Vancouver, Vancouver! This is it!

Those are the last words of David Johnston, before he was (presumably) fried by 1.2 cubic kilometres of debris that were launched at him by an exploding Mt. St. Helens in 1980.

He was at an observation post about 6 miles from the volcano on the morning of May 18th 1980.

Ironically he was the only person to correctly predict the direction of the explosion.

I was SUPER excited to be at Mt St. Helens.
Until we looked online and discovered that almost everything is shut due to excessive snowfall.
This pretty much ruled out the possibility of hiking to the rim of the crater. I guess I was already disappointed at this point, but we went up to the visitor centre anyway.

Actually the visitor centre had a cool film about the 1980 eruption, and some nice exhibits, but was 40 miles away from our campground. No worries. The ranger at the centre told us that we could probably get up to just past the Coldwater Lookout (which is where David was killed) and see some of the damage of the eruption. So we set out on another 40 mile drive. To encounter thick cloud at around 3000ft.

The long and the short of it kids, that that we drove 260 miles, didn't see the volcano, and couldn't climb to the top. Partly this is our own stupid fault for not checking the snow conditions, and partly this is the fault of the stinky weather and cloud. OK it's mainly our fault. Anyway I'm extremely disappointed and there is a good lesson for both of us in doing better research. *sighs*

At least there's an excuse to come back to WA again to check out the lave dome.

We are currently at Mossyrock, WA. A small community by Mayfield Lake. Which is pretty darn nice. Since I have nothing volcanic to show you, you can instead peruse some boring pictures of the campground.

First, the worlds largest RV spot - If we were keen I reckon we could put 2 x turd and 2 x Jeep in here quite comfortably:


It was really lovely when we arrived - really warm and sunny. This is the view from the site:


This is the view from the dock where we'd put our boat if we had one:


And another, you can see the houses on the other side of the lake - some of them look just grand with nice manicured gardens and such:


...and the grounds of the campground:


As I said, the weather was great when we arrived, but it's been dark, cold and rainy ever since.
Theme for this visit: disappointment. Oh well.