On a clear day in the Pacific Northwest, you can look to the horizon and see mountains. It’s beautifully eerie. Rainier, St. Helens, the Olympics, Hood, Adams - these guys loom over you day and night, in clear weather and in haze whether you can see them or not. They were there long before you, and they’ll be there long after you leave.
As someone who grew up on the plains, I’m irrationally terrified of the giants that stand above us in the mist. I don’t know why. It’s almost like an inverse fear of heights - it’s not like I’m afraid to be atop these things. I’m just scared they exist.
On a foggy day some weeks ago, I was driving along some nice forest roads when I passed a sign for Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Pulling over at a vista point, I saw pretty much nothing beyond nearby ridges. Sure wish it were clear today, grumble grumble. Might be a nice view.
In the time it took to find the next viewpoint and start the Peakfinder AR app, a light gust began to pull back the curtains on the giant that leered over me. I turned around and saw this great ominous shape, seemingly coming at me from the void.
I courageously drove away, pretending my mirrors don’t exist. Nope nope nope nope.
Photo credit: albertine.squarespace.com
About a month after my narrow escape from Mount St. Helens’ clutches, I found myself once again at its base, this time with a mountain bike - the fully rigid, dropbar Salsa Cutthroat (to be detailed in a subsequent post).
Just like I can’t explain my fear of mountains, I can’t explain what draws me to them, either. The thunderstorms from the previous night had been sporadically retreating, and the sun started coloring in the youthful forest that surrounds the volcano.
Yes, Mount St. Helens is an active volcano. It erupted - powerfully - in the spring of 1980. The force of this major event caused the biggest landslide in recorded history.
It lopped 1,300 feet off the top of the mountain and leveled much of the surrounding forestland, killing 57 people and thousands of animals. Scientists are still grappling with the biosphere’s continuing recovery and adaptation to a landscape that has only existed in a recognizable form for a few decades.
Ask anyone from the area old enough to remember and they’ll tell you where they were and what they were doing on that day when ash darkened the skies and rained down on cities as far away as Canada.
Today, you can just walk right up to this thing. Or ride. On this particular day, I parked at the trailhead, unloaded the bike and got ready to hop some roots.
At the start, the forest was lush with vegetation and full of old trees that had survived the blast. The ground was classic PNW mineral soil, admirably clomped and maintained by trail builders. Climbing a couple thousand feet over a few miles is a good workout and keeps the trail somewhat exclusive, which I am grateful for in this age of monuments being destroyed by hordes of selfie-snapping, fern-trampling litterers. (don’t get me started)
But anyway. As I approached the volcano, the trail got gnarlier: the edges were more overgrown, the roots were wetter and knucklier, and the clouds started to close in. The whole ensemble appeared to have been directed by Peter Jackson.
Every once in a while, there was an opening in the trees, and I looked up to see the mountain a lot closer than I remembered it being just a few minutes prior. In any case, gazing off the side of the trail soon proved to be sketchy - the paths were eroding in spots and the drop-offs were…severe.
Eventually, I reached a lookout just above the cloud line. That was when things started to get especially surreal, and more than a little scary. Gone was the familiarity of Northwest wooded single track - in this environment, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the scale of the topography.
The haze was swirling around me, selectively unveiling parts of the landscape while defying my best attempts to get a representative panorama. I was there alone - the only sounds I heard were the wind and the occasional pebble rolling its way down the unstable slopes into abyss. There wasn’t even much of an echo - the space was simply too open to bounce sounds back to you. The sheer bigness was somehow claustrophobic and suffocatingly, achingly beautiful.
That’s Mount Adams off in the distance (I think), distracting me while Mount St. Helens snuck up from behind.
It was difficult to judge how far away things were, like distant trails or passing marmots. President Jimmy Carter said the area made the surface of the moon look like a golf course, and I endorse that characterization. Ape Canyon is a jagged scar in the earth - a gaping mouth that you step around to continue along the trail. (I’m not totally sure where my instinctual fears went wrong, where I fear mountains in the abstract but have absolutely no qualms about casually stepping along damp rocks over a giant death-chasm.)
Here you can see where the trail follows the edge of the canyon and - look closely - slides into it, with Mt St. Helens as the backdrop.
My biggest regret for the day was riding there alone. I almost hit a snake, and wasn’t quite sure what my plan would’ve been had I been bitten. My gravel/road racing tires were designed to be light and supple, not tough or grippy on slippery roots, soft dirt or jagged pumice. I was running tubeless, with a basic patch kit and a single spare “get out of trail free” inner tube. My Salsa Cutthroat is fully rigid - no suspension on either wheel to take the edge off harsher bumps.
Now I’ve covered my bases with excuses, I won’t lie - there were some hike-a-bike moments where the trail dropped off and sidehill riding just didn’t seem wise, so I hoisted the bike over my shoulder and clambered around on foot. All this in mind, I didn’t “complete the loop” on this particular trip - that is, I did not ride beyond the Plains of Abraham and return via the Smith Creek trail - for various reasons I was on a schedule to return to Seattle that day.
I thoroughly enjoyed the descent back to the trailhead, though I wouldn’t call it a heart-pumping shredder in the same vein as Olallie - too many blind corners, sheer drop-offs and sneaky pedal-snatching rocks and roots hidden just behind seemingly soft vegetation along the edges.
As I rolled to the bottom, the sun came out again, and so did the rain.
If you have the chance to ride or hike this trail, do it. (and bring a friend)