Twenty-four years after the explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens, the most active volcano in the lower forty-eight states, the landscape on the sloping plain beneath the crater is still turbulent and unsettled. Flowing from the mile-wide breach in the crater wall, glacier-fed waterfalls erode dark volcanic cliffs. Streams sprawl over the landscape, cutting deep channels into volcanic deposits and spewing rocky rubble. The rawness and scale of this place suggest a land still being formed.

It’s a cool, overcast day in late spring, and thick clouds cover the upper slopes of the mountain. From a vantage point a few miles north of the crater, the pumice plain is a series of eroded slopes and hummocks that slant north to Spirit Lake and the headwaters of the Toutle River. On the flat surfaces between stream cuts and recent debris flows, a pale green carpet unfurls. Beds of moss and clusters of prairie lupine are interspersed with grasses, sedges and crimson paintbrush. Waist- to head-high alders and willows form the first wave of recovering forest. A few seedling Douglas-firs follow among scattered stones and boulders. Juncos nest in ground cover. On a far slope, elk browse among the young spring plants.

Scientists from across the country have centered dozens of studies on the pumice plain, and for good reason. Of more than 200 square miles affected by the blast, it is here on these few square miles that life was thoroughly erased. Elsewhere, biological legacies—ground-dwelling mammals and invertebrates, snow-covered plant communities, aquatic life protected beneath pond ice—survived and jump-started recovery. Here, the clock of ecological succession was reset to zero.

There are few places on earth that offer an opportunity to study ecological recovery from the very beginning. Monument ecologist Charlie Crisafulli calls the plain “the hotbed for ecological questions being addressed at Mount St. Helens.” To walk here is to experience a landscape newly born.

Other users of the monument see things differently, and some have other designs on the pumice plain. Surrounding counties, with many of their small communities suffering acutely from the decline of the Northwest timber economy, would like to see a highway built across the plain. Today, fifty-two-mile State Route 504 ends at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, seven miles short of forest roads east of the volcano. Backers say extending the road across the monument would bring much-needed economic renewal to struggling communities to the east. Nearly a million visitors travel State Route 504 each year, and with them comes a flood of tourist dollars.

Here, as elsewhere in the West, local communities have learned how to make their voices heard. Similar battles are being waged across the country: at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, at Mojave National Preserve in California, at WrangellÐSt. Elias National Park in Alaska. Communities are seeking increased access and economic benefits from visitation to parks and monuments. As these issues play out, political pressures on managers continue to mount.

So far, U.S. Forest Service officials at Mount St. Helens have not yielded. The monument was established by Congress to protect a unique volcanic landscape and allow its “geological forces and ecological succession to continue substantially unimpeded.” As such, it offers a poignant case study.

By any gauge, the landscape around Mount St. Helens is magnificent. And nearly a quarter-century later the story of its cataclysmic eruption on May 18, 1980, remains astounding.

Preceding the eruption, magma pushed up into the volcano and the northern flank of the mountain bulged visibly, fracturing overlying rock. The bulge expanded by five feet per day. A week before the eruption it had swelled outward nearly 500 feet.

On the morning of May 18, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake collapsed the bulging north face of the mountain, triggering a massive debris avalanche. It swept north into Spirit Lake and the North Fork Toutle River, burying the landscape beneath 600 feet of debris. As the mountainside slid away it exposed the highly pressurized magma within, triggering an eruptive blast that was heard in Saskatchewan, nearly 700 miles away.

The blast, 27,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, leveled 230 square miles of forest and killed fifty-seven people. Volcanic mudflows swept down the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers obliterating roads, buildings and bridges, and blocking shipping on the Columbia River seventy miles from the mountain. Darkness covered the eastern half of Washington State. The ash cloud circled the globe.

A pyroclastic flow, a froth of superheated gases and pumice reaching temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, flared over the pumice plain vaporizing every living thing. Pumice covered avalanche debris to a depth of 100 feet. No scrap of living matter survived.

In 1982, Congress set aside 110,000 acres around the volcano as the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. The monument is a spectacular natural laboratory for scientists and the public to experience a volcanic landscape firsthand and learn about ecosystem recovery. The monument’s management plan, released in 1985, established areas for public access and interpretation while leaving the core of the preserve, including the crater, pumice plain and debris avalanche of the Toutle River, as a research area free of human intrusion. Signs along the trail announce this: no bikes, no pets, no camping, and a minimum $100 fine for leaving the trail.

“There are dozens of active volcanoes around the world and dozens of recovery areas,” says monument scientist Peter Frenzen, “but this place has been so well documented with baseline studies and is so close to research institutions that new researchers can easily step into the story.” As time goes by, the story gets even more interesting as more habitats develop. To date there are some twenty active research projects and dozens more long-term studies under way on the pumice plain alone.

But beneath the unfolding ecological story lies another story, still fresh in the minds of area residents. Before the eruption, a Forest Service logging road, the old 100 road, connected State Route 504 with Forest Road 99 east of the mountain. Visitors to Mount St. Helens and Spirit Lake could make a loop, easily reaching campgrounds and the nearby communities of Randle, Packwood and Cougar, or continue north to Mount Rainier National Park. Today, an equivalent trip takes three hours or more.

Van Youngquist was Cowlitz County commissioner from before the eruption to 1998. He remembers discussions of a through road during the campaign to establish the monument. But Youngquist focused his energies on funding for facilities for the new monument, and he was quite successful. He was instrumental in securing between $70 and $100 million in federal funds for state-of-the-art visitor centers and access roads.

After he retired, Youngquist was hired by five surrounding counties to represent them in a campaign for a cross-monument road. He successfully lobbied for funding a 2001 feasibility study that found two possible routes. One is to the north and avoids the monument. The other departs the existing highway by Coldwater Lake and traverses the debris avalanche and pumice plain for seven miles before connecting to Forest Road 99 at Windy Ridge; this is the route favored by the counties. Its estimated cost is about $20 million.

When Youngquist and the commissioners took their proposal to Washington, D.C., they were told by Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish, “My people out West don’t like your project.” Undeterred, Youngquist lobbied the state legislature for $400,000 for an economic feasibility study. “We wanted an in-depth study to show how the project would benefit the counties,” he told me. He pitched the project to the state legislature as a toll road, or a privateÐpublic partnership. The $400,000 to study the economic benefits of a cross-monument road was included as a line item in an omnibus transportation bill that was voted on in spring 2003. When the vote came, “there was hardly any dissension at all,” Youngquist says. “The measure passed overwhelmingly.”

But an eleventh-hour phone-in campaign by area environmentalists convinced Washington’s Governor Gary Locke to veto the appropriation.

Youngquist believes that economic studies are critical. If they show the project will damage the environment or is not feasible financially, the counties will accept that. “But to get the project vetoed when the studies haven’t even been done, that’s why we’re upset,” he says. “Without the studies, we’re getting fiction rather than fact.”

Tom Knappenberger, spokesman for Gifford Pinchot National Forest, which oversees the monument, thinks the cross-monument road has been studied enough. The Forest Service helped fund the $350,000 feasibility study in 2001, he tells me. It considered fourteen possible routes, examined two in depth and looked at the economic benefits to communities, which weren’t promising.

When the study was complete, Forest Supervisor Claire Lavendel wrote a letter stating the Forest Service’s objections to the project. “Visitor safety was a big concern,” Knappenberger says. “So was the integrity of dozens of research projects in the area.” Some thirty scientists conducting studies on the monument also went on record opposing the proposal.

Knappenberger points out that the 1985 management plan calls for rebuilding State Route 504 only as far as Johnston Ridge, not across the monument. He also says that maintenance costs would be “huge”: he estimates $1 million annually with upgrades to connecting roads. “That’s as big a maintenance budget as we have for all 4,000 miles of roads in the rest of the forest.”

“There are so many reasons this proposal doesn’t make sense,” he says. “You wonder why it gets as far as it does.”

One reason may be persistence.

Mark Smith grew up around the mountain. He operates the Eco Park Resort on State Route 504 just west of Mount St. Helens, and his family owned Spirit Lake Lodge before the eruption. Smith was an advocate for monument status. It was part of the original plan, he recalls, to rebuild the old 100 road through the monument connecting State Route 504 to Cougar and Randall. (Several road advocates cite this, but a reading of the original legislation finds only that roads and facilities “should be located generally in areas which were developed prior to the 1980 eruption.”)

“A loop road would be a big help to the economies of the local communities, which are hurting,” Smith tells me. “What we have now is basically a fifty-two-mile dead-end road to a video.” There aren’t enough activities for visitors, he contends, and access to campgrounds and services east of the mountain requires backtracking and hours of driving. He says visitor use is falling off as a result. What’s more, a through road would promote more overnight visitors, who spend three to five times more than day users.

Smith concedes that a road across a geologically active volcanic landscape would be difficult to build and maintain. “To put a road through there would be tough,” he admits, “and a little bit of a challenge.” But citing the sediment retention structure built on the North Fork Toutle River and the 1.6-mile tunnel drilled though a rock ridge to regulate the level of Spirit Lake, he maintains that the highway wouldn’t be that big an undertaking. “In this area, we’re familiar with the impossible, and we have some examples of doing the extreme,” he says. “So I don’t buy that excuse.”

Those projects, built by the Army Corps of Engineers at no small expense, were considered critical safety measures to protect downstream communities from further floods and debris flows. Willie Scott, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist who reviewed the road proposal, says there are different concerns associated with the road.

“Any road located in the pumice plain would be in harm’s way,” Scott says. “We know that Mount St. Helens has been by far the most active volcano in the Cascades for the past 3,000 years. But there are other natural processes at work on the mountain that don’t require an eruption.”

Almost every year rainstorms cause landslides in the crater that trigger debris flows onto the pumice plain, according to Scott. There’s also a “considerable-size” glacier in the crater that’s growing every year. The water table is rising and landslides during fall storms have become more frequent. Down on the debris avalanche, where most of the mountain came to rest, the land is still compacting, and debris flows from floods shift everything. “From the point of view of a volcanic hazard,” Scott says, “the crater mouth of Mount St. Helens is the worst place [to build a road] in the United States.”

Of those who have concerns about the road, all expressed sympathy for the economic plight of the communities. The town of Packwood has already lost its doctor, for instance, and is now in danger of losing its school. “This is pretty basic stuff,” says the Forest Service’s Knappenberger. “It comes down to losing your identity as a town. We’re sensitive to that; our people live and work up there.”

The Forest Service, scientists and environmental activists all agree, however, that building the road is the wrong solution. In this they are backed up by the 2001 feasibility study, which predicted only minimal economic benefits to nearby communities. But Youngquist looks at the motels, theater and restaurants that sprang up at the Interstate 5 turnoff to the monument and wants that kind of growth for communities east of the mountain too.

“I’ve been working on this project since 1999,” Youngquist tells me. “There are literally hundreds of people, businesses and organizations that support this thing. And there’s broad bipartisan support in the legislature.” But for now, he admits, it will have to wait for a different governor.

Eco Park owner Smith echoes a more dogged determination. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, “and I’m gonna be working hard on it.”

For the environmental activists who coordinated the call-in campaign to Governor Locke, the veto of the highway study appropriation has allowed time to regroup. But no one entertains the idea that the issue has gone away for good.

“The idea of rebuilding this road took hold as soon as the ash settled after the eruption,” says Holly Forrest, a Sierra Club activist who coordinated the call-in campaign. “Right now, the monument is absolutely vulnerable to harmful development. It’s urgent that the people who care about this place get together and figure out how to permanently protect it. The only other option,” she adds, “is endlessly fighting for it.”