Nature Forces

Some areas are abandoned due to forces of nature, voluntarily or otherwise - Mother Nature will displace you if you won't heed the warnings and nature's alarms.Ask Harry Truman, not the president, but the last resident of Spirit Lake. That's not Spirit Lake there, that's the new lake that formed 150' of mud and volcanic ash above Harry R. Truman's last known whereabouts, at the Mt. St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake.

 

I first saw Mt. St. Helens in 1987. Seven years after the eruption that engulfed the world in ash. I recall the video that was burned into the national psyche at the time, but I was too young to comprehend the scale of destruction wrought in May, 1980. I get back as often as I can, it is reaffirming to see life reclaiming the pumice covered hump, and humbling to see the peak rebuilding itself as a lava cone in the crater of the former mountain.

Earth rarely blows it's insides out, in other places men stick dynamite fingers down her throat to extract gold, silver, diamonds, and other precious materials. These sites run out of favor when the precious minerals of the surrounding area are depleted, such as the town of Alta. A ghost town outside of Telluride in SW Colorado

In the San Juan Mountains, over a centurty beyond the silver heydays, the unmaintained county roads traverse miles of ancient railroad beds originally established to transport silver ore into the mills, and the precious metal on to Silverton

The grades are significant and the surface slippery with loose rock, but the roadbeds have proven more durable than any road constructed in my lifetime.

Perhaps the remoteness is the only protection against the destructive nature of mankind, small cabins fared better than the larger mill structures. Many of the most accessible mills are only foundations now

In wetter climates, like the Nantahala Valley of North Carolina, the fight against nature never relents

Once the overgrowth takes root, nature proves formidable, self-cleansing on a long-enough scale

And in urban areas where no profit is left to be made, none is available to maintain. Such as these apartments in Gary, Indiana the ivy is rooting itself into the door no one cares to open any longer