St Helens Through Time

The four panoramas on this page were all shot from the crater rim of Mount St Helens, within a few hundred metres of one another, over thirteen years. Nothing about the viewpoint changes. What changes is the mountain.

What happened here on the morning of 18 May 1980 is still the largest landslide in recorded history. A magnitude 5.1 earthquake dislodged the entire north flank, which had been visibly bulging outward for two months as magma pushed into it. The collapse uncorked the pressurised rock underneath, and the resulting lateral blast went sideways rather than up: it flattened forest out to nineteen miles, stripped ridges bare, and travelled faster than the people trying to drive away from it. A column of ash then rose for nine hours and turned midday to darkness across eastern Washington. Fifty-seven people were killed. The mountain lost thirteen hundred feet of height and gained the horseshoe crater you are standing on the edge of.

In the earliest of the four panoramas the crater floor is bare — a flat grey plain of ash and rock with nothing standing on it. That dates the shot before October 2004, which is when a new lava dome began pushing up through the floor. By the summer of 2006 the dome is unmistakable: a pale mass in the middle of the crater with steam lifting off it and drifting across the breach. The dome kept growing until January 2008.

The 2011 panorama was taken with everything under deep snow, and it is the one that shows how completely winter erases the place. The crater is a bowl of cloud, the rim is a white ridge with a line of bootprints along it, and only a few metres of dark rock break through. Five years later the crater is open again, snow still lying on the outer slopes, the walls banded and clear, and Spirit Lake sitting out beyond the breach.

The rest of the mountain is an experiment nobody designed. In 1982 Congress set aside a hundred and ten thousand acres as the Mount St Helens National Volcanic Monument and left most of it alone deliberately, so that the recovery could be watched rather than managed. Spirit Lake, below the breach to the north, was raised about two hundred feet by the debris and still carries a raft of floating logs from the forest that was blown into it. The Johnston Ridge Observatory looks straight up the crater from five miles out, and is named for David Johnston, the USGS volcanologist who radioed “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it” from a ridge nearby and was never found.

One landmark is in every frame: Mount Rainier, eighty kilometres north, unchanged in all four. Because it is far enough away to be unaffected by the camera moving along the rim, it is what the four panoramas are aligned to. Switch the year and the view holds its bearing; the mountain moves instead.