New road at Mount St. Helens? Scientists see another disaster

A planned access road to Spirit Lake has ignited a fight between the U.S. Forest Service and academics over one of the most important research sites in the world

By Eric Wagner. June 18, 2020. The Truman Trail starts at the end of the Windy Ridge parking lot on the east side of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

Named for Harry Truman, a cantankerous lodge owner killed during the 1980 eruption, the trail follows a winding gravel service road for its first couple of miles. Then it descends to meet an expanse of land called the Pumice Plain.

From the Pumice Plain it rides the landscape’s contours, dropping in and out of gullies, crossing the occasional stream. Mount St. Helens presides to the south with its gaping crater. North of the trail lies the deep, cool blue of Spirit Lake.

To strike out over the Pumice Plain on the Truman Trail is to walk across one of the most closely studied landscapes in the world.

Scientists have worked here since the volcano erupted 40 years ago. In summer, they can be seen checking mammal traps or surveying plants.

“This is one of the world’s great natural laboratories,” says Charlie Crisafulli, a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) ecologist who has worked at Mount St. Helens since 1980. “The record of research and discovery that has come out of here is extraordinary.”

But the closeness of that attention now faces an uncertain future thanks to Spirit Lake; or, more precisely, thanks to a small hole at the base of a ridge on the lake’s western shore.

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That hole is the mouth of the Spirit Lake tunnel, built after the eruption to allow the lake to drain to a nearby river. After nearly four decades in service, however, the tunnel needs to be either upgraded or replaced.

At issue is how the USFS wants to do that: by building a 3.4-mile-long road through the heart of the Pumice Plain. Officials say the pair of projects would take two or more years to complete and cost between $5 and $15 million.

Scientists oppose such a road.

Whether the Forest Service heeds their objections could have enormous consequences not only for their studies, but also for the unique experiment that is the Pumice Plain, and Mount St. Helens.

Why it’s so valuable

The tangle of the lake, the tunnel and the anxieties they provoke go back 40 years to when Mount St. Helens erupted on the morning of May 18, 1980.

Although the eruption has since entered regional lore as a singular event—the Eruption of Mount St. Helens—it was actually several processes in quick succession. First, a powerful earthquake caused the mountain’s summit to collapse in the largest landslide in recorded history. Seconds after, clouds of ash and steam and shattered stone exploded out from where the summit had been, racing over the land at more than 600 mph and flattening the forest.

These processes would remake the landscape. Part of the landslide, or debris avalanche, plunged into Spirit Lake with such force that a huge wave may have sloshed up the hillsides, gathering up tens of thousands of fallen trees and dragging them back to the lake.

Even more debris rumbled 14 miles down the North Fork Toutle River valley. Water then leached from that debris, sending tremendous mudflows down the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers.

The mudflows destroyed hundreds of bridges, homes and buildings before they reached the Columbia River more than 70 miles away.

Meanwhile, back at Mount St. Helens, waves of blistering pumice spilled over the crater walls, and a plume of ash began to rise more than 15 miles into the sky.

The eruption left 57 people dead and caused $1 billion in damages. Pumice covered a six-square-mile area in front of the mountain—the Pumice Plain—to a depth of 120 feet, while Spirit Lake became a black cesspool of logs, pumice and ash.

After the eruption, the lake bottom was almost 200 feet higher than it had been. Its surface area had nearly doubled to about 2,200 acres. And its sole outlet to the North Fork Toutle River was gone, buried under as much as 600 feet of debris.

After emergency responders, some of the first people to visit the blast area were scientists. Geologists were keen to unravel the eruption’s mechanisms.

But just as eager to see the devastation was a team of biologists for whom the eruption was in essence a massive, unplanned experiment. In the decades after the blast, they’d look at how everything from bacteria to plants to large mammals returned.

Plots set up in the Pumice Plain in the early 1980s are still in use today, having served as the foundation for hundreds of scientific papers.

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One group’s findings helped shape regional forest management by uncovering the role “biological legacies”—organisms that survived the blast—played in the development of the post-eruption community.

“Mount St. Helens has taught us so much about how plants and animals respond to large disturbances,” says Crisafulli. “It has let us ask questions that no one can ask anywhere else in the world. That’s what makes this such a valuable landscape.”

It was in part at the urging of scientists that President Ronald Reagan created the monument in 1982, setting aside more than 100,000 acres as a place for “geologic forces and ecological succession to continue substantially unimpeded.”

Spirit Lake dilemma

While Crisafulli and his colleagues were hard at work, though, Spirit Lake was not sitting idly by. Having no outlet, and with rain and snowmelt pouring into its basin every year, the lake began to rise.

Government officials soon realized they had a potential catastrophe on their hands: if the basin were to fill, Spirit Lake could breach the debris blockage and violently empty, unleashing huge mudflows on downstream communities still rebuilding from the 1980 eruption.

To forestall this, in 1985 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a 1.6-mile-long tunnel through a nearby ridge to let the lake drain into the North Fork Toutle River.

But while the lake’s surface was steady, the ridge through which the tunnel had been drilled was not. It was instead a matrix of small faults and shear zones that buckled and squeezed the tunnel.

Engineers have had to close the tunnel several times over the years to make repairs. During a recent closure that lasted several months, Spirit Lake rose more than 30 feet.

Federal managers were spooked. What if the tunnel were damaged in an earthquake?

“It was definitely a wakeup call,” says Chris Strebig, a project director with the Forest Service.

Officials faced a situation that Rebecca Hoffman, the monument’s manager, characterizes as “urgent, but not an emergency.”

Was the lake an immediate danger to the public? No. Might it become one in the future? Maybe, but only under the right circumstances.

“This is the struggle we’re in the middle of,” says Hoffman. “I don’t want to get to the point where we wait for an emergency.”

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In 2016, the Forest Service asked a committee from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to help determine the best way to manage Spirit Lake.

A NASEM team studied the problem for a year and issued a report in late 2017, which highlighted both the need for Spirit Lake to have a second outlet, and also how outdated much of the information about the lake system was.

But as the Forest Service decided on a course of action, the authors cautioned, it would have to be both deliberate and deliberative.

“The process needs to be informed by good science,” Gregory Baecher, a University of Maryland engineer and chair of the NASEM committee, told the Seattle Times in 2017. “But ultimately it is a question of objectives and values.”

Trucks vs. helicopters

That question of objectives and values is now at the fore of the dispute about the Forest Service’s plan.

Following the release of the NASEM report, the Service initiated an effort to find a second outlet for Spirit Lake.

Given the challenging terrain, the options are limited. Perhaps engineers could dig another tunnel under a different ridge. Or a channel through the debris blockage.

But the exact geological nature of the blockage is one of the aforementioned knowledge gaps. No one knows precisely what it is made of, how stable it is.

Monument managers decided that, to find out, they needed to drill into it.

The challenge is how to get large rigs out to the drilling site.

In late 2018, the Forest Service proposed building a temporary road across the Pumice Plain to transport the rigs. The proposed road would have followed an old roadbed the Corps used when it was building the tunnel in the early 1980s.

Researchers objected. Most of the old roadbed has long since eroded away. In its place now is the Truman Trail.

Even a temporary a road would significantly change the fragile landscape, they argued. And the planned route passed right through several long-term study plots.

Their initial reaction was so negative that the Forest Service withdrew the proposal in spring 2019.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Regeneration at Mount St. Helens lets researchers ask questions that can’t be asked anywhere else in the world.[/perfectpullquote]

But just a few months later, in December, the Service released a new proposal. This time, the drilling project was fused with another, unrelated project to replace a gate at the head of the Spirit Lake tunnel. According to the Corps of Engineers, the gate is no longer up to standard.

To complete these two projects, the Forest Service proposed either to build the road, or shuttle equipment and personnel in by helicopter.

Researchers preferred the helicopter approach.

But after receiving public comments, the vast majority of which opposed the road, the Forest Service announced in early April it had opted for the road. Additionally, the Service determined the project would have no significant environmental impact on the surrounding area.

The research community of Mount St. Helens is supremely dismayed with that decision. Forest Service officials say they’re trying to lessen the dismay.

“We’ve been working with the research community throughout the project,” Hoffman says. “We’re working with specific researchers, and will continue to work with research community to limit the amount of impact that occurs.”

Done deal?

Biologists feel they aren’t being listened to. Some who attended early planning meetings left fearing a decision had already been made.

“I just came away with a sense that they’re bound and determined to build a road,” says Carri LeRoy, a biologist at the Evergreen State University who studies stream formation in the Pumice Plain.

Now LeRoy, who recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation, fears for the future of her work; if the Forest Service builds the road it will pass right through her sites, and her project might be over as it begins.

“I’m worried they’re just paying lip service to researchers’ concerns,” she says.

On top of that, biologists feel they’re being scapegoated.

Local media coverage has tended to frame the issue as one of road-versus-research. In public documents and meetings about the project in downstream communities, Forest Service officials have tended to stray more to the emergency side of the continuum than the urgent. They’ve shown images of the mudflows from the 1980 eruption, even though the likelihood of that history repeating itself is remote.

“This exercise is sold to the public as a must exercise for safety,” Arne Mortensen, a commissioner for Cowlitz County, wrote to me in an email. “Absent a near-term and long-term cost analysis to show otherwise, using the road approach looks better.”

Furthermore, researchers say, the environmental assessment and its determination of no significant impact are woefully inadequate, downplaying potential effects while ignoring others. They argue that a full environmental impact statement is needed to compel a fuller accounting of what a road might do to a landscape as singular as the Pumice Plain.

Either way, a rocky road

Undergirding all of these objections is the feeling that the Forest Service is giving short shrift to the uniqueness of the blast area at Mount St. Helens.

“Saying ‘public safety’ is an easy way to get what you want,” says Jim Gawel, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Spirit Lake since 2005. “It plays into the stereotype of researchers just playing around and not caring about the real world, and that isn’t true.”

No one disputes that Spirit Lake should be managed with the safety of downstream communities in mind, Gawel says, “but part of the issue is that the Forest Service is used to managing for forestry, not research. They haven’t been trained to think about an environment like this. You get the feeling they have a management template and they’ve just transposed it here, in this place that is singular.”

After all, as Crisafulli points out, Mount St. Helens has become famous for the innovative and creative thought it inspired since the 1980 eruption. Where others saw a lifeless wasteland, biologists saw an opportunity to watch all the ways life responds to seeming total devastation.

The Forest Service was a major supporter of those efforts then; no agency has spent more on research at Mount St. Helens.

Forty years later, Crisafulli argues, it would be nice if the USFS once more embraced that tradition of creativity and foresight. To do so would be a most fitting legacy.

Eric Wagner is the author of After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens, published in April 2020.