B and I have arrived in Castle Rock! We’re taking the world’s laziest trip to Mount St. Helens, starting with a leisurely late departure from Seattle and an afternoon ambling round Castle Rock, WA: the Gateway to Mount St. Helens. See, last time we were down here, the volcano was socked in by clouds, and I realized that none of the guides really give you much to do when that happens. So I started nosing around looking for geological points of interest. Russell Evarts, the USGS geologist whose quad map documentation for the Silver Lake quadrangle reads like an epic adventure, pointed me toward the actual rock Castle Rock is named for.

So apparently, without all the trees, it looks more like a castle turret or something. It was pretty much barren when Eliza and William Huntington settled here, opened a post office, and established the town. It had been used as a landmark for Native Americans and traders at least since the early 1800s. Now it’s a 190-foot tall city park. Awesomesauce!

So do you want to climb a volcanic neck? Sure you do!

What you do is walk up the Riverfront Trail from Lions Pride Park. Aim yourself at that very large rock: you can’t miss it. After a short distance, you’ll be walking between the towering volcanic neck and a jersey barrier. Right about here, you’ll see a historic marker advising you that William and Eliza Huntington settled at this very rock way back in 1852, and a beautiful granite marker listing the pioneers. Just past that is one spur of the trail to the top. Most of the trail is platy bits of what looks like basalt or andesite. Then there’s this portion, which is a series of steps carved into the soil.

Volcanic necks are remnants of old volcanoes. They’re basically the internal plumbing of a volcano. You know those diagrams that show magma rising up a central conduit? These are basically those conduits, filled with frozen magma and various volcanic chunks. In many cases, this is sterner stuff than the outer bits of the volcano. Once the fire mountain has gone extinct, the softer stuff erodes away, and you’re left with the innards exposed, sometimes looking rather like a castle turret.

With the thriving forest that’s grown up on this one, the summit is quite a lovely place for a picnic.

As you go back down, take the left-hand branch when the trail forks, which will lead you to the other side of the neck. If you were disappointed too many trees were in the way to see the rock, you’ll be overjoyed here, as whole cliffs of bare rock are exposed. Yay!

There’s a rather interesting monument there at the riverside talking about how often Castle Rock has been severely damaged by floods from the Cowlitz River. It includes a bit about our very own May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Flood of 1980 – the eruption of Mt. St. Helens forever changed the banks of the Cowlitz River. The city itself did not flood because of the levees and dikes built around it. However, all the surrounding areas did; causing high losses of property damages [sic]. Many areas were covered with thick flowing mud and had to be dug out or left for a total loss.

We didn’t do the whole river trail, which is only about two miles long, but mostly exposed to the burning rays of the sun. We turned around and went back to the sweet, sweet air conditioning of the car. On the way back, we noticed that one of the hills looks like it has a mohawk due to the way it was clearcut, so of course we took a picture.

I suspect the ravines made that patch difficult to log, but there could be another reason. Feel free to speculate.

We drove a ways up Huntington Drive toward a parking area at the head of the Riverfront Trail. We were in search of the confluence of the Cowlitz and Toutle rivers, and so headed up the last spur of the trail. There’s a view of the Cowlitz there with the most extraordinary colors against the bank.

There are informal trails leading from the end of the Riverfront Trail, and so we followed them as far as we could. They lead to fantastic banks of volcanic ash, most of which is powder-fine. There’s also some coarser volcaniclastic sand.

There are whole dunes of this stuff. It’s magical to people who get really excited by volcanic products.

This ashy sand takes impressions extremely well – I’ll do up a post of some of the patterns we saw. It’s amazing to think that these delicate tracks and traces could end up fossilized someday.

That was pretty much the end of Day 1: we didn’t make it to the confluence of the rivers due to the trails petering out, so we headed for the hotel for some serious relaxing. The front desk person told us how to get to the confluence, so we’ll be able to visit that on Friday. You’ll love it. But Day 2 shall hopefully be Ape Cave and surroundings. Stay tuned for serious awesomesauce!