Walking the Miles ...: Glacier Overlook Hike with Mount St. Helens Institute

This was one of my favorite hikes to date! I truly spent the entire day in awe. I absolutely love hiking with the Mount St. Helens Institute because of the geology and history lessons you receive while on the trail. The guides are always very knowledgeable and full of enthusiasm!

The trailhead where we met was 2.5 hours from my home. Almost two hours of that was on farm roads, in the dark, fog and heavy rain. It was a rough way to start the day - leaving my house at 5:30 a.m. - but so worth it. At one point I considered turning back because I couldn't see the road because of the fog and didn't want to drive off of a cliff because of it (I later found out someone - not from our group - had driven off of the cliff the night before and somehow survived it! Such a lucky man... his vehicle was not so lucky.). Fortunately for me, the terrible driving conditions were short lived and I continued on in bad driving conditions, just not terrible. Whew. I arrived at the Windy Ridge Trailhead 30 minutes ahead of time and sat in my vehicle watching the pouring rain and wondered how much we were actually going to be able to see on this hike. Myself and one other hiker were the only two that showed up - probably because of the weather. We had a MSH Institute guide and one Institute volunteer all to ourselves! It made this day very personal, informative and quite wonderful... regardless of the rain!

It rained off and on all day. The clouds moved in, the clouds moved out. We had views, we didn't have views. It was beautiful... and WET. We hiked along the Loowit Trail, saw Loowit Falls in the distance, and saw mountain goats on the ridges. We eventually went off-trail into a closed area (thus the need for the MSH Institute guides) and followed an old lava flow up the mountain. We climbed up on a peak where we could see the domes (one of them was steaming) and the growing glacier straight ahead. This is the only growing glacier in the lower 48 states. We could see down into a canyon carved out by the lahar from the 1980 eruption, the colorful walls, and the glacier runoff far below. We could see evidence of prior eruptions all over the place. It was amazing... and so fascinating! My desire and thirst to learn as much as I possibly can about this mountain and surrounding area really surprises me! I can't seem to get enough of it. Next summer I definitely want to become a volunteer with the Institute. There's no better classroom than being right in the heart of it all. There is so much to learn and so much to explore!

I ran into an article written in the Smithsonian Magazine and thought this paragraph was a wealth of information (the MSH Institute guides also share this information on the hikes):

The eruption on May 18, 1980, blew away the top 1,314 feet of the mountain, reducing the once symmetrical, glacier-covered summit to a horseshoe-shaped crater. An avalanche of rocks plugged the Toutle River Valley at the base of the mountain and created a 23-square-mile zone of barren, hummocky land. A 300-mile-an-hour lateral blast of hot air and debris flattened the surrounding forest. A cloud of ash climbed to 80,000 feet in 15 minutes and circled the globe in 15 days. Torrents of superheated air, gases and rocks—a mixture known as a pyroclastic flow—surged down the mountain's northern face for hours, destroying everything in its path. All told, the eruption blasted more than 230 square miles of forests, lakes, meadows and streams. It killed 57 people, making it the deadliest eruption in U.S. history, and millions of animals and plants. "Death is everywhere," the Oregonian newspaper reported. "The living are not welcome."