Same rim, four visits
2003 · 2006 · 2011 · 2016
In 2003 the crater floor was bare. Three years later a lava dome was venting steam out of it. Change the year and the view stays exactly where you left it.
What changedFour 360° panoramas shot from the crater rim of Mount St Helens in Washington between 2003 and 2016, aligned to each other so that switching year does not move the view.
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.
In the earliest of them 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.
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.