10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday: Johnston Ridge Observatory. It’s a Blast: Volcano Science in Your Backyard, sponsored by the Mount St. Helens Institute. A day of hands-on learning, presentations by scientists, guided walks and a showing of the movie “Message from the Mountain,” as well as the debut of new interactive exhibits. Cost: $8, free for ages 15 and younger. Tickets: http://www.mshinstitute.org or at the door.
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday: Johnston Ridge Observatory. Opening of the observatory for the season. Cost: $8, free for ages 15 and younger.
5 p.m. Tuesday: Bella’s Courtyard in The Academy, 400 E. Evergreen Blvd., Suite 115, Vancouver. Volcano Views and Brews, a presentation by Marianna and Alan Kearney, survivors of the 1980 eruption, sponsored by the Mount St. Helens Institute.
10:30 a.m. May 18: Johnston Ridge Observatory. Ceremony marking the 31st anniversary of the 1980 eruption. Admission is free all day. The observatory will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week through October.
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday: Johnston Ridge Observatory. It's a Blast: Volcano Science in Your Backyard, sponsored by the Mount St. Helens Institute. A day of hands-on learning, presentations by scientists, guided walks and a showing of the movie "Message from the Mountain," as well as the debut of new interactive exhibits. Cost: $8, free for ages 15 and younger. Tickets: http://www.mshinstitute.org or at the door.
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday: Johnston Ridge Observatory. Opening of the observatory for the season. Cost: $8, free for ages 15 and younger.
5 p.m. Tuesday: Bella's Courtyard in The Academy, 400 E. Evergreen Blvd., Suite 115, Vancouver. Volcano Views and Brews, a presentation by Marianna and Alan Kearney, survivors of the 1980 eruption, sponsored by the Mount St. Helens Institute.
10:30 a.m. May 18: Johnston Ridge Observatory. Ceremony marking the 31st anniversary of the 1980 eruption. Admission is free all day. The observatory will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week through October.
Looking for a reason to visit Mount St. Helens on the 31st anniversary of its cataclysmic 1980 eruption?
Here’s one: A new interactive touch-screen exhibit that lets you track the phenomenal return of plants and animals to the ash-gray landscape surrounding the volcano in the past three decades.
Beginning Saturday, three kiosks featuring the Return to Life exhibit will be available at Johnston Ridge Observatory, at the end of state Highway 504. The road is plowed to the observatory, and crews are working to clear the parking lot of 14 feet of snow for its opening this weekend.
“It’s a big parking lot, but the snow has made it a little smaller,” said Chris Strebig, spokesman for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
Long lines may form inside as visitors explore the options at their fingertips.
You can click on one of the six disturbance zones — lahar, ashfall zone, pyroclastic flow, lateral blast, debris avalanche and scorch zone — to explore the changes the mountain has undergone over time. You can run your finger along a timeline at the bottom of the screen to observe the gradual greening of the landscape. You can watch a pocket gopher emerge from its burrow beneath a thick layer of ash or admire a purple prairie lupine, one of the first plants to colonize the pyroclastic flow. You can follow an elk herd as it races over the pumice plain toward the mountain in a scene that seems transplanted from Africa’s Serengeti plain. You can hear bird ecologist Elise Larson describe the return of avian species to the mountain in the months and years after the eruption. You can call up a map of the road system surrounding the volcano, touch a spot on the map and go to scenes of that area.
Besides the kiosks at Johnston Ridge, three others will soon be installed: One at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument headquarters in Chelatchie Prairie, one at the Pine Creek Information Center south of the mountain, and one northeast of the mountain on Forest Service Road 99, which leads to Windy Ridge.
The nonprofit Mount St. Helens Institute, a partner in the project, hopes to make the display available on its website as well.
Second Story, the studio that produced the exhibit, had a wealth of images from which to draw, including outtakes from 40 hours of high-definition video acquired from Austrian filmmaker Jörg Daniel Hissen, who spent four years making the 52-minute film “Life from Zero.” He interviewed scientists in the field as they tracked plants and animals in the volcano’s blast zone. The film was broadcast by Nova on PBS last year, the 30th anniversary of the eruption, and recently rebroadcast.
In addition, the producers worked with about 400 photos, including some taken before the 1980 eruption, as well as 16 interviews and 20 short video clips.
Producer Brad Johnson was inspired to work on the project after he got his first up-close look at the mountain during a crater hike several years ago.
“Going on that trip opened me up to a whole new world,” he said during a preview of the exhibit Tuesday. “I became obsessed with it.”
“Our role has been to help create interest in what’s going on on the mountain,” said Jeanne Bennett, executive director of the Mount St. Helens Institute. Asked whether the public might be blasé about the volcano in its backyard after 31 years, she said, “The story is not about the 1980 eruption anymore. It’s about the incredible diversity of life.”
“To me, the landscape is even more exciting with the life on top of it,” said monument scientist Peter Frenzen. “Our challenge is to open people’s eyes to what the mountain offers. That’s really where the show is.”
Renaissance of sorts
The debut of the new exhibits marks something of a renaissance for the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, which languished for years due to lack of Forest Service funding.
The renewal began last year, with new windows, carpeting and exhibits at the Johnston observatory and other improvements paid for with $8 million in federal stimulus money. One exhibit displays seismic activity beneath the mountain in real time on a digital screen. Another shows seismic activity recorded during the early part of the volcano’s 2004-08 dome-building period, as the mountain was shaken by harmonic tremors and days of regular drumbeat quakes.
Projectors in the observatory’s movie theater were 13 years old and parts were getting hard to find. Stimulus money paid to replace the projectors and remodel the high-definition theater, which will debut its remastered “Message from the Mountain” movie, telling the story of the 1980 eruption, on Sunday.
“The movie will be bright and clear, and the sound will be more vivid,” Frenzen said.
Stimulus money and a grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust to the institute paid for the new interactive exhibit, which cost about $105,0000. New audio translation handsets will deliver information in six languages.
It’s a far cry from November 2007, when the Forest Service closed its Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center, a few miles down the mountain, after struggling for years with chronic budget shortfalls that left the dilapidated center with cracked concrete, broken windows and worn, outdated exhibits. Coldwater remains closed, but thanks to stimulus funding, it’s being repaired, and the agency is looking for a vendor to reopen the 18-year-old building’s restaurant.
The Forest Service successfully competed for federal money under a program that pays for capital investments at priority sites throughout the national forest system. That will allow it to complete its new outdoor amphitheater near the Johnston observatory. It’s scheduled to open this summer.
Monument manager Tom Mulder gives credit for the turnaround to Washington’s congressional delegation, local government officials and to a special commission that drew attention to the monument’s plight, as well as former Northwest Regional Forester Mary Wagner.
“When she arrived, she made an important commitment to the monument,” Mulder said. “She said we should be able to be a world-class asset that the community is interested in being involved in. We just needed a green light to be creative.”
Mulder also credits the institute for fundraising and recruiting volunteers in what has become a productive partnership with the Forest Service.
“Almost everything that is exciting at the monument, the institute is a player in,” he said. “Everything we’ve been able to do is because of their assistance.”
