Basalt, bones and big explosions fill the walls and screens of the Mount St. Helens Creation Center in Castle Rock.
The visitor center was started in 1996 by Lloyd and Doris Anderson, country preachers who were trying to figure out what to do when they retired.
“They said, ‘Are we going to go fishing? No, let’s build. Let’s turn our garage into a visitor center,’” said Bill Hoesch, director of the Mount St. Helens Creation Center.
Given the background of the founders, the center’s exhibits and educational courses are grounded in a Biblical view of geology.
“We believe the Bible makes truth claims about history. I’ve found it’s very exciting to do. I wasn’t always a religious person,” Hoesch said.
According to Hoesch, the couple wanted to make sure they were accurate with their center, so they consulted Steve Austin, a geologist who had studied the mountain for a while.
When the business first started, it was called “Seven Wonders Museum” and was run out of the Andersons’ garage.
“They had a very effective ministry and they would lead groups on field trips,” Hoesch said. “They had people visiting their garage, and they would talk to people about the truth of these kinds of things.”
The exhibit space and the programs offered have expanded drastically since the Creation Center’s original founding in 1996.
Within the facility walls, the Creation Center staff offer programs broken into two categories of study, origins and creation apologetics.
More casual visitors can spend their time in “an immersive museum experience” focusing their time on an immersive dinosaur and fossil exhibit, or a multimedia telling of the story of Mount St. Helens.
Special events are held at the Creation Center, too, with topics ranging from climate change to cosmology.
In 2021, Hoesch was hired to be the director of the Creation Center by his predecessors.
The Creation Center is busiest during the summer, organizing several field trips throughout the warm months to tour the mountain area.
“Sometimes we have a train of 12 or 15 cars and we drive as a caravan to different points along the way,” Hoesch said.
The groups will often stop, talk for around 15 minutes while overlooking the area affected by the eruption, then get back in the cars and drive to another spot.
Some of the notable places they visit include the popular Ape Cave Interpretive Site and the Tale of Two Forests.
“I’m a geologist, so I like to talk about the physical impact of the eruption before getting into ‘OK, what are some of the implications of this?’” Hoesch said.
For him, the eruption of Mount St. Helens brings some questions he’s had while practicing geology over the years.
“Rocks inside the crater were potassium-argon aged to be hundreds of thousands of years old when we know the true age was (7,000) years,” Hoesch said. “The eruption had excessive argon in the eruptive products and that’s what threw off the calculation.”
While that topic is still debated among some geologists, it sits as one of many that Hoesch believes give reason to discuss the possibility of creationism.
“Mount St. Helens, I’ve known it for the last 30 years, is the most amazing open door to talking about this issue,” Hoesch said. “Come and learn about the mountain that blew its top off 40 years ago and you might be surprised what else you might learn.”
The Mount St. Helens Creation Center is located at 147 Front Ave. NW in Castle Rock. It can be reached by phone at 360-274-5737 or by email at info@mshcreaitoncenter.org.
Follow the center on social media at facebook.com/mshcreation or donate to the center via P.O. Box 629, Castle Rock, WA 98611.
Learn more at https://mshcreationcenter.org/.
