08 Jul '04 - + 17 - 17 Weekend at Mt. St. Helens
After spending the week at
JavaOne,
I spent a day touring San Francisco with a couple co-workers, and then
I headed to Portland to meet up with Jenny, my wife. A friend got
married July 3 near
Mt. St. Helens,
and we also did some good hiking and spelunking. We also got to
see a lot of fireworks on the drive back the evening of the 4th.
The tour of San Francisco was fun, and we saw quite a lot. We did the
Alcatraz Tour and the San Francisco City Tour
through Tower Tours, which wasn't quite what I expected. There were
two separate tours for $55; a bus tour of the city and a ferry ride to
Alcatraz. The bus tour was pretty good; the driver seemed to know the
city well, and the route hit a lot of great highlights. I was the only
one in our group who had visited San Francisco before, so some was
review, but I hadn't been to the Golden Gate Park or seen Haight
Ashbury before. There wasn't a lot of depth to the tour, but we saw a
lot.
Blue and Gold Lines actually does the trip to
Alcatraz,
so Tower Tours really was just a ticket agent. I had never been out
there before, so it was the highlight of the day. I really enjoyed the
audio tour of the cell block and the movies about the
Indian occupation. It's definitely worth the trip. After the ferry ride back, we got sundaes at
Ghirardelli, and then I got my stuff from the hotel to go to Portland.
After seeing an old friend from my days working at
CSC, Jenny and I headed up to
Anderson Lodge near Mt. St. Helens for a wedding. My dear friend from
college,
Melissa Clark,
was getting married. She and Rowdy (his real name) were finally
getting married. It was a lovely ceremony in a mountain meadow
with wild flowers. Very fun. There were also a lot of other
friends from college there, which was great.
The next day, a bunch of us from the wedding went spelunking in
Ape Cave in
Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Ape Cave was created
from
a lava flow from Mt. St. Helens about 1900 years ago. It was a
lot of
fun exploring the cave, although it's a lot different than the
limestone caves we find in Missouri and neighboring states. The
walls
are a lot harder because it's basalt, and there aren't many side
channels or rooms to explore (the lava just went where it wanted:
straight downhill). We had to climb over a lot of rock piles
created by ceiling collapses, and there was also an 8-ft wall to
navigate. Unfortunately, most of my pictures inside the cave
didn't turn out.
After the lunch in Cougar, WA, Jenny and I went to the Windy Ridge
lookout at Mt. St. Helens. The view was amazing. On the
edges of the blast zone, many trees have recolonized the slopes, but
much of the landscape near the volcano is still desolate and nearly
devoid of life despite the 24 years that have passed since the great
eruption. I was especially surprised to see that there are still
thousands of dead trees floating in Spirit Lake, after all these
years. Amazing.
On the drive home to Portland that evening, July 4th, we saw fireworks
throughout Southwestern Washington and the Portland area. It was
a lot of fun to drive on I-5 and see five or ten fireworks displays
around us. Unfortunately, we had to head back to St. Louis the
next day and go back to the real world of work.
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