Hiking · Mount St. Helens, Washington, USA · recorded with NomadTracks

Mount St. Helens: 16 km through the blast zone to the viewpoints

Few trails walk you through a geology lesson like this one: 16.2 km across the hummocks — house-sized chunks of the mountain that slid here in 1980 — with the open crater staring down the whole time. About 600 m of rolling gain, and lupines everywhere the eruption once sterilized.

Distance16.2 km
Elevation gain608 m
ActivityHiking
Duration4 h 01 min

About this data: this track and its photos were personally shared with us as samples by a NomadTracks user. NomadTracks never uploads, collects or shares your tracks or photos — your recordings stay on your devices and in your own cloud.

Route map of Mount St. Helens: 16 km through the blast zone to the viewpoints drawn from the recorded GPS points on an OpenStreetMap basemap
The actual recorded GPS track — start marked green, finish orange. Numbered pins mark where the photos below were taken.

Download GPX Coordinates, elevation and relative times — recording dates are normalized out, photos not included.

Elevation profile of the track
Elevation profile over the full distance. Switch the map above to interactive mode, then slide across the chart — a marker follows the route.

A landscape with a timestamp

The blast zone is regrowth in fast-forward, different every single year. That's what makes a dated, recorded track interesting here: this line and these photos are a snapshot of the recovery — walk it again in five years and compare.

POIs as a field notebook

Viewpoints, the best lupine patches, the parking spot with the perfect crater view — all pinned with photos and notes. This is also the very track whose POIs appear in NomadTracks's App Store screenshots.

About the place: Mount St. Helens, Washington, USA

Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in Washington preserves the landscape of the 1980 eruption, and the trails through the hummocks — house-sized chunks of the former summit — read like an open geology book. The Coldwater and Johnston Ridge area is snow-free roughly June to October; lupines peak in July, recolonizing ground that was sterile rock within living memory.

Trail winding through the hummocks toward the open crater of Mount St. Helens
1 · Trail winding through the hummocks toward the open crater of Mount St. Helens
Lupine meadows regrowing in the blast zone below Mount St. Helens
2 · Lupine meadows regrowing in the blast zone below Mount St. Helens
Bleached snag left by the 1980 eruption against the recovering landscape
3 · Bleached snag left by the 1980 eruption against the recovering landscape
Mount St. Helens rising over the forested valley from the viewpoint trail
4 · Mount St. Helens rising over the forested valley from the viewpoint trail
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