The amazing recovery of Mt. St. Helens.

The early airwaves from across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon, delivered a mildly warming wake-up brew of western and country music. I turned off Washington's Interstate 5 at Woodland and headed eastward toward the spine of the Cascades.

It was still dark at 5:30 a.m. as I headed for little Cougar, which sits right in the lap of Mt. St. Helens, surrounded by miles of Douglas-fir plantations. A few lights in roadside farmhouses were coming on, and my headlights began picking up signs with the local sentiment: "We support the timber industry."

The mountain I was approaching, I thought, most certainly had not supported the timber industry a decade ago.

It had, in fact, generated one massive, prolonged, volcanic burp emanating directly from the bowels of the earth. Mt. St. Helens, elevation 9,677 feet, summarily heaved, then dropped nearly 1,400 feet in the biggest avalanche in recorded history.

In the largely outward explosion that triggered this cataclysm, 200 square miles of prime Washington timber was suddenly devastated wiped clean off the earth's face near the new crater, or toppled chaotically farther out, or, beyond that, burned or superheated in a so-called "scorch zone" that reached as far as 25 miles to the northwest. Forest fires in that periphery burned for weeks after the May 18, 1980 eruption.

A plume of menacing gray ash rose 15 miles, then showered much of the mountain in a choking, plant-suffocating rain of pumice that buried nearly everything for miles around. Fifty-eight people died in the biggest U.S. geophysical event of the century. Ash fell as far away as Wyoming.

And now 10 years later, as the music played while I drove toward Cougar, my eyes began to move upward. My heart jolted. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

The sky around Mt. St. Helens was beginning to glow. Right before my now-wide eyes, it was glowing red enough and bright enough to .... I slowed down, turned off the radio.

I knew of a little overlook near Cougar where I could see the top of the mountain. I raced there and, in full view of Mt. St. Helens, beheld the beginning of a brief, monumental, magma-crimson sunrise.

I parked for a while, turned the radio back on, and quietly watched the day's curtain rise. The mountain, I could now see, would be quite approachable-and was until early last November, when another disturbance again sent ash to 30,000 feet and caused avalanches, limited mudflows, jittery headlines, but no major danger.

In a series of recent trips to this magnificent massif, I have hiked, helicoptered, driven, and camped the mountain, searched out survivors, and visited with tree farmers, silviculturists, entrepreneurs, interpreters, and recreation specialists who are in daily contact with Mt. St. Helens.

Those who are closest to the mountain these days, I found, seem to march victoriously out of the ash, their diverse flags unfurled in a celebration of survival-theirs and the mountain's.

The recovery of Mt. St. Helens particularly the forest comeback-is at least as amazing as the eruption itself.

Chuck Tonne, St. Helens survivor, could easily have been on the mountain when it blew. At the time, he was a recreation assistant for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest's Spirit Lake area, which is now part of the new Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. He did bear-control work and rescue coordination, administering three camps less than five miles from the crater.

Memorably, Tonne and his fiance gave Harry Truman, colorful Spirit Lake resort owner, his last piece of pie-apple-just before the couple joined the general evacuation. Truman, who refused to leave, was craggy-faced, irascible, and hence eminently quotable. The news media beat a steady track to his little place, even as it rumbled and shook during the pre-eruption earthquakes.

"That mountain will never hurt me," someone remembers him saying. "When you live someplace for 50 years, you either know your country or you're stupid."

Shortly thereafter he was vaporized.

Today Tonne is in charge of the Forest Service's premier visitor center a $6 million, 16,000-square-foot sensual trip to and "into" Mt. St. Helens, complete with an under-the-mountain magma walk-through, megagraphics, time-lines, movies, and

"Wheelchairs are no problem, and we have multi-language maps and brochures," he says, "cassette tapes for the sight-impaired, and telecommunication devices for the deaf. Barrier-free access is big here."

Interestingly, the visitor center isn't located on the mountain, but rather just seven miles from 1-5 to the northwest. It turns out that in the bigger scheme of things, this is just the first course in the Forest Service's total interpretive program for Mt. St. Helens.

Ross Graham, Weyerhaeuser forester, stands in a little clearing on a Douglas-fir forest. He's on the northwest shoulder of the mountain, kneehigh in ferns on the company's 446,000-acre Mt. St. Helens tree farm just outside the monument.

"The morning of the eruption, 68,000 acres of the farm were devastated," says Graham. "In the 10 years since, we have planted more than 18 million trees-mostly Douglas-firs in the farm's lower elevations and noble firs above that."

That task was no easy one. Planting by hand, one tree at a time, Weyerhaeuser's people had to penetrate ash sometimes two feet deep to find mineral soil. It was an enormous, highrisk challenge in forest regeneration that has no parallel.

Weyerhaeuser makes no bones about its operation, which is to plant, grow, and harvest trees for milling, pulping, and exporting.

As timber resources diminish in the Pacific Northwest, just how much timber is Weyerhaeuser-taking off its St. Helens Tree Farm, and for how many generations of timber can it do so?

"We harvest approximately two percent of our total acreage here per year. We're in our third generation of trees on some of these lands and have seen no decrease in soil productivity," he says.

The company, which lost much of its St. Helens old-growth timber during the eruption, shows a surprising degree of environmental sensitivity.

As we walk through an understory of sword ferns, vine maple, salal, and western hemlock in a second-growth Douglas-fir stand, Graham claims, "We're creating an environment that's conducive to most wildlife. The gloom-and-doom reports by researchers that all life was gone on the south fork of the Toutle River [ravaged by immense mudflows] were wrong. The river has recovered. Gravel brought down with the mudflow turned out to be ideal for steelhead. Their population growth has been tremendous." That afternoon, with Weyerhaeuser's chief helicopter pilot, Ron Wagner, I fly in a Bell LongRanger across the rolling shoulders of lower Mt. St. Helens. Within the new forest as we fly over, I see exciting lifescores of Roosevelt elk scuffing along in a new and welcome habitat. Higher up on the Green River, we set down and walk up to a stand of post-eruption, Weyerhaeuser-planted trees. Remarkably, they are now pushing 25 feet.

Dave Frosty, helicopter pilot, steps out of a well-used helicopter on the north fork of the Toutle and relates how he retired from Greyhound Bus Lines a few years back, took up helicoptering, and now hauls visitors to the mountain, working out of a little lunch stop called 19 Mile House.

"You might say I'm on a busman's holiday," he smiles.

Susan Wheeler, who operates the place, explains, "We take passengers on a half-hour trip up the mountain for $65 to $75, have a little museum with a video on the eruption, serve sandwiches."

She adds, "We do four or five flights daily in summer-wait for breaks in the weather when we have to. We're the closest helicopter operation to the crater. By the way, we saw 300 head of elk yesterday."

John Fraenzl, a Forest Service reforestation technician, scuff s through volcanic ash 18 inches deep in a planted forest of Douglas-fir and other species, some of them over 20 feet tall, in an area that was ravaged by the eruption. Today, Clearwater Valley, in an area of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest administered by the National Monument staff, is an example of a different kind of human-aided forest recovery.

"We had two opportunities here," Fraenzi says, "to run this valley as a tree farm or to provide for multiple-use management. We chose the latter. We're emphasizing species diversification, we're providing for different heights of stands, we're going for horizontal diversity-that is, irregularly spaced clumps of trees that give hiding places to elk and deer."

Adds Steve Kimball, Forest Service silviculturist, "A diverse forest is a healthy forest. In replanting this area, we've been looking at what has occurred naturally here in the past and have tried to plant in the same species proportion."

Viewed from an overlook on Highway 25 between Cougar and Randle, this 5,000-acre compartment is more than a recovering forest. It's admittedly an example of a significant transition in Forest Service thinking-toward natural forest management.

joel Andrews, mountainside entrepreneur, is tending a rack of barbecue chicken at Crater House restaurant, the only public eating place within Mt. St. Helens National Monument-the nearest other restaurant being at Randle, Washington, 60 miles away.

"We started this Forest Service concession with a couple of trailers," he says. "It was so windy they darned near blew over."

He adds, "We put in this building six years ago, have several thousand customers a week during summer, truck in our water from Randle, do a 200-mile garbage run to Longview."

On the menu this late-morning is your choice of barbecued chicken or ribs, beans, bread, and a fountain drink-for $6.95. Not bad for a mountainside whose face was wiped clean 10 years ago.

I can see four marvelous, metallic blue reflections of Mt. St. Helens. They're in two pairs of color-tint sunglasses, worn by a couple of hamburger-munching college kids from back East.

Blair Barner, ash opportunist, was a bit short on luck when the mountain blew. Eight hours after the eruption, here came a monstrous wall of mud-a mixture of melted glacial ice and volcanic ash-down the Toutle, filling his just-completed A-frame house with silt, ash, water, and one monstrous log. Turning a disaster into a going business was a bit of a trick, but today, at Barner's North Fork Survivors,' you can buy handcrafted volcanic ash figurines, genuine Mt. St. Helens T-shirts, coffee mugs, lasercarved doodads, and all manner of related memorabilia. Call it cash-from-the-ash.

Outside, visitors driving along the now-recovered river spot signs reading Carnivores & More," Sasquatch Lives," Flights to Mt. St. Helens.Enough people stop to make a tidy, though seasonal enterprise for Barner.

The A-frame, meanwhile, is open to the public-your only chance to see a building filled with 200 tons of ash, now as hard as concrete.

Sitting at his desk at Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument headquarterS, Brad Powell, monument manager, tries to sum up what has happened on the post-eruption mountain.

"When you take a place like Spirit Lake with its traditional recreation history and throw in a major international attraction like the eruption, you come up with a huge new audience people who would come here even if we chose to do nothing," he says.

"We're trying to protect the mountain and allow natural processes to proceed. We're also encouraging recreation use, and we're conducting longterm research on reforestation and other subjects."

That ambitious menu comes off Powell's lips easily. But behind the words are enormous developments now under way or recently completed. Some components:

As part of a $65-million program, the largest recreation project in Forest Service history, the agency is building a road to johnston Ridge (named for a geophysicist who perished there during the eruption). The development includes a huge bridge and a volcano observatory at the mountain's premier viewing site just six miles from the crater. The project will take several more years, funds willing. Some 1.5 million visitors annually are expected by the late 1990s.

About $600,000 per year is being spent on trails in one of the Forest Service's most aggressive programs. Some 25 to 30 miles are being built per year; 220 miles of trails will be in place within the next several years.

New winter parking and crosscountry ski facilities on the south side of the mountain.

A special system of barrier-free trails for the handicapped, some of them paved or done in crushed gravel. "We're ahead of the game in working with the disabled community," reports Bob Shank, Forest Service resource planner.

A just-completed facility at dramatic Windy Ridge opposite the crater: amphitheater, toilets, parking.

It's perhaps curious that all of this development is taking place right in the lap of a still-active volcano. It was to me. But Powell has thought about that carefully.

,Mt. St. Helens is the most monitored mountain in the world. The odds of another volcano taking out all our facilities are very small,- he replies.

Small, medium, or large, the possibility of a similar eruption has got to be in the mind of any thinking person around here; it certainly was in mine last summer when the sky turned red.

Meanwhile the showplace called Mt. St. Helens is attracting more than a million visitors a year. it is visual, monumental, easy to reach, richly educational. For forest lovers, this place is one scrubbed-clean, huge "delivery room" for future forests, both natural and human-assisted.

To me, that's the real kick on Mt. St. Helens. AF