Healing

Mt. St. Helens in southwestern Washington state. Nearly 40 years after the eruption of May 18, 1980, there's little obvious evidence of the devastated area. You'd have seen a gray landscape from here a few years after the eruption; now it's all covered with second growth. (Not a big surprise to geologists, because eruptions like St. Helens's are common geologically--and the evidence for them is subtle!) The inset shows a telephoto of the mountain itself. The drainage in the foreground is the Toutle ("tootle") River.