Entering the Blast Zone

[AlienGirl]

Today Xen and I drove to St. Helens, to try to get as close as possible to potential death. Some interesting things we saw along the way:

*A sign that said "Begin Blast Zone"

*Two Russian-speaking filmmakers with California plates filming a closed tourist shop in the middle of the night

*A lookout spot gated off and labelled "Media Only" in large red capital letters.

We drove up to the spot where the road is closed, but the higher we got, the thickr the fog became. Drizzly rain fell through a pea-soup fog that smelled of volcano, and the travel-advisory radio station told us that ash and rain could cause dangerous conditions on steep roads.

As we climbed into the fog, I got a really eerie unsettled feeling. Gideon (our bird) seemed to feel it too; he huddled close to me, something he usually doesn't do in the car. I wondered if we were feeling the electrical activity that seismic events sometimes put out, the thing that makes animals get scared right before an earthquake.

Unfortunately, we couldn't see the top of the mountain, and the tourist traps were all closed so I couldn't buy ash to send to the kids. Still was a good drive though.

Tucker

[Ruffhowse]

1. I saw on the local news yesterday some video from someone who had (very

illegally) climbed right up to the edge of the rim of the volcano. The video was rather shaky because he was feeling tremors every minute or so. He shot down into the volcano and got some nice shots of the dome. Pretty interesting, but I think he was kinda crazy to do that. He would have been toast if any kind of eruption would have happened.

[AlienGirl]

2. Xen has codified his volcano policy

Check out the latest rant: "If you want to see a volcano, you can!" on the site linked in my sig. (Yes, that's really a pic of Xen on the site. He really does look like...hehe...hehehe...some kinda bureaucrat or something.)

Tucker

[AlienGirl]

3. Kick for daytime peeps