Around Mount St. Helens

In One Very Long Day, the Fear of Running in the Sweltering Heat of Summer Quickly Disappeared.

huffling up a sandy slope inside one of the many canyons on Mount St. Helens’s southeast side, my running partner and I question a certain park ranger’s motives. “When you hit Windy Pass, it’s pretty easy from there,” the ranger had said. “The last nine miles are mostly downhill.” Yeah, right. We had run through Windy Pass more than an hour ago on this 30-mile circumnavigation of Mount St. Helens via the Loowit Trail. The only thing we had

Photo by Don Kardong

Five hundred-year-old lava flows on the south side of Mount St. Helens make for slooooow going.

found to be “mostly downhill” since the pass were our spirits. By 5:30 on this late July afternoon when we found ourselves yo-yoing up and down gorge after gorge, we had been running, speed hiking, and scrambling for over nine hours.

To get an idea of what this stretch of the Loowit is like, spread your fingers on one hand, press it into some wet sand, and then remove it. These canyons and ridges are a supersize version of the handprint you just made. They are the results of mudflows that blasted through the earth during the 1980 eruption.

In front of me, Don Kardong, my partner in this trail-running adventure, wonders if I instigated the ranger’s fibbery.

“You didn’t happen to question his ability to distinguish flora from fauna, did you?” asks Don, a noted writer and former Olympic marathoner.

WHAT ABOUT UP GETS YOU DOWN?

No I didn’t, but I do question his ability to distinguish downhill from uphill.

At least by now the fog has lifted. At 8:00 this morning, we left the June Lake Trailhead in a fog soup that chilled our bones and cut visibility to about 200 yards. No roads cross the Loowit, so to get there you take one of the many feeder trails that lead to it. We chose the June Lake Trail on the southeast side of the mountain, because at 1.5 miles, it’s the shortest and climbs only about 700 feet. Also, a dip at the end of the day in chilly June Lake would be heavenly on what we figured to be a sweltering day running in the hot July sun.

Yeah, right.

We’ re running clockwise around the mountain, so this morning when we hop on the Loowit, we run left, heading west. After passing through moss-draped hemlocks and firs that have somehow survived centuries of Mount St. Helens’s rumblings and eruptions, we climb through rock piles of huge black, blocky boulders. They are lava flows from eruptions about 500 years ago, and before we know it, the trail has disappeared and been replaced by these boulders, which look like SUV-size hunks of fudge. Soon, we’re down on all fours trying to make our way. Running is a memory.

The fog, which by now has been joined by wind and rain, makes it impossible to tell how much lava is ahead of us. Luckily, wood posts spaced about every 150 yards mark the route. When we make it to one post, we spend a few panicky moments scanning the whiteout for the next one, until one of us yells “There it is!” and off we go at half a snail’s pace.

After a half mile or so, the lava stops, and we have a snow crossing of a couple of hundred yards. It’s soft so we don’t slide, and over the next five miles, lava flows—as well as the wind and the rain—come and go. Some flows are a mile wide and such slow going that we question whether we will finish this route today. In three and a half hours, we have gone just seven miles and have more than 20 to go.

In a soupy fog, author Mike McQuaide runs past a waterfall at the bottom of one of Mount St. Helens’s many gorges. Water is plentiful but mostly silty along the Loowit. Clean water is scarce.

“At least we know the last nine miles are downhill,” I offer.

Don brightens, and so do I.

Once the snow and lava are behind us, we establish a running rhythm as we climb steadily through a more familiar Northwest mountain environment—familiar except for the grayish volcanic ash and rock that are everywhere and the stands of trees that look like they have been dynamited, of course. We run through cathedral forests and meadows splashed with wildflower rainbows, across creeks and canyons, and past plunging waterfalls. We’re having fun. We had been cursing the fog for the views it had stolen but now realize that it’s a blessing, for it has kept us cool.

Through the first 10 miles, we gain 2,000 feet, but we lose all of that on a two-mile descent into the Toutle River valley. There’s a short bushwhack, then some boulder hopping to cross the braided river. At noon, with soaked shoes, socks, and legs, we sit down on some riverside rocks for lunch.

THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES

Don eats a chicken sandwich, some chocolate, and Fritos while I scarf down PowerBars, dried apricots, and Fritos.

Photo by Don Kardong

A When the going gets tough, the tough follow . . . cairns. With visibility at a minimum and the trail hard to follow in spots, McQuaide and Kardong have to rely on stacks of rocks left by hikers.

“It’s funny, but I’ve discovered that the most satisfying ultra food is Fritos,” Don had e-mailed a couple days before the run.

He’s right. There on the banks of the Toutle, they tasted amazing.

I fill my water bottles with the silty river water and drop in a couple of iodine tablets followed by some Gatorade powder to mask the iodine, but it still tastes lousy. The ranger had told me about a bubbling spring eight miles ahead where the water is so good you don’t have to pill it. (On this one, he’s right on.) P’Il drink sparingly until then.

We scan the chowder sky wondering aloud whether it’s ever going to clear, then get to work regaining all the elevation we had just lost. Up sandy hills—like giant dunes—we run and shuffle when it’s too steep. Often, we slip back a step for every two we take forward.

At about 16 miles, we enter the Pumice Plain in the volcano’s blast zone on Mount St. Helens’s north side. If it were clear, we would see hummocks, huge mounds of volcanic debris scattered for miles across the plain. We would see millions of downed trees floating in Spirit Lake and covering the surrounding hills like spilled toothpicks. We would even see Mount Rainier looming high above its Cascade siblings.

Instead, we have what we called the “Bocci Ball Desert,” millions of black, gray, and salmon-colored pumice rocks about the size and shape of bocci balls. Like the lava flow boulders from before, they extend as far as the fog lets us see. The trail disappears once again, and we inch along, with route finding our only priority. Cairns, placed by backpackers who have gone before, mark the way, but it’s hard to tell which are cairns and which are just random piles of rocks.

We cross the Bocci Ball Desert in about an hour, and not long after, there’s a break in the fog. At 4:00 p.M., after running, hiking, and shuffling for nine hours, we get our first views of Mount St. Helens. From this close, it’s truly breathtaking. We are only two miles from the crater and at such an angle that the growing and often steaming lava dome in the center appears almost as high as the mountain’s fractured sidewalls. I’ve seen pictures of the 1980 eruption many times, but they don’t prepare you for seeing the real thing from here. To witness the effects and to imagine the sheer power and destruction of a force that could rip the top off a mountain and leave a mile-wide crater in its wake is to be truly humbled.

THE SHOW’S OVER, BOYS

Then, as suddenly as it was revealed to us, it’s gone. The clouds drop their curtain on the mountain once again.