Day 51 - Father's Day and the Fog

It started out great, a nice breakfast, church with the family, a nice lunch at a great Indian restaurant and then an afternoon on beautiful Mount Helens. Well, that's the part that didn't happen according to plan as mother nature had her own ideas. Locally, they are calling this month Juneuary as a rebuttal for the sixth straight month of monsoon season in 2010. Apparently, it has been an unusually wet year with little sun and currently there is no end in sight. It started out drippy driving up the mountain and then turned to stark white pea soup. We were somehow optimistic that at some point there wold be a magic opening of the clouds and there it would be in all its volcanic majesty. Bt it didn't. We did make it up to the Johnson Ridge Visitor's center where we viewed a really interesting film on the volcano and at the end of the movie, the big screen magically rolled up and then with musical fanfare the curtains behind the screen rolled up to reveal a huge glass wall which was hidden behind the curtain, the purpose of which was to reveal Mount Saint Helens to the movie audience in all it's beauty. But it didn't. Instead, we had a wonderful view of fog. The good news is it was a great father's day with my family, what more could you ask for. Maybe tomorrow we will get a glimpse as we head north toward Seattle. Here's a great video of the eruption, worth watching.