In Terror on Mount St. Helens, Professor Grant Coleman has to escape a number of deadly prehistoric plants and animals as he scales the slopes of this active volcano. The novel contains some interesting, true-life, geological oddities at the national monument.
One of them is a lava tube. Ape Cave on the mountain’s south side is an excellent example of one. These occur when a flow of lava cools on the outside while the hot lava inside keeps flowing.
It’s a short hike to the steps that lead down to the cave’s entrance, seen above from inside the tube.
Inside, the cave stretches for miles and is big enough to drive a semi-truck down. The rock’s strata patterns in the picture above makes it look filled with water, but it isn’t. The floor is actually a jumble of rocks that have fallen from the ceiling over centuries.
In the story Grant comes across a “phantom forest” where lava preserved the impressions of tree trunks and logs that have long since rotted away. There are examples like this on the mountain at the Trail of Two Forests Interpretive Site.
Above is an example of where the lava had once encased a tree trunk. There is also a place nearby that where you are actually allowed to crawl through an old log formation, as you can see on the map below.
Doing so is a challenge. First, you climb down a ladder.
Then you crawl through this tree trunk. (Note the bark impressions are still there.)
And finally you exit though this hole. The claustrophobic need not apply.
Trust me when I tell you that visiting Mount St. Helens is worth the trip. You can check out some of its other natural beauty at the other bonus material page for the book here.
Paleontologist Grant Coleman is on vacation at a lakeside resort near Mount St. Helens, Washington. All he wants to do is relax, but while he’s floating in an inner tube on the lake, the dam fails. He and others are swept away in the ensuing flood.
He awakens on the riverbank somewhere downstream in the heart of a national forest on the slopes of Mount St. Helens. He meets Ridley Montrose, a back-to-nature woman living off the land, and a group of fraternity brothers dumped from a party boat on the lake. They huddle by the water, awaiting rescue.
But that is no place to rest. They discover the river harbors a deadly fish. Their only hope is an uphill trek to the open areas on Mount St. Helens. But this route proves to be just as dangerous. Murderous beasts, thought extinct for thousands of years, hunt the forest, and seismic activity shakes the earth. Death stalks the group at every turn.
Countless numbers have died on these slopes over the decades, and it looks like Grant may soon be one of them. Will anyone survive the terrors on Mount St. Helens?
If you haven’t already gotten your copy of Terror on Mount St. Helens, you can get one here on Amazon. Don’t miss the other page of bonus materiel for this book here. Thanks for checking out my page!