With the 45th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption on Sunday, the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center is wrapping up the first update to its exhibits since it was constructed in 1986.
The visitor center, located between Castle Rock and Silver Lake, commemorates the eruption and teaches visitors about the surrounding Seaquest State Park.
It closed in September for updates, and will reopen with new exhibits expanding on how the area has changed since the eruption that killed 57 people, destroyed 200 homes, and forever altered the landscape.
The Washington State Park website says the center will reopen on May 31, but staff would not allow photographs taken of the exhibits prior to opening.
Lead Parks Interpreter Alysa Adams said the new exhibits will be more user friendly and center the eruption in the ongoing story of the mountain rather than treating it as a single isolated event.
“We still tell the story we told before, but we’re going bigger picture, that this eruption is only one chapter in the overall millennia of eruptions that have occurred,” she said.
Interactive and accessible
Many of the new exhibits will be interactive, including touchable models of plants and animals, a pinball machine that shows different types of volcanoes and a Make-A-Quake exhibit where visitors can see the impact of their jumps displayed on a seismograph, Adams said.
The center’s walkthrough volcano model, a central element which she said is very popular with visitors, has been updated with looping video feeds of magma.
Making sure the exhibits were accessible was an important concern. For example, wheelchair users will also be able to interact with the Make-A-Quake exhibit, and a periscope on the volcano model will allow people who can’t enter the model to view the inside.
Over 80 new historic artifacts are featured in the exhibits, including an eruption-blasted Weyerhaeuser logging truck door.
Washington State Parks partnered extensively with the Cowlitz Indian Tribe while developing the new exhibits, and the Cowlitz language is incorporated into many parts of the facility, Adams said. The tribe contributed several artifacts including a historic basket, woven cedar hats and carvings. An audio exhibit will allow visitors to hear Cowlitz words for area resources.
The center will also show a new feature film and a series of featurettes developed with the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. The film references the center’s original film, “Cycle of Chaos and Creation,” and covers the build up to the eruption, the actual event and current times.
“It does a really beautiful job of having it be cyclic,” Adams said. “These stories are woven. They are not separate.”
The film will still feature Greg Drew, owner of Drew’s Grocery in Toutle, who was also featured in the original film.
A much-needed update
The visitor’s center was constructed in 1986, only a few years after Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. Its exhibits have not been updated since then, so they were missing a lot of information, Adams said. They did not mention the existence of Johnston Ridge Observatory — which opened in 1997 but has been closed since 2023 due to a landslide — or the volcanic activity from 2004-2008 that created a new lava dome inside the crater left by the 1980 eruption.
“This exhibit, as beautiful as it has been, was kind of stagnant and stationary as of 1986,” Adams said. “We really felt it was time to put some upgrades into the system so that the story we were telling was a bit more authentic and accurate.”
The exhibits themselves were also starting to break down due to their age.
“I’ve laminated and taped too many signs to the walls that things were out of order and upgrades were coming soon,” Adams said.
Among the new exhibits is a decade-by-decade timeline of the plants and animals that have flourished since the eruption, which also delves into open-ended questions about what the future of the area will look like.
Planning for the updates began around five years ago. Adams, who has worked at the center for 10 years, said it was one of the largest projects she’s ever been involved in.
“It’s been a vast assortment of people who have really put a lot of love into this project,” she said.
Mount St. Helens Visitor Center
Address: 3029 Spirit Lake Hwy., Castle Rock
Info: 360-274-0962 or parks.wa.gov/mount-st-helens-visitor-center
