Published: May 2010
Mountain Transformed
By McKenzie Funk


Three decades later, Spirit Lake holds a new mystery: How did fish, now twice the length of those pre-eruption rainbows, reappear? Everyone has a theory. Smith, who runs Eco Park Resort at the edge of the volcanic monument, thinks the trout slid down from smaller, higher St. Helens Lake during a flood year. But that lake has only mackinaw—and the Spirit Lake fish are rainbows. Biologist Bob Lucas of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife believes someone illegally planted them. In the late 1990s, an anonymous call to his home seemed to confirm it: "I'm the one who stocked the fish." Preliminary genetic testing by Forest Service ecologist Charlie Crisafulli also suggests the trout did not descend from the pre-eruption population, but he's given up on figuring out their origin. "There are as many stories as there are fish tales," he says, "and all of them start, 'I know somebody who put those fish in there.' " To him the important question is not how they arrived but how they grew so big. On the 30th anniversary of the May 18 eruption, one of the only things certain about the trout in Spirit Lake is that they've given everyone—environmentalists, scientists, fishermen, congressmen, rangers, and business owners—something else to argue about.

Mark Smith grew up at the lake, where his family ran the lodge one down from the one owned by Harry Truman, the famously cantankerous 83-year-old who shared a name with a President and was among the eruption's 57 victims. As a boy, Smith fished there. Today he'd have to break the law to do so. He's not saying he does, but if ever I want to join him, he is, ahem, very familiar with where a poacher could sneak in. "We were lost!" he yells, practicing his alibi. "We just saw this and started fishing!" The 2,700-acre lake now sits at the center of a restricted research area taking up roughly a quarter of the 110,000-acre Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, which Congress set aside in 1982 "to protect the geologic, ecologic, and cultural resources … in as natural a state as possible, allowing primarily natural geologic forces and ecological succession to continue unimpeded." Mostly closed to the public, this part of the blast zone has become one of our planet's grandest experiments.

The volcano came back to life from 2004 to 2008, shooting off plumes of steam and ash up to 30,000 feet into the sky, growing a new lava dome in its crater, and captivating sightseers and geologists. But many of the area's greatest insights have come in the field of ecology.

As a natural lab to study the rebirth of ecosystems, the blast zone has no equal. "It's the most thoroughly studied large-forest disturbance in the world," says Crisafulli, examined from nearly every angle, at nearly every scale, from molecules to ecosystems, bacteria to mammals, steaming geothermal vents to waterlogged meadows. Almost daily, callers inquire about the lessons of St. Helens. One woman is interested in salamanders, another in toads. Officials in Alaska and Chile want to know what to expect after eruptions of their own.



What I remember from my swim in Spirit Lake is not a sunken forest but an underwater jungle. Last August I drove behind Crisafulli on a sinuous two-lane road along Windy Ridge, through a damaged gate secured by a makeshift chain—"You'd think there'd be enough money to buy a new damn gate," Crisafulli said—and down a scary, slopeside jeep trail into the restricted area. At the edge of the Pumice Plain we began the two-and-a-half-mile walk that the lean 52-year-old has taken thousands of times. His ponytail swung with each step. He talked ecology almost nonstop, his New York accent still discernible after 30 years in the blast zone. Behind us was the volcano, snowless and gray, its northern wall collapsed, its crater exposed. In front was the lake, its surface calm and two-fifths covered by the "log raft," a shifting mass of thousands of floating logs. Along the trail were fir saplings, lupines, and Indian paintbrush, 15-foot-tall thickets of willow and alder, and, near a stream, hordes of toads and tree frogs. At the lake's edge, we got into warm fleece overalls that Crisafulli called bunny suits, into dry suits and masks and snorkels, and into a Zodiac raft, which motored into Duck Bay. And then into the frigid water.


Before the eruption Spirit Lake was, like many subalpine lakes, unproductive and nutrient-poor, with clear water and few shallow spots. When the volcano top slid into it at 150 miles an hour, it became choked with what Crisafulli terms "pyrolyzed forest constituents"—organic material burned in the blast. The water was warmed to body temperature, filled with dissolved carbon, manganese, iron, and lead. Visibility went from 30 feet to six inches. Bacteria flourished. The first scientists to take water samples came down with unexplained ailments. There was a rapid succession of microbes: aerobes, which quickly used up all the oxygen; anaerobes, which require none; then nitrogen-consuming bacteria; and then forms that fed on methane and heavy metals. For 18 months Spirit Lake was ruled by chemistry, home to "hundreds of millions of bacteria per milliliter," Crisafulli says. Finally, the microbes had consumed so much that they began to die off, and streams and snowmelt came in, and the water cleared.


Spirit Lake's richness is spilling over. When a tadpole dies as a frog on the Pumice Plain, when an insect hatched in the lake is deposited in the ash, their nutrients are transferred to land. Slowly this process undoes what the eruption wrought. "Before the eruption, the terrestrial environment was superproductive," Crisafulli says, with "lots of nutrients and carbon tied up in the old-growth forest. In comparison, the lake was impoverished. After the eruption they flip-flopped." Now the landscape is going back from gray to green, and the lake is becoming more like its former self.


Some fly fishers see the ongoing changes in Spirit Lake as a problem—of overpopulation—and offer themselves as the solution. "There's a world-class fishery going untapped, and it's the right of the citizens to fish it," Denny Way tells me. The president of the Clark-Skamania Flyfishers club, he's proposed opening up Spirit Lake before the trout shrink: ten catch-and-release fly fishers, along with a trained host, one day a week. The scientists, meanwhile, note that a dozen neighboring lakes are open to fishing but are undervisited and that at Spirit the danger is not the numbers but the precedent: ten fishermen or a hundred, the door would be open. Nominally about fish, the argument goes deeper: What should the monument be for?


Some hope for a Mount St. Helens National Park, with congressional funding, lodging, and more money for more science. Funds are starting to flow, with more than $6 million in federal stimulus last year, plus a $163,000 grant to the Mount St. Helens Institute for an exhibit at the end of the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway. The 30th anniversary means renewed interest. "In my talks at St. Helens I tried to get people to realize that the volcano is not static," says the National Parks Conservation Association's Sean Smith, a former St. Helens ranger now pushing for park status. "I'd hold up an Etch A Sketch and say the monument's like this drawing. The forces of nature control one knob. The public has the other."

"In the larger story of St. Helens, park versus monument is a blip in history," says monument staff scientist Peter Frenzen, who started alongside Crisafulli in the weeks after the eruption. "Access to Spirit Lake is a blip in history." Those who've walked the blast zone for three decades see the beginning of a more profound process. Breakthroughs are fewer—one plant pushing through the ash is no longer a miracle—but the pace of change is accelerating, the scale broadening. Instead of eureka moments, there is something approximating wisdom.

"Right now, the Pumice Plain is like a runaway horse," Crisafulli says. "Individual plots can't address the evolution." He plans to survey by satellite and airplane—tools that can see the big picture as the pixels fill in. "We're moving to broad-scale biogeography," he says. "It's the next frontier."
