Eruption review

MOSES LAKE — It didn’t take long after the eruption on Mt. St. Heles on May 18, 1980, for life to begin to re-emerge on the sides of the mountain, according to biologist and author Eric Wagner.

Wagner, speaking in the Moses Lake Civic Center Auditorium on Saturday about the recovery of the area around Mt. St. Helens in the four decades of the volcano’s last major eruption, told the story of plant biologist Jerry Franklin, aquatic biologist Jim Sidell and geologist Fred Swanson and the helicopter trip they took to Ryan Lake, about eight miles northeast of Mt. St. Helens, in June 1980, about two weeks after the eruption.

The trip could have been a short one given the state of the volcano, Wagner said, so once they landed, they needed to stay close.

“So, Jerry Franklin, he’s ready to go. He’s raring to go. He opens up the door and he hops out. And he looks down at his boots. And what does he see but little green shoots pushing out of the ground,” Wagner said.

It was fireweed, Wagner said, a hardy plant that is among the first to grow back after wildfires, and the first proof researchers had that life was busy reestablishing itself around the mountain far more quickly than anyone anticipated. More fireweed shoots were found in areas covered under the mudslides and volcanic debris near the mountain in subsequent visits, Wagner said.

A speaker with Humanities Washington, Wagner was in Moses Lake to talk about the rapid recovery of plant and animal life around Mt. St. Helens following the 1980s eruption which killed 57 and buried large portions around the mountain in mud and debris. Biologists and ecologists initially believed it would take many years for life to recover around the mountain, Wagner said, but the evidence quickly proved otherwise.

“The neat thing is that Mt. St. Helens showed just how life is resilient, that you can look at the near-clearing of over 200 square miles and there’s still stuff inside, that stuff can come back. Even in the face of this sort of unfathomable disaster,” Wagner said. “They (plants and living creatures) are just full of surprises.”

However, Wagner said the ways in which life returns to a damaged environment are not predictable and work on their own logic.

“It may not come back in the ways that you want it to or expect it to,” he said. “And when that happens, you have to know, as a user of the landscape, or as a manager, what it feels like to have an idea about a place and then have that place have its own ideas about itself.”

For example, Wagner said the researchers returning to sites near the volcano in the weeks following the eruption found tiny footprints from insects and small mammals like pocket gophers in the ash in addition to the fireweed sprouts. He sorted the flora and the fauna into survivors — things that managed to make it through the eruption — and colonizers, animals that made their way back to the damaged landscape, like elk and rainbow trout.

“The story of the rainbow trout is the story of Spirit Lake,” he said.

Wagner said despite being filled with ash and dead trees, plankton and algae quickly recreated the aquatic food web in Spirit Lake so that by 1983, the lake was clear, though decay and bacterial action had used up all of Spirit Lake’s oxygen. However, enough rainbow trout had survived the eruption because many nearby mountain lakes and ponds were still covered in ice at the time, and slowly made their way back to Spirit Lake without any help, with the first one found in 1993.

“If you’re a fish, and you’re just swimming around in the cold and dark, and then one Sunday it gets a little darker and a little colder and there’s a lot of rumbling, but you know, it isn’t like stuff’s crashing in on you,” he said. “It’s not like these brook trout were in terrific shape. It’s not like they were fat and happy. But they were alive.”

The elk also slowly wandered back into the area, Wagner said, nibbling on the emerging plant growth and as they pooped, providing fertilizer for even more plant growth as well as bringing in seeds caught on their bodies and scattering them around.

However, Wagner said the usual sequence by which plants repopulate a damaged environment has not quite held around Mt. St. Helens. Evergreens are supposed to be the last plant species to arrive, he said, coming after smaller plants, shrubs, and deciduous trees like Willows. The elk have taken to stripping and eating the lower branches of the fir and spruce trees, and those trees have not been doing as well as they probably would otherwise, he said.

“As one biologist would write, having an elk herd walk through an area sets succession back 10 years,” Wagner said.

The ongoing recovery of the land around the volcano has given biologists an opportunity to watch and learn a great deal over the last four years, Wagner said, and will give scientists and researchers more opportunities to keep learning how landscapes and ecospheres recover from spectacular disasters like the 1980s eruption.

“I always admire the foresight that people had to say this is really, really cool and we should just watch what happens,” Wagner said. “As the older scientists retire, new folks are coming in, they’re asking questions or bringing in new techniques. And so it’s neat to think about what the mountain will look like, what sort of lessons that Mt. St. Helens will continue to teach in the next 40 years.”

Wagner’s presentation was organized by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution Karneetsa Chapter in Moses Lake.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.