When a magnitude 5.1 earthquake hit northern Washington state on May 18, 1980, it triggered an event not seen in the contiguous United States in decades: a massive volcanic eruption.
In seconds, Mount St. Helens—the fifth tallest peak in the state—dropped to the thirtieth tallest, literally blowing its top and losing 1,314 feet of its height. Over the ensuing nine hours, avalanches of pumice, hot ash and gas traveling at 50 to 80 miles per hour cascaded down the mountain, devastating plant and animal life for miles around. “Prevailing winds blew 520 million tons of ash eastward across the United States and caused complete darkness in Spokane, Washington, 250 miles from the volcano,” says the U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet on the cataclysmic eruption.
By the time it was over, 50 people were dead, 70 percent of the mountain’s snow and ice had boiled away, and the land around the mountain had been transformed in ways that only a volcano can do to a landscape. Additional explosive episodes over the next several years built a lava dome in the volcano’s caldera—the crater formed by the initial eruption—and subsequent smaller explosions continued through 1999. Today the mountain continues to steam (see the USFS VolcanoCam site), and seismic activity from 2004 to 2008 formed a new lava dome in the crater.
After the initial disaster, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) moved quickly to acquire the surrounding land from local landowners, immediately seeing the need to preserve the impact zone the eruption had created. What had been a swath of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest became the Mount St. Helens Volcanic Area. In 1982, Congress designated a total of 110,030 acres as the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, still under the management of USFS. Legislation creating this monument calls for the Forest Service to “protect geologic, ecologic, and cultural resources.”
Congress approved a budget of $200 million to build the Spirit Lake Highway to the monument, as well as three major visitor centers along the highway’s length. As the opportunity to see an active volcano attracted more and more tourists, USFS added two more visitor centers. The 1980s and 1990s became a boom time for Mount St. Helens and the surrounding area, with tourists frequenting the area’s restaurants, hotels, and the monument’s many outdoor recreation options.
With the turn of the century, however, times began to change for USFS and its Washington holdings. Firefighting across the country began to consume as much as 45 percent of the agency’s annual budget, according to the Mount St. Helens Information Resource Center. This focus, coupled with a reduction in logging in the national forest, forced USFS to close the $15 million Coldwater Visitor Center, shifting the funds for its operations to maintenance of local roads and campgrounds. This shift, however, barely addressed the maintenance backlog the monument had accumulated.
Future funding for the monument has become a political hot potato in the state of Washington. USFS has a strong interest in retaining the monument’s management, but local officials and interest groups state that the agency has damaged its reputation by “not being aggressive enough in setting their budgets, or asking for the dollars they need to operate the Monument successfully,” the information resource center states. Many local residents want the recreational area they lost in the eruption, believing that this was promised to them in the 1982 legislation.
Others, including the National Parks Conservation Association and Axel Swanson, Cowlitz County commissioner, would like to see the area become Mount St. Helens National Park. “I really don’t know how much faith I have that the Forest Service can accomplish the (committee’s) two major goals”—i.e. better funding and a higher national profile for the volcano, Swanson told The Daily News Online in 2012.
“The redesignation of Mount St. Helens from Monument to National Park will not only afford the Mountain the prestige associated with National Parks in general, but will bring with it additional tourist dollars from non-local visitors that will benefit surrounding communities,” says an NPCA report titled Mandates, Economic Impacts, and Local Concerns: Who Should Manage Mount St. Helens?
“Were it not for the long history of the Forest Service’s management of the public lands in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, including much of the land that now comprises the Monument, one would be hard pressed to explain why Congress would have selected the Forest Service as the federal agency in charge of the Monument,” the NPCA report states. “To start, the NPS is the agency whose mission best fits Congress’ stated goals for the management of Mount St. Helens. Unlike the Forest Service, where recreation and preservation must compete with other land uses for funding and attention, resource protection and appropriate use are the only priorities for our Nation’s lands under the care of the NPS.”
Most recently, a group of more than 30 local community leaders visited Washington, DC, to petition Congressional representatives for Washington state and Oregon to introduce a bill calling for a study of Mount St. Helens and its feasibility as a national park. “Mount St. Helens is an international gem, worth preserving for our children and grandchildren to enjoy,” said Sean Smith, NPCA policy director and a former Mount St. Helens ranger. “The mountain and its surrounding communities deserve the prestige, recognition, and stability that would come with making it a national park.”
To date, the bill has not been introduced in Congress.
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