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Outside Magazine February 2005

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Mount St. Helens
Eruptus Interruptus
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Thar she... might blow! When Mount St. Helens, America's very own all-natural weapon of mass destruction, threatened to go postal again, 24 years after her last tantrum, disaster groupies rushed to the crater—and hoped for the worst.

By Mark Sundeen


	Our lady of smoke and ash: paying respects at the volcano's Charles W. Bingham Forest Learning Center (Photograph by Sian Kennedy)

THE SUN HAS RISEN, evaporating the clouds wrapped around Mount St. Helens, and if you look closely you can see what might be steam rising from its crater. Or is that a cloud? All along the Spirit Lake Highway, gawkers are scrambling for a vantage point. Parked cars hug the shoulder, where hundreds of people have staked their plots with lawn chairs, tripods, and video cameras.

This wide-laned tourist conduit used to dead-end at the U.S. Forest Service's Johnston Ridge Observatory, just five miles from the steaming crater. But when the mountain began threatening to erupt in late September, that observatory was closed, and now the road terminates nine miles sooner, at the Coldwater Ridge Visitors Center. Three miles shy of the place, 40 TV trucks are lined up at an overlook, satellite dishes cocked toward the horizon like a row of big white daisies. Satellite City growls with generators and the smell of diesel as reporters dab themselves with makeup in their rearview mirrors, then go live, beamed around the globe from the flat-topped shadow of the hulking volcano, right here just 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon.

Everyone wants to get closer. Hovering in choppers above the crater itself, scientists are practicing commando volcanology, dangling instruments from cables, hauling ass when an ash cloud explodes their way. We're all envious: How come they get to do that? A few days ago, one adventurer flew all the way from New Jersey to Portland, took an $80 cab ride to the town of Cougar, 12 miles south of the volcano, and sneaked past the blockades to climb the mountain, only to call 911 for rescue from the closed climber's bivouac at 3,765 feet. Later this week another daredevil will make it to the crater's rim, at 8,365 feet, shoot video of the steaming magma dome, and sell it to Portland news channel KGW.

Like them, I am eager. And like the thousands of other pilgrims drawn to southwestern Washington, I am decidedly not neutral. I am a taxpayer, and frankly I feel entitled to see an eruption. It's still October: Bush hasn't won yet, and between the war in Iraq and the recession and the election threatening to tear the country in two, the American psyche needs a cosmic release. I want to see the thing blow.

I finally inch my rental car into the Coldwater parking lot, where two female rangers in olive-green uniforms and neon-orange hazard vests are directing traffic. One of them is kneeling, her forearms flat on the ground and an ear to the asphalt. Oh, this is good! She must be monitoring seismic activity beneath the parking lot.

"Can you hear anything?" I blurt out the car window.

She looks up at me, perplexed.

"Is the ground trembling?" I call. "Are we safe?"

"I'm just stretching," she says. "It's a yoga pose."

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MARK SUNDEEN is the author of Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures and The Making of Toro.

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