Camping, Thursday
Aug. 3rd, 2006 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe duct tape failed us. We awoke awash on the rocks.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, all created by grilling or frying over a fire. Without coffee or pop easily accessible, I was reduced to drinking Lipton tea, which, despite all of the commercial effort put into it, is still one of the most civilizing means of waking up left to us on planet Earth. The equestrienne in the next campsite left this morning with her family, and gave us the gift of wood. Cleanup was difficult-- Dr. Bronners might have 18 uses, but Palmolive it just ain't.
We drove up to the Blast Zone today, the huge valley that Mt. St. Helens completely destroyed in 1980 with a lateral blast so overwhelming that, having seen the damage, it's still not quite real to me. On the drive up, we stopped at "The Last Gas" before the volcano (apparently, there is only one road out of the valley), a Shell station so ancient the pumps went only to $1.99, and you had to mentally double the amount shown on the pump to reflect the true price. Yeah, I wish gas were only $13.79 a tank!
Our first official stop was the Weyehauser Nature Trail. Following the 1980 blast, Weyerhauser put a lot of money into rebuilding the ruined valley's land good farmland for treefarms and started filling in as much as possible. The official blast zone is a research field and not available to corporations, but millions of acres outside of the official blast zone were scorched and burned, and Weyerhauser is trying to put the best face on their stewardship. I can be cynical about these things; the Weyerhauser establishment was better-equipped and better-run than the three government installations we visited, but their emphasis on that stewardship and their complete de-emphasis on the capital benefits of their stewardship kinda bugged me. Still, we ate lunch and walked a nature trail full of well-labeled exhibits on the kinds of plants that grew around the volcano. There was supposed to be a platform overlooking the western part of the valley, but all we found was this sign, and the people running the building at the trailhead were volunteers and had no idea why the trail had never been finished.
We drove up to the Coldwater Lake outlook, a large building with the look and feel of a bright and airy bomb shelter. There was a lot of glass held up by concrete walls two feet thick; the contrast was weird. As the girls looked out at the mountain, we heard this loud chirping noise and discovered a family of barn swallows living in a drainage ridge between two blocks of concrete. The girls were delighted, and had a lot of fun watching the parent birds flitting in and out. We walked the nature trail, where there wasn't much to see except the ocassional ground squirrel. We also went down to Coldwater Lake itself and did the nature trail there as well. The bathrooms had that bunker look themselves with all the concrete, with a steepled ventilation tower. I commented that it looked like a "Temple to Poop," which the girls thought was hilarious.
There was also a very creepy android that gave a presentation on wildlife in the area. The android had the name "Pearly Everlasting," which despite being the name of a native flower common in the area, creeped me out even more. Pearly definitely poked hard at my Uncanny Valley[?] when she was on, because a face was projected onto the mannequin head that was not quite right. Omaha jibed me about hanging out on alt.sex.fetish.robots (hey, I have to know my audience, right?) but I simply pointed out that I would never date anything with such lousy hair.
Even now, 26 years after the great blast, there's still a sense of a ruined landscape. Depending upon which eye you use, you can see growth and vegetation abundant, or blasted grey hummocks of lahor flow and ash accumulation, the craters of pumice strikes, and a landscape scoured by a 700mph wind thick with stone. The girls saw a water snake. A metal connective bridge over water on part of the nature trail sounds like a foley[?] from Half-Life 2.
On the drive home, I had to stop and take photos of a little ranch-level home, the owners of which had turned their garage into a museum dedicated to bolstering the young-Earth creationist argument from catastrophism[?], the argument that the Earth's shapes and forms are not the result of millions of years of geology, but could all have happened in very short, very voilent bursts, often affecting whole continents or even the whole planet. For those of you disinclined to click on the image, the sign reads: "Think about it: Lots of water, lots of mud, Mt. St. Helens and Noah's Flood." On the other side it read, "Hear how God speaks through natures' fury! In here!" The main crux of their argument seems to be that most geologists were wrong about just how much material St. Helens could disgorge in an eruption, and the resulting outflows were five hundred times worse than predicted, so if they were wrong about that, couldn't they also be wrong about their whole "the flood never happened" bit? Very silly.
Dinner was a portable beef-and-bean casserole, which was too sweet for my taste. The recipie called for sugar; I'll leave it out next time. Even the girls agreed that meat shouldn't be sweet like that. But they didn't complain about the marshmallows afterward.
There are showers at the campsite. They cost 50¢ for three minutes of hot water. And they meant it too-- the inline heater cut out instantly at 3:00 minutes, which was very bracing. I showered in a kind of frenzy; I'm used to having ten minutes to get clean and relax. And lemme tell you, Dr. Bronners up the wazoo is very bracing as well.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, all created by grilling or frying over a fire. Without coffee or pop easily accessible, I was reduced to drinking Lipton tea, which, despite all of the commercial effort put into it, is still one of the most civilizing means of waking up left to us on planet Earth. The equestrienne in the next campsite left this morning with her family, and gave us the gift of wood. Cleanup was difficult-- Dr. Bronners might have 18 uses, but Palmolive it just ain't.
We drove up to the Blast Zone today, the huge valley that Mt. St. Helens completely destroyed in 1980 with a lateral blast so overwhelming that, having seen the damage, it's still not quite real to me. On the drive up, we stopped at "The Last Gas" before the volcano (apparently, there is only one road out of the valley), a Shell station so ancient the pumps went only to $1.99, and you had to mentally double the amount shown on the pump to reflect the true price. Yeah, I wish gas were only $13.79 a tank!
Our first official stop was the Weyehauser Nature Trail. Following the 1980 blast, Weyerhauser put a lot of money into rebuilding the ruined valley's land good farmland for treefarms and started filling in as much as possible. The official blast zone is a research field and not available to corporations, but millions of acres outside of the official blast zone were scorched and burned, and Weyerhauser is trying to put the best face on their stewardship. I can be cynical about these things; the Weyerhauser establishment was better-equipped and better-run than the three government installations we visited, but their emphasis on that stewardship and their complete de-emphasis on the capital benefits of their stewardship kinda bugged me. Still, we ate lunch and walked a nature trail full of well-labeled exhibits on the kinds of plants that grew around the volcano. There was supposed to be a platform overlooking the western part of the valley, but all we found was this sign, and the people running the building at the trailhead were volunteers and had no idea why the trail had never been finished.
We drove up to the Coldwater Lake outlook, a large building with the look and feel of a bright and airy bomb shelter. There was a lot of glass held up by concrete walls two feet thick; the contrast was weird. As the girls looked out at the mountain, we heard this loud chirping noise and discovered a family of barn swallows living in a drainage ridge between two blocks of concrete. The girls were delighted, and had a lot of fun watching the parent birds flitting in and out. We walked the nature trail, where there wasn't much to see except the ocassional ground squirrel. We also went down to Coldwater Lake itself and did the nature trail there as well. The bathrooms had that bunker look themselves with all the concrete, with a steepled ventilation tower. I commented that it looked like a "Temple to Poop," which the girls thought was hilarious.
There was also a very creepy android that gave a presentation on wildlife in the area. The android had the name "Pearly Everlasting," which despite being the name of a native flower common in the area, creeped me out even more. Pearly definitely poked hard at my Uncanny Valley[?] when she was on, because a face was projected onto the mannequin head that was not quite right. Omaha jibed me about hanging out on alt.sex.fetish.robots (hey, I have to know my audience, right?) but I simply pointed out that I would never date anything with such lousy hair.
Even now, 26 years after the great blast, there's still a sense of a ruined landscape. Depending upon which eye you use, you can see growth and vegetation abundant, or blasted grey hummocks of lahor flow and ash accumulation, the craters of pumice strikes, and a landscape scoured by a 700mph wind thick with stone. The girls saw a water snake. A metal connective bridge over water on part of the nature trail sounds like a foley[?] from Half-Life 2.
On the drive home, I had to stop and take photos of a little ranch-level home, the owners of which had turned their garage into a museum dedicated to bolstering the young-Earth creationist argument from catastrophism[?], the argument that the Earth's shapes and forms are not the result of millions of years of geology, but could all have happened in very short, very voilent bursts, often affecting whole continents or even the whole planet. For those of you disinclined to click on the image, the sign reads: "Think about it: Lots of water, lots of mud, Mt. St. Helens and Noah's Flood." On the other side it read, "Hear how God speaks through natures' fury! In here!" The main crux of their argument seems to be that most geologists were wrong about just how much material St. Helens could disgorge in an eruption, and the resulting outflows were five hundred times worse than predicted, so if they were wrong about that, couldn't they also be wrong about their whole "the flood never happened" bit? Very silly.
Dinner was a portable beef-and-bean casserole, which was too sweet for my taste. The recipie called for sugar; I'll leave it out next time. Even the girls agreed that meat shouldn't be sweet like that. But they didn't complain about the marshmallows afterward.
There are showers at the campsite. They cost 50¢ for three minutes of hot water. And they meant it too-- the inline heater cut out instantly at 3:00 minutes, which was very bracing. I showered in a kind of frenzy; I'm used to having ten minutes to get clean and relax. And lemme tell you, Dr. Bronners up the wazoo is very bracing as well.
