Mount St. Helens, seen from Twin Buttes, twenty miles away, across the Cascades. View shows the remarkable cleft or canyon on the southeast face of the peak.
The slopes not covered with new lava sheets and dikes exhibit, below the snow-line, countless bombs hurled up from the crater, with great fields of pumice embedding huge angular rocks that tell a story not written on our other peaks. These hard boulders, curiously different from the soft materials in which they lie, were fragments of the tertiary platform on which the cone was erected. Torn off by the volcano, as it enlarged its bore, they were shot out without melting or change in substance. On every hand is proof that this now peaceful snow-mountain, which resembles nothing else so much as a well-filled saucer of ice cream, had a hot temper in its youth, and has passed some bad days even since the coming of the white man.
The mountain was first climbed in August, 1853, by a party which included the same T. J. Dryer who, a year later, took part in the first ascent of Mount Hood. In a letter to The Oregonian he said the party consisted of "Messrs. Wilson, Smith, Drew and myself." They ascended the south side. The other slopes were long thought too steep to climb, but in 1893 Fred G. Plummer, of Tacoma, now Geographer of the United States Forest Service, ascended the north side. His party included Leschi, a Klickitat Indian, probably the first of his superstitious race to scale a snow-peak. The climbers found evidence of recent activity in two craters on the north slope, and photographed a curious "diagonal moraine," as regular in shape as a railway embankment, which connected the border moraines of a small glacier. The north side has since seen frequent ascents.
Canyons of South Toutle River, west side of St. Helens. These vast trenches in the soft pumice show by their V shape that they have been cut by streams from the glaciers above, rather than by the glaciers themselves, which, on this young peak, have probably never had a much greater extension.
The Mazamas, who had climbed St. Helens from the south in 1898, again ascended it in 1908, climbing by the Lizard and Boot. This outing furnished the most stirring chapter in the annals of American mountaineering.
Lower Toutle Canyon, seen on left above. Note shattered volcanic bomb.
