Harvesting Begins At Rejuvenated Mount St. Helens

Weyerhaeuser Co. has begun harvesting trees that were planted 25 years ago in the ashes of the Mount St. Helens disaster.

During the violent blast, more than 150,000 acres of forestland were destroyed. Weyerhaeuser was the largest private landowner affected, with 68,000 acres.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered one of the world's largest recorded landslides, followed by one of the most powerful volcanic blasts in the history of North America.

After the eruption, the area looked as if it might never produce another tree. After touring the devastation, President Jimmy Carter noted, "Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the moon looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there."

Today, in the Green River Valley near the fringe of the blast zone, there aren't any obvious signs of the volcano's eruption on May 18, 1980. Ash that blanketed the area has long since mixed into the soil, and the forest floor is shaded under a canopy of green.

"It's a time of immense pride for all of us at Weyerhaeuser," spokeswoman Jackie Lang said. "By all definitions, this area was a wasteland 25 years ago. It's a complex and healthy forest today because of our active forest management."

In order to give the new forest room to grow and thrive, contract loggers will thin stands of Douglas fir and send the timber to lumber and pulp mills three times this year. Remaining trees will be ready for harvest in another 15 years or so.

"This is a pretty exciting time to be a forester," said Dick Ford, who in 1980 was in charge of Weyerhaeuser's 68,000 acres of company timberland within the blast zone. Ford and his co-workers started renewal efforts just 30 days after the eruption, when they dug through a thick layer of ash and planted the first trees.

Over the next seven years, 8.4 million trees were planted by contractors on more than 45,000 acres of Weyerhaeuser acreage in the blast zone. The remaining acreage was traded with the U.S. Forest Service to be preserved as part of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

Two visitor centers, Coldwater and Johnston Ridge, stand on land formerly owned by Weyerhaeuser. Weyerhaeuser plans to continue thinning forests on half of the replanted areas over the next seven years, said Bob Keller, harvest manager for the company's St. Helens Tree Farm. The rest of the replanted land won't be commercially thinned due to steep terrain or type oftree species.

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