You may have heard of Mt. St. Helens. You know, that mountain that exploded back in 1980?

I took a class last fall called “Environmental Hazards of the Pacific Northwest” and as you might imagine, we ended up talking quite a bit about Mt. St. Helens. A couple of my friends took the class with me, so we’ve been planning to make a trip up to the actual mountain for a while now. We wanted to go over Spring Break, but the roads were still closed thanks to a pesky bit of weather called snow (we had to settle for “Danielle’s Excellent Gorge Adventure” instead, but more on that another time).

We finally got ourselves out there last weekend. I was there last two summers ago on fourth of July with my sister, and while I’m sure I probably had to pay for parking, I don’t remember paying to go into the observatory… and even if that was a thing back then I definitely don’t remember paying just to be on the trails, so that was a bit of a shock. We’d driven two hours to get there though, so there wasn’t much point in just turning around, plus I was finally out of the city (something that happens depressingly rarely now that I don’t own a car), so I was going to take full advantage.

I had seen the observatory several times before, so I encouraged my friends to go check that out while I got in the maximum amount of trail miles I could. I went to Harry’s ridge and back in just over two hours – because I ran most of it. It’s roughly an 8 mile out-and-back from the Johnston Ridge Observatory to a view of Spirit Lake and Harry Truman’s grave – the pieces of mountainside that completely buried him and his Spirit Lake Lodge when he refused to leave back in 1980. All-in-all it was a good time despite the extra unexpected fee and the scraped knee I got out of the deal.