The plan was to leave Yakima early Saturday morning the weekend of Labor, so we could be at Mount St. Helens before the place started heating up. We left town early, but stopped here, stopped there, a few more twist and turns than I had anticipated and we didn't get to the mountain, which is out in the middle of no where till about 10:30 AM. So it was hike now before it gets any hotter or tour the Johnston Ridge Observatory and hike later. So we headed out after getting our passes from Observatory. We hiked down the Boundary Trail from the end of the parking lot. Not a lot of people out at first, even tho the temperature was high 70's. Lets just say Mount St. Helen's is fascinating, interesting, massive, hot, dry, stark and scary all at the same time. I don't like to think about any other mountains that could possibly do this same amount of damage or more, that are parked out my backdoor. We didn't hike as far as we intended, our timing was not the best and the little folks petered out and lost interest before we reached our destination. I think the words being tossed around was; you can only look at the mountain so many times, and nothing is changing. So we headed back to the Observatory and explored, read all the signage and such. Very interesting, sad and educational all at the same time. I really enjoyed our visit, probably wont have to return, unless it is to another trail in a different location. As we left the mountain and we stopped at the forest service building, which has some great displays and checked out the other view points, we voted to head to Paradise the next day. It helped that we were staying the night only 30 miles from the entrance to Mount Rainier.
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