Visions of Spirit Lake: What do you remember?

When Mount St. Helens exploded that clear may morning 30 yearsago, Dorothy Packard had at least one consolation.

“She felt she lost the only competition she had ever had for mydad,” daughter Kathleen Packard recalled Friday. the mountain andSpirit Lake, which were blown into a primordial-looking wastelandon may 18, 1980, had been “the love of his life. he loved thatcountry.”

In 1961-62, Don Packard was director of the YMCA’s Camp Loowit,a summer camp at the northeast corner of the lake, accessible onlyby boat. several generations of youngsters got their first, and inmany cases their most intimate, experiences with nature there. LikePackard, who died in 1996, they never forgot them.

As time marches on, though, those memories are in danger ofdisappearing. in interest of preserving them, we’re inviting ourreaders to share their memories of pre-eruption times spent atSpirit Lake and Mount St. Helens (see note on the front page). Wewill publish them on our Web site, TDN.com, and select a few toinclude in the newspaper’s eruption anniversary coverage inmid-May.

Don Packard, who grew up to become principal of several Longviewschools, had a long memory of the volcano, though it wasn’tcommonly referred to that way in those days. it was just “themountain” or “the lake.” no other name was necessary.

“When he was 11, he climbed to the summit in his tennis shoes,”recalled his daughter, who as a teenager spent several summersthere with her whole family, working as a camp cook.

“All of us were aware of how beautiful it was and how beautifulthe lake was. the lake was so clear,” she said, that you could seebarbecues, old stoves and other refuse commonly thrown into thelake until the early 1960s. “At some point they started requiringpeople to barge their trash across the lake to a dump a little waysdown from Harry Truman’s Lodge,” she said, recalling the colorfulproprietor of the Spirit Lake Lodge who perished in theeruption.

“Y camp itself was just an incredible experience. it was so muchfun, and so much freedom,” said Dorothy Packard, 60, of Longview.they had a lot of wonderful activities. it was just an incredibleexperience.”

Campers on a week-long stay went on a one-night backpackingtrip, she said, while those on a 10-day camp went for atwo-nighter. they would hike to Meta Lake, a steep, arduous trekthrough old growth forest in the Mount Margaret Backcountry. Nightscould get chilly, she recalled, because sleeping bags weren’tinsulated with goose down as they are today. Summer camp at SpiritLake was the main reason she studied forestry, though now she takescare of her mother, Packard said.

Her father, an avid hunter and fisherman, “knew that land likethe back of his hand,” Packard said.

On the morning the mountain erupted, her dad had been visiting aMormon church in Rainier. His first thought was to get back up tothe family’s cabin on the Toutle River to salvage what possessionshe could.

That would have been a bad idea.

Mudflows caused by melting snow and ice swept the cabin off itsmoorings along Tower Road. down the Toutle River it floated,largely intact until it splintered on the underside of theInterstate 5 bridge. TV video of the home’s obliteration is amongthe most iconic and enduring of the events that unfolded thatday.

Her dad would have liked to see the Y rebuild the camp, butcreation of the Mount St. Helens National Monument, the lack ofaccess and the instability of the mountain and land itself, ruledthat out.

“That really broke his heart,” Kathleen Packard said.

The last time her father visited the lake, the winter before theeruption, he went to retrieve his boat with his then-son-in-law.With daylight waning, old buddy “Doc” Belding radioed from acrossthe lake, saying he and his sons had shot an elk and needed helpgetting it out. Despite the cold and impending nightfall, her dadzipped across the lake, used Belding’s descriptions of theirsurroundings to find them, then brought them all back to the southshore and the old Spirit Lake Highway. by then it was pitchdark.

“It was the last experience he had with the mountain.”

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