439 Steps to Windy Ridge. Four Volcanoes.

439 steps. That's the answer to the question you might have asked in my previous post, looking up at the staircase ascending Windy Ridge. There are 439 steps in the staircase. I was concerned for a bit it might be like climbing the Koko Head Tramline in Hawaii, which left me wrecked for several days, but it was way easier. Partly that's because I set a deliberate pace of stopping every 25 stairs for a short rest. Plus, that made it easier to keep count of the steps. 😅



Stopping every 25 steps also made it easier to appreciate the views around me. As I ascended the views of Mount St. Helens just kept getting better. BTW, the clouds in the crater are steam rising from volcanic activity. This volcano is not dormant, it's just... resting.



Also as I ascended, other volcanoes came into view. Looking east over the flank of Windy Ridge I could see Mt. Adams, a 12,280' stratovolcano. It looks like it's nearby... it's actually 35 miles distant.

Yes, there are a  lot of volcanoes in the area. We're in the Cascade Range, which is volcanic. It's part of the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean.



Speaking of other volcanoes, Mt. Rainier makes an appearance from atop Windy Ridge, too. It's a 14,410' stratovolcano. From here it's 50 miles away.

"What's at the back end of that lake?" you might ask. "Is it a beach?" First, that's Spirit Lake. Second, it's not a beach, it's actually a huge spread of dead trees floating in the water.

When Mount St. Helens exploded in 1980 it unleashed a torrent of rocks and hot gases that swept at speeds of several hundred miles per hour across the ground. The blast flattened everything in its path at least 8 miles out. The blast swept down the northern flank of the mount, across Spirit Lake, and up the ridge on the far side. That ridge was forested with huge fir trees. They were shaved from the ground like hair under a razor. What's left of them floats at the north end of the lake as a debris floe.



Soon enough it was time to head back. 439 steps down!

Oh, and in the distance to the south I saw one more volcano, making this a four-volcano viewpoint. I wasn't sure which mountain it was because I didn't have a big enough map handy. It turns out it was 11,249' Mt. Hood, in Oregon, roughly 60 miles away. Yes, I definitely needed a bigger map for that!

Iron Creek Falls

Friday last week was a busy day for hiking. Despite getting a somewhat late start from Chehalis, WA after being up 'til 2 the night before we hiked the Covel Creek trail (which grew to 3 blogs), then Camp Creek Falls, then Windy Ridge at Mount St. Helens. And we still weren't done for the day. We'd passed Iron Creek Falls on the way up to Mount St. Helens, and we were determined to hike it on the way back.

A great thing about summer is these loooong days giving us so many hours of daylight. Often I plan around the question, "Can we make it a two-fer?" Today we'd make it... a four-fer? A quad?

Daylight isn't the only constraint on hiking, though. There's also energy. We were pretty close to spend after all those other hikes, particularly after ascending those 439 stairs at Windy Ridge. Fortunately Iron Creek Falls was only a few hundred meters each way.



And what a payoff this short trail yielded. Water pours off a rocky ledge 30-40' high into a beautifully framed rock bowl below.

At first we thought the trail ended here but then we noticed careful cuts in the fallen logs. They were steps to climb over the logs. We followed the trail around to the right, to where there's a sandy beach underneath the overhang of the ledge.



This is another falls you can walk behind like Covel Falls... though here you have to get in the water to go behind/under the falls. I was too tired to deal with swimming/wading and having to change into dry clothes afterwards (plus I didn't even have spare underwear to change into!) so I stayed at the water's edge to enjoy the scene.

Revenge Travel? Yes, But Not The Revenge You Think.

There's been a lot about "revenge travel" in the media the past several months. People are traveling more now to make up for things being closed and people choosing to stay home during the depths of the Coronavirus pandemic. The trip we took to the Pacific Northwest last weekend (which I'm still writing about a week later and need probably another 5 days to catch up on) was revenge travel— but not Coronavirus revenge. This was revenge we've been waiting for longer than that!

In 2017 we took a 10-day road trip to the Pacific Northwest. Things went well, if busy, for the first two days. Then things started to go sideways. A nonsense road closure kept us from a scenic drive near Mt. Rainier. A weather closure kept us from a day of hiking around Mt. Rainier we'd hoped to do. We made alternate plans, but then minor sickness trashed those plans. Finally, just as we were starting to get things back on track the whole trip crashed, hard, when our car broke down. Five days of plans were torched.

The trip we took last weekend was basically us getting back up to Mt. Rainier & Mount St. Helens to do the stuff we were blocked from doing five years ago. ...Well, three days of the stuff we were blocked from. There's another ~2 days of sightseeing and hiking in central Washington that's still on the list. Hopefully it doesn't take another 5 years to complete our revenge!