Follow Mount St. Helens recovery

Looking for a reason to visit Mount St. Helens on the 31st anniversary of its cataclysmic 1980 eruption?

Here’s one: A new interactive touch-screen exhibit that lets you track the phenomenal return of plants and animals to the ash-gray landscape surrounding the volcano in the past three decades.

Beginning Saturday, three kiosks featuring the Return to Life exhibit will be available at Johnston Ridge Observatory, at the end of state Highway 504. Long lines may form inside as visitors explore the options at their fingertips.

You can click on one of the six disturbance zones – lahar, ashfall zone, pyroclastic flow, lateral blast, debris avalanche and scorch zone – to explore the changes the mountain has undergone over time. You can run your finger along a timeline at the bottom of the screen to observe the gradual greening of the landscape. You can watch a pocket gopher emerge from its burrow beneath a thick layer of ash or admire a purple prairie lupine, one of the first plants to colonize the pyroclastic flow. You can hear bird ecologist Elise Larson describe the return of avian species to the mountain in the months and years after the eruption. You can call up a map of the road system surrounding the volcano and go to scenes of that area.

The debut of the new exhibits marks something of a renaissance for the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

The renewal began last year, with new windows, carpeting and exhibits at the Johnston observatory and other improvements paid for with $8 million in federal stimulus money. One exhibit displays seismic activity beneath the mountain in real time on a digital screen. Another shows seismic activity recorded during the early part of the volcano’s 2004-’08 dome-building period, as the mountain was shaken by harmonic tremors and days of regular drumbeat quakes.

Stimulus money and a grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust to the institute paid for the new interactive exhibit, which cost about $105,000.