More than two years after Mount St. Helens erupted, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a national volcanic monument around the mountain.
For most people, the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument is a place to go and learn about the eruption, as well as see some of its still-visible effects on the landscape around the mountain.
But for scientists, the monument is a place to take advantage of a — hopefully — once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see how nature can recover from a cataclysmic event.
Prior to May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens was known as “The Mount Fuji of America” in large part because of its graceful shape. But on that day, the volcano erupted, unexpectedly blowing out its north face, dropping the mountain’s elevation by almost a quarter-mile, and sending a storm of superheated gas and rock into the surrounding forests at hundreds of miles an hour.
The force of the blast was 500 times that of the atomic bombs that laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
The eruption killed 57 people, only three of whom were within the “red zone” around Mount St. Helens. It also flattened thousands of acres of forest, turned Spirit Lake into toxic soup and blanketed areas as far away as Yakima Valley with volcanic ash.
President Jimmy Carter, who surveyed the area around the mountain on a helicopter tour after the eruption, was almost speechless at the devastation.
“Someone said it looks like a moonscape,” Carter said, “but the moon looks like a golf course compared to what’s up there. It’s a horrible sight.”
Contrary to popular myth, scientists did not write off the area as completely dead. While Spirit Lake may have seemed like a lost cause to some, scientists knew that nature would, if left to its own devices, reclaim the area.
The question was how long that would take. And Mount St. Helens provided a natural laboratory to examine that process.
Shortly after the eruption, scientists already were seeing signs that life was returning to the blast zone. Grasses were seen poking up through the ash, and pocket gophers managed to ride out the eruption in their burrows.
The scientific community was spurred on to protect the site by the Soil Conservation Service’s seeding non-native grasses in the area to check erosion.
(For anyone who wonders why bringing outside flora and fauna to an area is a problem, use your favorite search engine to look up “Australian rabbit-proof fence.”)
Instead of designating the area as a wilderness, the plan was to designate it as a national monument, which would allow scientists better access to the area, as well as give the public opportunities to see the recovery process for themselves.
But there was haggling over how much land to put in the monument. Smaller timber companies wanted to constrain it to 40,000 acres, while conservationists were lobbying for 216,000 acres — an area roughly two-thirds the size of the Yakima Training Center.
Forest Service officials urged Reagan to veto any proposal that exceeded 85,000 acres, while Reagan’s budget officials were opposed to it. But the proposal gained support on both sides of the aisle.
U.S. Rep. Don Bonker, D-Vancouver, sponsored legislation to create the monument, with the rest of Washington’s delegation co-sponsoring it. His bill set aside 115,000 acres for the monument, while a Senate version sponsored by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., set the monument’s size at 105,000 acres.
Through a conference committee, a compromise was reached at 110,000 acres, which passed the House on a 393-8 vote and was approved by voice vote in the Senate. It was signed by Reagan on Aug. 26, 1982, at his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif.
The law set the monument’s mission as protecting “the geologic, ecologic and cultural resources” of the area and permitting “geologic forces and ecological succession to continue substantially unimpeded.”
While the land was within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, there were about 32,000 acres owned by various corporations, including Weyerhaeuser. The law called on the government to get those lands through donations, purchase or land swaps.
In 1998, mineral rights within the monument were acquired through a similar process.
Along with the scientific research, there are also visitor centers and observation points where people can examine the mountain and areas that were once devastated but are on the mend.
