The first thing you notice are the crickets.  There are hundreds of them — colliding with you, getting in the way of your compostion while the shutter is open, perching on grasses and stones.  Why so many?  You start to wonder what could explain the cricket population — is there a typical predator that hasn’t made it back to the blast zone?   Then, you suddenly notice the silence…and realize, even after almost thirty years, there are no birds here.

All of us have seen photos of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.  On my trip to the Pacific Northwest before moving here back in 1982, my ex-wife and I pulled off the interstate and drove to the closest-allowable vantage point, then dozens of miles away, to stare at what was left of the mountain in the distance, a faint steam cloud emerging from its crater.  But this year marked the first time I actually made the drive to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, a mere five miles from the mountain, and the place where the late David Johnston radioed his final words on the morning of May 18, 1980:  “Vancouver! Vancouver!  This is it!”

Whatever you may have seen second-hand, nothing will prepare you for the overwhelming strangeness that is Mount St. Helens.  The word “moonscape” has become overused when describing the blast zone, but I can’t think of a more-accurate description.  As you gaze at St. Helens, you reflexively follow the sides of the slope up to a no-longer-existent summit, and imagine that whole immensity of mountain exploding into dust, dust that covers all you can see, in a matter of seconds — and imagine the young David Johnston standing in this spot as his doom swept down upon him.  The oppressive sense of absence, of a lack of life and growth, is almost overwhelming.  This used to be a forested mountain with reflecting lakes, much like so many other beautiful peaks in the Cascades.  How could all that have been wiped away, replaced with this barrenness stretching over hundreds of square miles, in but a few minutes?

And yet…I overheard a ranger speaking to a group of tourists, pointing out that, while the common reaction of first-time visitors is similar to mine, those who return after several years express an amazement at how much the area has recovered.  Dry grasses form sere meadows in patches here and there along the Plains of Abraham; one such meadow, directly in the shadow of the mountain, hosts a herd of elk. Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels can be found in quantity around the Observatory, begging or stealing handouts from visitors.  (And, despite my earlier observation, birds aren’t entirely absent in the Monument; late in the afternoon, a pair of hunting Peregrine Falcons swooped and pinwheeled through the sky above Johnston Ridge, their wings making the sound of miniature helicopters.)  Wildflowers sprout here and there in the ashy soil.  The lava dome continues to grow; it won’t be much longer until it reaches the top of the crater rim, then surmounts it.  In coming years, St. Helens will take on the appearance of a mini-mountain set in the middle of a larger, truncated one — and, of course, one day in the distant future the mountain will have regained something close to the conical form it had before 1980.  Needless to say, I will be long-gone before that happens, or before the forests return to what, nearly three decades later, is still a severe, uncompromising landscape.

When dealing with Mount St. Helens as a photographer, I found that there were two different, diametrically-opposite approaches that each worked well.  The first was to emphasize the returning life that can, indeed, be found there, seeking out  foreground features such as flowers or vegetation, and boosting the saturation slightly to bring out the many subtle differences in the shades of rock found on the mountain and along the canyons formed by the eruption.

The second is to take the opposite  route, and resort to black-and-white imagery that emphasizes the harshness of the terrain.  In the past, I have been very pessimistic about black-and-white conversion of digital images, finding them inferior in tonality to monochrome images from 35mm film.  Fortunately, the color controls in Lightroom add a whole new level of flexibility in being able to take any color in an image and map it to a specific shade of gray.  For the first time, I am getting black-and-white images from digital files that I’m not hesitant to share alongside my color work.

Will I return to Mount St. Helens?  I assume I will do so at one time or another; in particular, I missed peak wildflower season, and maybe the addition of paintbrush and lupine will relieve the overwhelming sense of deadness that, at least for me on my first visit, was present everywhere I looked.  Still,  I don’t see St. Helens becoming one of my favorite photo locations in the Northwest.  I’m drawn to life, color, and freshness — qualities that were anything but present on my trip to the Monument.  And I hope and pray that I’m long-departed by the time my beloved Mount Rainier, inevitably, follows in the path of its neighbor in the Pacific “ring of fire.”