When Mount St. Helens erupted four decades ago, killing 57 people and laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land, everyone assumed years would pass before life returned to the blast zone. But the first biologists to visit were shocked to find a host of survivors. Fireweed was already pushing up through the ash. Pocket gophers poked their noses out from burrows.
Biologists have documented the effects of these so-called “biological legacies” ever since. To visit the mountain today is to walk through the most famous natural experiment in the Pacific Northwest – one that is still unfolding on a grand scale. But now that experiment is in peril. Recently, the U.S. Forest Service announced plans to build a road right through the heart of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.
The reason the Forest Service says it needs a road is Spirit Lake. Debris from the eruption buried the lake’s natural outlet to the North Fork Toutle River. Rain and snowmelt soon caused the lake to rise. Officials realized that if it overtopped the debris blockage, it would unleash a terrible mudflow on towns downstream.
To prevent this, engineers bored a 1.6-mile-long tunnel to let Spirit Lake drain. But the tunnel passes through an unstable ridge. While the risk of flood is remote, in 2017 a government panel recommended building a second outlet. A likely route lies through the debris blockage, and Forest Service officials say they need to drill into the blockage to study it.
This is where the road comes in. For several years, trucks would haul equipment and workers from Windy Ridge more than three miles across an open expanse called the Pumice Plain. Researchers strenuously oppose the plan. Although the Pumice Plain makes up less than 3 percent of the monument’s total land area, it holds some 70 percent of all active studies, some of which would be irrevocably damaged.
No one disputes that officials should manage Spirit Lake for the safety of Toutle, Castle Rock, and others. But the road as conceived is the wrong approach.
Research, after all, is central to the monument. Congress created it in 1982 to serve as a place for “geologic forces and ecological succession to continue substantially unimpeded.” A road is an existential threat to that aim. Vehicles would make 2,000 passes per summer over ground that hasn’t felt a rubber tire for decades, exposing the Pumice Plain to harmful non-native species and destroying plots that scientists have followed since 1980. All of this would change the blast zone irreparably.
There must a better way. After the 1980 eruption, Mount St. Helens became famous for the creative thought it inspired. Where some saw a lifeless wasteland, others saw an opportunity to study and celebrate all the ways life responds to seeming total devastation. The Forest Service supported those efforts then. More than 40 years later, it would be nice if the agency once again embraced that tradition of creativity and foresight. To do so would be a fitting legacy for this beautiful and unique place.
Eric Wagner is an ecologist and the author most recently of “After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens.”
