had the day off (Discovererer's/Columbus Day, which we don't get in Hawaii), weather was amazingly good, long 3 hour drive (one way, left at 0900, got home at 1930), 332 miles round trip, buzzin after drinking mountain dew and red bull to keep me awake. but it was worth it. i'm glad i went.

ok, stories for some of the pics below
the first observatory was owned by Weyerhouser, the paper company. They've owned a majority of the lands around the volcano since about 1900. When the mountain blew in 1980, it destroyed most of their property. So they put a huge effort into restoring the area. They picked up whatever timber was still good after being burnt and blown down.
What they do normally is after cutting an area of trees, they plant new ones. However in this case, they had to replant about 2 million trees by hand. It took them years, and you can still seem them growing to catch up. They made the National Park after the eruption, so they couldn't help those trees grow. So in the park, the trees don't grow so well naturally compared to the Weyerhouser land.
2nd story: Sound. When it erupted in 1980, it was just a big park, no national park, observatories, etc. Just a big mountain. So there were some campers, etc around. When it did blow up, the sound got blown skyward. I think it was something like for some 60 miles around the volcano, no one heard it blow, as the sound bounced off the atmosphere and didn't land til 60 miles out. They saw and heard all the trees being blown down and the cloud and wind without hearing the explosion itself. Kinda scary.
g'nite.