gul writing system of Korea over all other alphabets, but what got me started on that? Our hissing Primus stove. I talked about ten years of living in Japan, “Two
hundred miles of industrial city-strip along the railroad, and tenth-growth forest mountains far as you can see. Went twice through Hiroshima, great noodles, full of activists, green and leafy — doing fine.”

Fred's mind is as open as a summer morning in the Sierra. We talk about a lot. But when we come back to forests, eruptions, and the balance of economy and ecology, I shut up and listen.

Green tea hotwater

Sunball in the fog

Loowit cooled in white

New crater summit lightly dusted

Morning fumarole summit mist-wisps — “Hah” . . . “Hah”

One final trip before leaving: a walk to Ghost Lake: pearly everlasting, huckleberries and fireweed, all the way.

P
EARLY
E
VERLASTING

Walk a trail down to the lake

mountain ash and elderberries red

old-growth log bodies blown about,

whacked down, tumbled in the new ash
wadis.

Root-mats tipped up, veiled in tall straight fireweed,

fields of prone logs laid by blast

in-line north-south down and silvery

limbless barkless poles —

clear to the alpine ridgetop all you see

is toothpicks of dead trees

thousands of summers

at detritus-cycle rest

— hard and dry in the sun — the long life of the down tree yet to go

bedded in bushes of pearly everlasting

dense white flowers

saplings of bushy vibrant silver fir

the creek here once was “Harmony Falls”

The pristine mountain

just a little battered now

the smooth dome gone

ragged crown

the lake was shady
yin
—

now blinding water mirror of the sky

remembering days of fir and hemlock —

no blame to magma or the mountain

& sit on a clean down log at the lake's edge,

the water dark as tea.

I had asked Mt. St. Helens for help

the day I climbed it,        so seems she did

The trees all lying flat like,       after that big party

Siddhartha went to on the night he left the house for good,

crowd of young friends whipped from sexy dancing

dozens crashed out on the floor

angelic boys and girls, sleeping it off.

A palace orgy of the gods but what

“we” see is “Blast Zone” sprinkled with

clustered white flowers

“Do not be tricked by human-centered views,” says Dogen,

And Siddhartha looks it over, slips away — for another forest —

— to really get right down on life and death.

If you ask for help it comes.

But not in any way you'd ever know

— thank you Loowit, lawilayt-lá,
Smoky Mâ