Seattle: The Geology 101 Refresher Course

Wow - long time no blog. It's very easy to fall out of the habit of writing a regular blog. It's a shame really as quite a lot has happened in the past few months since Mardi Gras. That includes Jazzfest; New Orleans fest; visiting Boston & Cape Cod; exploring plantation homes along the Mississippi; Miami & the Florida keys; San Antonio Fiesta & lots of other day trips. Stay tuned....

The weather has really heated up in the past month. Weather reports are boring & consistent - the week lookahead is always something like: Monday 90 degrees; humid; 50% chance of rain; Tuesday 89 degrees; humid; 50% chance of rain; Wednesday 91 degrees; humid; 40% chance of rain......etc etc. And the rain that is forecast always comes in the form of a thunderstorm at about 5pm.

Naturally we'd been looking for an opportunity to get up north and explore the colder parts of the country while the weather down here was hot & humid. We heard that ex-Blue Sun friends of ours J1 & J2 were heading back to Australia via North America, so took the opportunity to visit them in Washington State. This also meant that I could see two volcanoes in the one weekend! We took two days off leading up to a weekend, and flew into Seattle very late on the Wednesday night. I had a magnificent view of the top of Mt. Rainier through the clouds as the plane came into land.

We got up Thursday morning to find the weather cold & overcast. Woohoo! We had planned to run straight down to Mt. Rainier; but we had plenty of time so stopped off to check out the bay in Des Moines.
Check out Gator Girl wearing a fleece!

Got on the road and drove to the Mt. Rainier visitor centre where we met up with J1 & J2. Arriving at the visitor centre was when we discovered we hadn't brought enough warm clothes - it was above the snow line! We hadn't managed to get a glimpse of the mountain the whole way up as it was well above the cloud line. But soon after we said hi to J&J the clouds parted and we could see the mountain towering above us.
Nice forests on the drive up the mountain.

The clouds parting.

J&J & me stuffing our faces.

We had a quick lunch and then decided to hike part of the way up the mountain. Hiking to the top of the mountain was really not an option as it about 4,400m high (or 2 times the height of Mt. Kosciusko). It takes a day to hike to the base camp before the final ascent, and then then another full day to attack the final slope. So we settled for strolling up a few thousand feet to get a view of the glaciers.
How hard is it to get lost when you can see for miles?

J, J & Gator Girl pretending walking uphill in the snow is fun.

Success! Finally made it to the glacier views.

Somewhere at the top of this picture is the overnight camp for the serious climbers. Looked way too hard for us.

Chilling out before the slide back down the hill. Why oh why did I leave my snowboard behind?

After we'd hiked back down to the visitors centre, we headed back down the hill, this time stopping at some of the impressive views along the way.

This waterfall was so huuuuuge I wasn't able to get it in one shot. I'm also possibly not a very good photographer.

Birdy. Num Num.


Check this river valley out. There was a massive flood in this national park last year, and a lot of the water flowed down here. Check out the small twigs in the bottom of the river- they're full sized trees.


Now just imagine when Rainier erupts next time. Either the heat will melt the snow and you'll get an incredible flood, or the lava will rocket* down this valley. Either way, the bottom of this valley is really not the place to be during an eruption.

* Although the magma composition here tends to be quite high in silica content, which implies quite viscous lava. So maybe the flood is the real danger. Assuming you survive the initial eruption, pyroclastic flows or ash falls.
We stopped at a scenic spot called Cougar rock on the way down the mountain. I think we got jibbed - there was no rock that looked like a Cougar anywhere to be seen. Here's me looking quite upset by the lack of cougar shaped rocks.

Also stopped off for a nice walk through some tall trees.

And saw a deer up close. Actually it's half a deer - it had it's head deep in a bush and wouldn't come out for the photo. And since it smelt pretty bad I wasn't keen on getting too close. But given that you can't see it's head, does that make it a no-eyed deer?*

*Sorry.

Ok, got the the bottom of the hill and found some log cabins to spend the evening in, right at the entrance to the park. This of course gave us a great excuse to build a huge wood fire and drink some tasty bottles of red. Ate dinner at a local roadhouse and enjoyed the local delicacy, which is fresh blackberry pie. Mmmmm, tasty.

Gator Girl working it at the entrance to the log cabin.

J&J modelling the entrance to the Rainier national park.

Next day we got up and drove across to Mt. St. Helens. For those of you who don't follow geological events with interest, St. Helens erupted catastrophically in 1980. The unusual thing about St. Helens is that it erupted sideways, after a landslide released pressure on one side of the mountain. Inside 30 seconds trees were flattened within a 17 mile radius on one side of the mountain. It's been erupting quietly on and off since that time, mostly with small dome-building lava flows.

The area around the mountain is part of a national park, and you can't get close to the mountain itself. However from the observatory across the valley you can get a good impression of the devastation that the eruption caused.

Again the weather wasn't kind to us in the morning. It was overcast and for most of the day we unable to see the top of the mountain.

On the way up you can start to see signs of the eruption. Here, about two valleys away, you can see the flattened trees pointing away from the mountain.

Notice the unusual topography in this shot - this is the valley that was filled in by the mudslide and subsequent eruption. You can see that for the most part it hasn't recovered, even 27 years later there is only very sparse vegetation.

You can see the steep valleys caused by water eroding the extra-soft ash/rubble mix in the valley.
Somewhere in that cloud is the mountain.

And as the afternoon wore on, the clouds parted and we could finally see the remainder of the mountain.
And I mean remainder - there's not much left of the top.

Just think about it - the entire side of the mountain disappeared in under a minute. Can you imagine how much power that eruption must have had?

That night we camped at a site about half-way back down the hill. It was great to spend a night in a tent again, as we haven't really had the opportunity to camp since we've been in Louisiana. Admittedly it was a luxury campground - it had toilets & a shower, but it's the principle of sleeping in a tent that counts.

Got up the next morning and drove to the south side of St. Helens and went for a walk in a lava tunnel.

Well, what did you expect? It's a tunnel underground. Of course it's black.

After that we needed to start heading back to Seattle. On the road back I saw a sign that looked familiar, so convinced the troops to take a 10 mile detour to...

Battle Ground! Hi Volcboy! I think it may have got bigger since you lived there, as there was quite a nice main street. We ended up having lunch there at a cool little cafe.

After that we parted way from J&J, as they were off to continue their trip down to Oregon and further south. We on the other hand headed north for Seattle. We didn't have much time to explore when we got there, only enough time to check out some of the shops & the famous (but closed by the time we got there) Pike Place market.

The most impressive shop was the REI store, which is an enormous outdoor equipment shop with amazing facilities. For example, not only does it sell mountain bikes, it has a mountain bike track outside around the store so you can test your bike before you buy. It has climbing walls, hiking paths, everything. It also had a great section on hiking with your pet - including awesome dog booties so they can go snow hiking with you.

The next morning we got up and quickly ran to the market again so we could see it when it was open. No real time to see the throwing fish unfortunately. We did however discover the original starbucks store, and bought a hot chocolate.
The Pike Place market. It's more exciting inside, trust me.

I had to wonder if Starbucks is like a vampire. If we kill the head, will the rest disappear?

After that we had to rush back to the airport to head back home to Nawlins. Well, at least I did, Gator Girl headed off to Tennessee to go to work. In summary - Washington State is a beautiful part of the country, and has some fantastic geology to check out. I think we'll try and get back there next year for a longer trip, and maybe fit in a bit more camping and hiking. But given how cold it was up there in the middle of summer, I don't think I'll be visiting in winter :-).