Thu 15 – Fri 16 Aug 2019
Having stumbled upon paradise at Winston Creek DNR campground, we were in no hurry to stray far. We slept well overnight and enjoyed a good lie-in on Thursday, then a whole morning of downtime around the campsite.
May and I watched the shallow, little creek flowing by, whilst Poppy and Dave tried to get to the other side balanced on a selection of flat stones, but didn’t quite make it all the way across. A woodpecker laughed and hammered on a hollow tree nearby. The little guy (painted rock) in the back of the car peeped out at me, reminding me that I needed to think of a good hiding place for him back in the UK.
In the afternoon, we drove into Morton, 20 miles east of the campground, for provisions, then another 20 miles east to Cowlitz Falls Day Use Area on a pretty bend in the Cowlitz River just north of Lake Scanewa.
As we drove back to the campsite via Ike Kinswa State Park and then across Mayfield Lake, we saw a speedboat pulling three people along on what looked like an inflatable sofa about to capsize. We were reminded of the three pillocks we’d had to endure camping next to on Australia’s Magnetic Island just 4 months ago: they’d sat on an inflatable sofa outside their tent, rowdily swigging beer until well past 3 a.m., without care or consideration for anyone else around them. If it was them again, we hoped the sofa would capsize.
We got back to the campsite and the girls and I used our washing line and pegs between three trees to rig up our sarongs as a 3½-sided ‘shower cubicle’ with the final ½ side open as a ‘doorway’. The aim was for each of us in turn to have a strip wash from our tiny, fold-up bowl using river water warmed over the campfire in empty food tins that were awaiting recycling.
This worked a treat until Dave’s turn, when the rest of us became hysterical as we noticed that he was using the ‘doorway’ to create extra cubicle space by poking his butt out!
“Um, Dave, have you thought that poking your butt out might defeat the object of privacy of having a shower cubicle? How about poking your top half out instead if you need more space?”
Dave was the ‘butt’ of joke again that evening. The girls and I had cooked corn on the cob and a loaf of part-baked bread over the campfire, then we’d all sat down to toast marshmallows. We normally prepare our own toasting sticks from fresh, green, peeled, deciduous tree twigs, but had decided to take the easier option and, this afternoon, had bought four telescopic toasting forks, each with two prongs to stop the marshmallows from slipping and spinning on the forks as they are rotated.
We compared how many marshmallows we could fit on the stick at once, and smiled when May (just 11 years old) told us in a serious voice that she had cooked six at once “back in the day”.
We returned to happily toasting away. Then we noticed Dave muttering and cursing about the marshmallow fork design. Finally, he exploded, “What’s the point of having two prongs when they’ve made them so close together that you can’t get a marshmallow on each prong?”
We thought he was joking. But it turned out he was serious. It then got even funnier. “It’s alright you lot laughing. You three have grabbed the long toasting forks, and left me with the short one, and my fingers are burning from the flames.”
We fell about laughing uproariously. It was some time before we could compose ourselves enough to explain how you use a telescopic fork, changing the rod from short to long by pulling on the end.
Just before bed, Poppy and I sat down by the creek, just the two of us, listening to the burbling waters, watching a bat flitting about overhead and noticing the first star (well, planet, I suppose) come out in the little patch of night sky through the trees. It was a very special moment that I will treasure.
Next morning, we were refreshed for another early start to visit the volcano of Mount St Helens, and had had breakfast, made a pack-up for lunch, done the dishes, packed the bags for the day and driven 45 miles to the Visitor Centre on Silver Lake, arriving well before the 9 a.m opening time.
We have found it interesting driving around Washington state. In contrast with our immediately previous few weeks in Newfoundland – where there were many road and public signs written in French as well as English because of the nearby French-speaking province of Quebec – here, in the far north-west of the USA, there are many road and public signs written in Spanish as well as English. Yet the far south of the USA, where most of the Spanish is spoken, is over 1000 miles away.
At the Visitor Centre on Silver Lake, we enjoyed an excellent ranger talk that really brought to life the events that occurred here in May 1980: the harmonic tremors, earthquakes and growing bulge on the side of Mount St Helens, followed by the violent eruption when the bulge blew out, leaving a huge, gaping hollow on the side of the volcano and causing a 180 mph landslide (the biggest landslide in the world’s recorded history). 57 people lost their lives during the eruption, famously including 85-year-old Harry Truman, who wouldn’t leave his home on Spirit Lake at the foot of the volcano.
We took a short walk from the visitor centre across a tiny portion of Silver Lake, partly on boardwalk, then continued the remaining 45 mile drive towards the main observatory viewpoint over Mount St Helens.
On the way, we stopped for a short walk at Coldwater Lake, where we came across a visitor who had learnt to boat on Spirit Lake just a month before the eruption and another (an American ex-missionary who’d lived in Colombia) who had been on a commercial flight from Seattle that decided to circle Mount St Helens so that the passengers could view the bulge in close-up, the day immediately before the eruption.
Just before reaching the main observatory, with its large car park and masses of people, we stopped at a small, near-deserted car park at Loowit viewpoint. Here, we did a short walk westwards all by ourselves along a narrow, dirt path amongst wildflowers of every hue, to reach a magnificent, rustic viewpoint just 250 metres away, at which we stood in splendid isolation to enjoy spectacular views of Mount St Helens.
We therefore decided not to pay to go onto the concrete viewpoint at the main observatory. The view would be little different from what we had just seen and, for us, the heaving crowds would spoil the beauty, power and majesty of this wonder of nature.
Dave and I previously came to Mount St Helens in 2001, just over 20 years since the eruption. It was now approaching twice that period and little has changed – perhaps a slight greening up around the base as new vegetation slowly starts to take hold.
We made a short visit to the main observatory car park, of course, so that the girls could run around excitedly checking car registration plates (to the confusion and consternation of the other visitors). Suddenly, there were shrieks of joy – they had just found a plate for their 33rd different state! They had now succeeded at Dave’s second competition, after just 8 days in the USA, and won another bar of chocolate each. By now, they were also up to 8 different sightings of Florida plates here in the far north-west of the USA (but Dave insisted that that competition still warrants only one chocolate bar each, not 8).
Poppy gaily read out her list of 33 states, unfortunately mispronouncing Virginia as a part of a woman’s anatomy. We corrected her quickly for fear of what West Virginia might be called if she accidentally omitted the ‘s’.
We drove back to our tent via a detour to a small village grocery store to buy sausages, corn on the cob, bread rolls and marshmallows for another campfire dinner, and each of us had another strip wash in our sarong cubicle using campfire-heated river water, bringing to a close what had been a perfect two days (three nights) based at Winston Creek.