Walking On Thousands Of Floating Logs At Spirit Lake At Mt St Helens

I went to summer camp on Spirit Lake in the 76-77 time frame. In the video you are walking on logs not far from the camp. Hard to fathom the idea that the place I loved so much was just erased. After the eruption I recall a person in a helicopter reporting from the air that "Spirit Lake is gone". Not true but certainly stripped of its former beauty. I have traveled the world and been to 48 States, including Alaska, and I still think Spirit lake was one of the most beautiful places on earth. I will never forget canoeing from camp to Bear Cove. Paradise for a 15 year old boy.

These tourism videos are OUTSTANDING in content and information. There are so many aspects you are getting right. You capture the human experience interacting with environment that many tourists look for. You have a gift for it and I appreciate you sharing.

This is great - I get to travel without leaving my home! Wonderful places and such history. And, thank you for having a caring heart to stop and help the innocent kittens get rescued.

That little gas station was Grandma Josephine's store when I was a kid, there used to be a restaurant next to it called The Burger Bar, that my step mom worked at and it had small cabin's around and behind it that where rented out. Grandma Josephine had a self playing piano in the store and she had a pet raccoon and a crow that talked. 😆 She was a cool old gal and her husband was a sweet heart that always gave us candy.

I lived in Lacey just outside of Olympia until just before Mount St Helens blew up I remember what it looked like before it's so different now. I miss the rain and the fog. Well bless your heart for helping the kitties ♥️ One of your best videos. So many places you have shared on this trip are places I grew up visiting in summers or lived in. Great memories. Thank you Post 10

I live in Longview right on the Cowlitz River. We experienced so many trees floating down the river. Spirit Lake was a beautiful place to camp and enjoy the outdoors with Mt St Helens in the background before 5/8/1980. The landscape has changed but mother nature is bring it back to its beauty. Weyerhaeuser owned much of the surrounding land. As 5th graders, we got to plant trees on the mountain. Those are the signs you see with the dates as you travel up to Johnsons Ridge. Thank you for enjoying my home!!!

My father was a hobby prospector and gold panner and was planning to go up to St. Helens by Randle on May 18th to do a little panning, something told him not to and he decided against it, he always had this kinda 6th sense about him. We lived in Olympia and I remember hearing the mountain blow that morning, just about the time he would have been getting ready to pan his first sample. The ash started to fall like snowat our place by Black Lake, we didn't get alot but enough to coat everything about a half inch deep. I remember my dad saying he was glad he listened to that lil voice and didn't go up there that day, so was I. I waited seven years before going up there to see the devastation, it was like nothing you could have imagined, huge trees looked like someone had taken their hand and just whacked them off at the bases with a huge sideways slice, these trees had to be 3 to 5 ft in diameter, and all laid like pickup sticks in rows from the blast direction went as it swept down through the valleys, we hiked up to a ridge overlooking what was once Spirit lake and it was moved way higher up the valley than before, and it was just solid trees across the water, you could not see any water except on the shores. Simply amazing and unbelievable destruction, I will never forget those scenes as long as I live, I was in my early 20's at that time, I am now 63 and it seems like just yesterday, I own a copy of the movie St. Helens with Art Carney, and I watch it from time to time, always makes my hair on my neck stand on end just before it blows, and the music they used was perfect for that movie, so ominous and suspenseful lol.

Great video Post - I grew up in Ariel WA on the southwest side of Mt St Helens - 20 miles from the summit on the Lewis River. I remember the morning of May 18, 1980 very well. I was wondering what was on (the four TV channels we could receive) at 8:30 AM on a Sunday (not much..) and happened to glance out the dining room windows to the east and said "Wow - that's a weird looking cloud." The sky to the east was completely black. We got out the binoculars, figured out what it was and then just sat in our front yard and watched it all day - rolling with the constant small earthquakes. Late that evening Pacific Power brought in a helicopter to take my Dad up to Swift Dam which sits due south of the mountain to check on the power plant. Mom was not happy about this and threatened the pilot with bodily harm if he didn't bring my Dad back intact and alive. (Sounds funny now but she was deadly serious then.) We didn't get any ash that day - it all went east - but got covered with wet ash a week later with the next eruption. It looked like someone had sprayed everything with a 1/2" layer of wet cement. BTW - that was really foolish to get out on those logs. One wrong roll and you could have been crushed or trapped underwater. (My brothers and I used to log roll on the boom that marked the edge of the swimming area on Lake Merwin by the dam. That was dangerous enough with a single string of logs.) And oh yeah - growing up there, I used to build and then destroy dams on the creeks near the house that fed into the river. Guess living less than 1/4 mile from a 300' concrete arch dam for 10 years had some influence and explains why I watch your channel. ;-)

My family and I lived in Hillsboro, OR in 1980, about 90 miles south of Mt. St. Helens. I remember the eruption very well--the mountain had been "outgassing" for a month or two, and then on May 18, THIS happened. It was a stunning day. Luckily we were not downwind of it that day, though some smaller eruptions later that spring and summer DID give us ash to deal with. One staggering factoid about Spirit Lake is that its bottom is now higher, elevation-wise, than its surface was before the May 18, 1980 blast. I also remember seeing Harry R. Truman, a local who owned a resort on Spirit Lake, interviewed on local news stations for his refusal to evacuate the mountain. Just an astonishing event to live through.

Amazing to see Mt St Helens after all this time. I'm astounded at the way the forests have come back so healthy. Thanks for taking us along with you on this wonderful excursion.

I work up there. That was indeed wildfire smoke. You don’t smell it when it’s that light. We had several fires burning nearby a lot of the summer, and haze was constant. The fog off the ocean doesn’t typically reach this far inland, the valley floor down in front of Johnston ridge is nearly 3,000 feet in elevation. Also, just a couple weeks ago, there was a fire on that clearcut you passed that had the single strip of trees. Some hunters started a fire and it burned the debris. The fire made it to the stand of trees, but they didn’t burn. Look up the “pulled creek fire”.

I'm really surprised that the logs have not been systematically removed for use as kindling or something similar. Even drift wood sculptures!!!😊

You are exactly right about pulp wood. Weyerhaeuser is a paper company. I visited there for the 25th anniversary of the eruption. The sides of the facing slopes still looked like matchsticks all laying on the ground. It looks great now! Thanks for the visit!

I thought the Hoover Dam was going to be the highlight of your epic vacation but this video has changed my mind. Incredible!

Really impressive the way you read the environment and provide your listeners with education. Always wondered what Spirit Lake looked like up close with all the trees. I visited Mt. St. Helens the summer of 2001. Thanks for sharing, great work!!

Thank you for helping the kittens. Another fascinating adventure. Well done! ❤😎👏

The power of the eruption and how it changed such a wide swath of landscape, is absolutely jaw dropping. Thanks again for taking us along Post.✌️

Absolutely awesome video! But those poor baby kittens, I hope they turned out ok! Your childlike enthusiasm for everything is adorable Post, but your intelligence and attention to every little detail is fascinating! My favorite channel forever 🤘❤️

It may seem dry because of the volcanic soil but it is a very rainy place. It’s always interesting to hear non-PNW folks refer to the local evergreens as ‘pines.’ Very few pines are actually around until you get to the east side of the Cascades. Fir, cedar, hemlock, spruce, and further south redwood & sequoia, dominate the northwestern coastal slope of North America.