Field Journal: Spirit Lake is an Obstacle Course
Vince Patton, Producer/Reporter
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 — The last thing we expected on the placid blue waters of Spirit Lake was to hear startling alarms.
"Look out, on the right!"
"12 O'clock! Go left!"
Tara, a research assistant, was acting as a spotter aboard the small boat we were using to motor to the far side of the lake.
She called out warnings as biologist Charlie Crisafulli navigated us around an obstacle course of floating hazards which could easily do serious damage to the boat or take out its propeller entirely.
I'd assumed Spirit Lake would present a tranquil, natural lake, free of humans and their impact.
After all, it's a restricted research lake in the blast zone of Mount St. Helens,
It turns out the hazards were from Mother Nature, placed in the lake 27 years ago. When the largest landslide in recorded history washed down during the 1980 eruption, it not only swamped Spirit Lake, it pushed the water up the surrounding hillsides with the force of a tsunami. The water came back down, and dragged almost every tree in the forest with it.
That forest floats to this day on Spirit Lake. Thousands of trees cover one fifth of the lake's surface.
From a distance it looks like those trees seem to stay clumped together.
But when you're out boating, you learn there are loose logs drifting. These are the obstacles we did not want to encounter at high speed.
Only once we reached the giant mat of logs did it become apparent that these logs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are really quite small. Some are just stubs. Many are huge. And there's so many of them they cover acres of lake surface.
And they make noise.
They bump and slosh in the water. Clanking, creaking, crunching sounds all the more eerie because it's in the water.
Videographer Michael Bendixen brought a friend to assist us. Derek Ecklund is an audiophile who brought an underwater microphone and recorded what that moving log mat sounds like from beneath the surface of the water.
Michael also dragged in scuba gear. Yes, we hiked 2 miles in and 2 miles out with nearly 180 pounds of equipment to allow Michael to dive in Spirit Lake.
Suffice it to say, he got some amazing scenes below the logs as if sunlight were streaming in cathedral windows. Be sure to watch the Mount St. Helens Mysteries story to see and hear the forest that floats to this day.
Charlie Crisafulli tosses Michael's underwater camera to him, then jumps in himself.
Other photos here.
