Cirque du St. Helens - Stage 3

The long bridge leading to the Johnston Ridge Observatory | Copyright 2006 Charles H. Porter, all rights reserved

Editor’s note: While I was climbing Bonanza Peak in early July, Nick and my dad took a three day motorcycle trip. This is their story, as told by Nick.

Sunday, 2 July.
Stage 3: Cougar, Johnston Ridge, Kirkland.
Distance: 200-something miles.
Conditions: Morning –mid 50s. Afternoon – mid-80s.

The drag out to Woodland from Cougar is uninteresting, but Woodland could make a good pick-up point if you were going to do this on bicycle. You could drop a car in Randle and ride to Woodland over two days. It would be a fabulous ride.

Arriving in Woodland, we had our first taste of I-5 for the trip, and I was glad to spit it out again when we exited at Castle Rock for the run up to the Johnston Ridge Observatory. 

The road to Johnston Ridge, after two days of exercising restraint due to uncertain road conditions, finally offered the opportunity to turn the wick up. “I followed at a reasonable pace while Nick proceeded to hone the edges of his tires,” Chuck later claimed.  One spirited half hour later, we arrived at the Observatory much faster than I had the previous weekend on my bicycle. We were just in time to hear another ranger talk. This one was much more polished than the first. We learned that the 1980 eruption came in four stages: The initial collapse of the mountainside, which in turn allowed an outlet for the second stage – the explosion. The explosion overran the damage caused by the landslide, picking up boulders and trees and carrying them through the air for miles. The bulk of the damage to the surrounding landscape was caused by this blast, which ripped out trees at close range, knocked them over in the medium range, and scorching them at long range. The heat from the explosion melted the glacier and triggered the mud flow we remember from the television footage. The mud scoured the valley to the north of the mountain and adopted the path of the North Fork Toutle River. It washed away cars, destroyed bridges and covered homes. After all this destructive output, the mountain still had the energy to send up the ash plume. As I mentioned earlier, 600 dump trucks of ash per second for twelve hours. No wonder this stuff circled the globe and turned up on Washington’s coast carried by a westerly wind.

The mountain is still erupting, and has been since late 2004. But it’s a gas-poor mountain now, having expended all its gas in the 1980 eruption and never really sealing up enough to allow tremendous pressure to build.

We snapped some photos and hit the road again, this time with a plan to take a few new roads on our way back to Highway 7. We missed a few turns, scratched our heads, and ultimately found our way back to Morton, where we stopped for ice cream bars. Assuring Chuck that I was fine on gas (he carries an extra gallon or so in his tank and gets better mileage to boot, so he was always leery of me not gassing up at every opportunity) we set off for home. The road got hotter and hotter as we approached Puyallup, finally reaching its zenith just before we turned north on 167. Stopping at IKEA sounded good, but with home nearly in sight I put my head down and charged for the barn. I made it all the way home without running out of gas, much to my surprise. The next day, Chuck called me and gave me the official trip mileage – 570 miles. I kept resetting my trip odometer in order to monitor fuel consumption, so I was guessing a lot.

This could be a great bicycle trip, but you need to do a lot of transit to get to the good roads. The trip down 25 from Randle is spectacular. I could see the ride from Randle to Cougar making a very good two-day trip. A detailed Forest Service map would yield a network of dirt roads that connect most major roads in that part of the state. The question is how willing you are to spend part of your tour off-road in order to make it a loop. Put the fat tires on and see how it goes.

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