How Hiking Mount St. Helens Transformed My Path to Healing

Sometimes what we seek has been within us all along

Mount St. Helens eruption, May 18, 1980 [U.S. Forest Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Towering Douglas firs lined the dirt-packed trail blanketed in brown needles, spongy beneath my boots. The air smelled of tree sap, and birdsong echoed in the canopy.

Sunlight filtered through the boughs in scattered rays, like a hand fan flared open. Wisps of white clouds floated against a cerulean sky. Somewhere in the distance, a creek babbled.

Hiking with others on a guided trek to the top of Mount St. Helens, I thought about seeing the mountain erupt twenty-three years earlier. It was a week before my ninth birthday. Jimmy Carter was president, and at school, we were learning about current events. The Iran hostage crisis dominated headlines, but interspersed were stories of St. Helens.

Then one night, while setting the kitchen table, the news on TV stopped me. For weeks, I had watched footage of the mountain spewing steam and ash into the air, with reports of earthquakes signaling the coming doom.

News segments featured Harry Truman, the man who refused to leave his lodge at the base of the mountain, next to Spirit Lake. I worried about his safety.

I ran to our TV and plopped in front of it.

“Kris, what are you doing?” Mom called from the kitchen as she stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce.

“St. Helens finally blew its top!” I shouted.

She rushed into the den, and we watched the coverage together. A massive column of smoke and ash rose above the mountain. Truman’s lodge had been buried. His fate was unknown.

“That guy’s crazy for not leaving,” I said. “Why do you think he stayed?”

“Who knows?” Mom said. “Sometimes you just don’t want to leave.”

“Is that how you felt when you left Des Moines?”

She shrugged and walked back to the stove. I stared after her, half listening to the news, which had turned to flooding caused by the blast.

Was that a yes?

Mom always said she didn’t miss Iowa with its frigid winters, but I knew she’d left behind her sister and an aunt and uncle she adored. Maybe that was why she always seemed mad at Dad, because she missed her home.

On the news, the massive ash cloud billowed higher above the mountain.

Three days later, Dad’s El Camino was coated in a fine grayish-white powder. When he saw it, he put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well, I’ll be. Would you look at that?”

Then he drove to the car wash.

Ash from St. Helens had reached all the way to Oklahoma City. Who knew destruction could travel so far?

After the eruption, I convinced Mom to buy me an encyclopedia series on volcanoes. She ordered the first one — the free trial — but canceled the subscription, so I pored over that single volume like it was a sacred text, searching for the answer to how something that looked so peaceful could explode with such violence.

Later, I would wonder the same about myself.

Like St. Helens, my eruption rumbled before it blew. There were warning signs, if anyone had looked long enough. In 1980, it felt like everything in my life was crumbling: my family dismantled one by one as my sister and brother left for college, my mother’s body thudding against walls during fights with my father, the dull shock of bone meeting sheetrock.

It was too much, the pressure of wanting to be loved. Wanting attention — especially from boys. Wanting to be seen.

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Starting out, the trail had been soft and shaded. But higher up, the trees gave way to mammoth boulders — tawny beasts that blocked our path. Their ragged angles were difficult to traverse, and shallow crevasses waited for an ankle to twist. Or break.

After an hour of slogging over boulders, the trail cleared again to what felt like sand but was shale — the remnants of lava rock pummeled over time and mixed with layers of ash. The eruption had blown out the north side, leaving behind a crater large enough to swallow the small village that once sat beside Spirit Lake.

We didn’t hike up the shale as much as slide up it — two steps forward, one step back. It didn’t feel like progress at all until suddenly, I looked up and realized I was higher than I thought.

By then, I was exhausted. My knees ached, and my calves burned. The sun glinted off patches of snow in a blinding glare, and the gray shale radiated such relentless heat it felt like a desert at noon, parched and unforgiving. The water bladder in my backpack was nearly empty. My breath came in shallow bursts in the thin air, making my head spin. Sweat stung my eyes.

At one point, I paused and looked up to where my fellow hikers stood, silhouetted against the sky. Thinking I couldn’t reach them, I considered turning back. But they called out encouragement and motioned me forward.

“It’s amazing!” someone shouted, and I knew I had to keep going.

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In my early twenties, I loaded my car with essentials, a new pair of hiking boots, and my dog. I hugged my sister and brother-in-law goodbye in an IHOP parking lot and drove away. White shoe polish on the rear windshield read: Oregon or Bust.

When I told my therapist I was moving to Oregon, she said, “You know, no matter where you go, there you are.”

The phrase struck me as trite. Maybe that was true for others, but it wouldn’t be true for me. She didn’t understand how badly I needed a new place, far from the pain and conflict I’d grown up with. I refused to hear her warning, choosing instead to believe the mountains would heal me.

It might have started with the mountain I saw every day: an oil painting of a snow-capped peak above a gently trickling stream that hung in our living room from the time I was four.

That image stayed with me, calling me toward something I didn’t yet understand.

But it wasn’t just the shape of the mountain that captivated me. I imagined a kind of peace lived inside that painting — a serenity I longed for, and a sense of belonging I never felt at home.

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Back on the trail, I reached what remained of St. Helens’ top and marveled at how much the land had recovered. But scars remained. Spirit Lake was still choked with logs, and the hillsides were so stripped and covered in shale that nothing would grow there again, at least not in my lifetime.

There were moments when I believed that I’d also healed. Mostly. But like the lake, emptied of Truman’s lodge, it felt like something was missing.

I still longed for acceptance. For my parents’ love that I didn’t have to earn.

From high on the mountain, I realized that what I’d been searching for was right where I’d left it. My therapist was right. Here I was, two thousand miles from home, with the same longings, the same regrets. But beneath all of that — what had always been there — was a clarity I hadn’t been able to name until then. A knowing that I could stop striving for something outside myself.

Climbing another mountain wasn’t the answer. I just needed to stand still long enough to hear what had already begun to rise up from the noise.

Healing hadn’t been a summit I reached in a single, graceful attempt, but a long slog of a climb. A slipping, sliding scramble toward peace.

Maybe it was finally time to go home.

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At the top of St. Helens with Mount Rainier in the distance, August, 1, 2003

© 2025 Krista Schumacher

A version of this piece was published in The Narrative Arc on Medium. It was my first boosted story.