Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Ride to Mt. St. Helens


Saturday, September 13th. Floyd and I had decided to trailer our Harleys down to our property and ride out from there heading toward Mt. St. Helens. It had been in the high 70's all week, but the morning started out foggy and a little on the cold side. We decided to take back roads along the Cowlitz River,then connect to the Jackson Highway through Toledo, after which we would head up toward the Johnson Ridge side of St. Helens. We came out of the fog outside Toledo into such beautiful scenery! Following the river past big farms, woods and as we got closer toward the Mountain, sheer rock faces. We stopped at a gift shop sporting a huge sasquach made out of concrete that had to be 20 ft. high. After laughing and teasing each other about which one of us looked more like the sasquach, we snapped a picture (not digital) I forgot my camera... so we had to buy a disposable one. Riding on we had the sun on our faces and it made the ride so much fun. We stopped at the Hoffstad Ridge store/gift shop. This is a classic timber-frame structure with a beautiful view of the Toutle River destruction zone where Mt. St. Helens sent it's huge mudflows pouring down the Toutle River, wiping out homes, farms everything in its path in 1980. We saw an "A" frame home that had just been completed in 1980 when the mud buried it up to it's 2nd Floor. What an amazing site. It took me back so many years to when the mountain erupted. I was 13, about the same age as my son is now. I remembered so much about it just reading the old newspapers at the Hoftstad Ridge observatory. We ended up turning around before reaching the actual end of the road, and rode back to Salkum in the sunshine, stopping here an there to look at things. What a great day.

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