Topic: Road trip!! update 8/19/07

[Cheesemaker]

We'll the family and I are going to go to see Mt. St. Helens tomorrow.  And I got to stop by the toy man in Portland to get parts tomorrow.  It's been a long time since I saw the mountain.  Right after they opened it up to the public to see!  The van is loaded with picnic stuff, and bungee cords to hold parts on the roof rack!  Will post some pics when we get back.

[kneedownnate]

Have fun!  We made that trip years and years ago.  I was too young to fully appreciate the scope of the damage but was still surprised by just how drastic it was. 

[weirdtimes_7]

I love going up that mountain, it's so surreal to see how powerfully the explosion really was....  just amazing......

military_stang

[abnormaltoy]

I watched a show on the Disaster Network (Discovery) the other day that included the St. Helens footage, the amount of earth that fell away before the blast was amazing! Enjoy yourselves and take plenty of pictures.

[Lady Di]

  That sounds like a great roadtrip!

 

[Cheesemaker [OP]]

This is the image from Johnston Ridge, we are five miles from the crater itself!  In a book I bought, said that the flow from the mountain when it blew, hit the side of Johnston Ridge and went up and over the ridge I was standing on.  You can see down the side of the ridge to the bottom!


Here's another shot from Johnston Ridge!


Who's this STUD?


This is my wife!


Here's the family!


This is down stream from the Mountain, in the Toutle valley!  You can see the debris build up and how the water is slowly carving it's way down through it!  The debris is like several hundred feet thick there in the picture.


This is looking down from the Coldwater Ridge observatory onto Coldwater lake.  Which was created during the blast.  The green area in the middle of the pic is debris that built up in the canyon and created a damn like structure.  We had our picnic down there along the lake!


Speaking of picnic!



This is looking up Coldwater lake.  If you look at the walls of the canyon, you can tell they were formed by glaciers, the smooth walls!


The mountain was steaming for us too!


It was a beautiful day to see the mountain.  I pulled out some old photo albums and showed the kids some pics when I there the first time.  It was August of 1982 when I went!  And there was no green, just gray! 
When we got there the clouds parted for us to see inside the crater, and shortly after the clouds moved in!  I want to go back later and hopefully spend more time in the area and hike some of the trails! 

We have more pics, but that is all my wife loaded onto photobucket, because photobucket was being picky!

Thank you for looking at my pictures. 
I think that Minisimp would love to go and take pictures of the mountain!

[topar]

Cool Pics.  Looks like a nice family day. 

[Lady Di]

Very cool, Cheesy, thanks for sharing!

[79coyotefrg]

looks like a great time Cheesey     

[AaronB]

beautiful

[Cheesemaker [OP]]

Well, we road tripped again!  Had a 3 day weekend, first day was busy running around going to the eye dr, the dentist, library, registering my eldest for school, back home like a half dozen times, and to my sister's house to write on her walls before the sheetrockers come in and put up the sheetrock on her new home!  And my third day off was yard work and worked on the truck a little!

But the second day was Road Trip #2! 
We went to Salem, Oregon and visited the Enchanted Forest!  http://www.enchantedforest.com/enchanted_forest.html

It was fun to watch the kids! 



And then we left there and headed towards McMinville, OR to see the Spruce Goose!

That's a Titan missile next to it!


This is inside looking towards the tail!


It was really hard to get pictures of how big the Goose is in person, just standing around it was impressive, and they have the belly of the plane sunk into the floor to get the plane closer to you!

And my wife was really excited about this one!  It's a MIG 27?

You can see how the Russians copied the F-14/15 on this plane!

There were other planes there that got me all excited, like a B-25, a B-17 mitchell (got to talk to a gentleman that was a ball turret gunner there too!  That was awesome!),  Huey helicopter, F-14, a DC plane, stunt planes, and several several others, including the fastest plane ever built!  The BLACKBIRD SR-17!  That was awesome!  If you ever get to the area I recommend it!  They were in the process of building a new building that was gonna be for space travel!  And they also have another building that houses a IMAX theatre.
http://www.sprucegoose.org/   If you go to the website, you can see the the building that houses the Spruce Goose and how wide it's wingspan really is!

It was a fun day, I'd love to go through the air museum without the kids one day, that way I'm not so rushed at looking at all the displays!  They also had alot of engines on display that was cool to look at!

[Wermz84]

  I remember going to the Enchanted forest as a kid.   Hopefully they have good memories for a long time.

[Stocker]

Driven past the Enchanted Forest many times but never stopped...  I used to live near McMinnville (Mac to the locals) -- grew up in the area and had family there for many years, before Evergreen acquired the Spruce Goose.  No living family there anymore (Grandparents are interred at Mac) but fully intend to go through the Evergreen museum one of these days. 

Great pics, thanks for posting 'em!   

When do you hear about your shift change -- soon, isn't it?

[topar]

  Looks like a fun trip.