Tucked just beyond Portland’s outer fringes, Mount Saint Helens beckons the wayfaring spirit with its sublime mixture of stillness and seismic majesty. Our midsummer odyssey began in July, amid a shimmering heatwave that bathed the Pacific Northwest in radiant amber. While others escaped to the Columbia River Gorge, crowding its cascading trails, we chose the path less trampled—a bold detour into Washington’s more tempestuous, less predictable wilderness.
There, the landscape thrummed with unscripted wonder. Our destination was not just the mountain, but the feeling of awe that arises when a place reminds you how very small you are—and how beautifully brief our footprints might be.
Sanctuary Beneath the Canopy
We pitched our tent beneath an emerald canopy of Douglas firs so tall they seemed to scrape the underbelly of the sky. The forest whispered in breaths—needles rustling, birds flitting invisibly, distant creeks murmuring beneath moss-laden stones. There was no Wi-Fi, no buzzing hum of distraction. Just pine-perfumed air and silence so expansive it felt sacred.
That first night, the world shrank to the orange flicker of our campfire and the lazy swirl of sparks ascending into the night. Marshmallows blistered on skewers while the kids chased lightning bugs with jars and barefoot glee. It was a sanctuary not just of place, but of time, suspended somewhere between the past’s simplicity and the present’s unraveling noise.
The Ascent Along Highway 504
Morning arrived with clarity—mist lifting, dew trembling on leaves, and a chorus of jays and woodpeckers composing a makeshift reveille. We packed up provisions, secured hats, filled water bottles, and began our climb along the legendary Highway 504, the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway, etched with both loss and resurrection.
This road is no ordinary drive—it’s a pilgrimage. Every turn unveils a panorama that swells the chest and slows the breath. Vast slopes scarred by the eruption decades ago stand now reclaimed by resilience: carpets of lupine ripple purple, Indian paintbrush ignite the ridgelines, and noble evergreens pierce the sky once again.
The North Fork Toutle River meanders far below, its glacial gray ribbon slicing through meadows and ashfields. Pulloffs offer interpretive signs, but we mostly stood quietly, absorbing the gravity of this place. It’s not a landscape you observe so much as one you feel—its force, its fragility, its echo.
Echoes of the Blast
Even decades later, the aftermath of the 1980 eruption reverberates. Mount Saint Helens erupted not just with lava and ash, but with a force that reshaped entire ecosystems, reconfigured rivers, and etched trauma into the land.
At Johnston Ridge Observatory, we faced the crater itself—immense, open, and ghostlike. It gaped where the summit once stood, now fractured and transformed. The wind at that elevation is relentless, like breath from a broken flute, but it carries stories if you listen closely. This is not a ruin, but a living record of resilience, marked not by despair but rebirth.
Our children stood silently at the railing, wide-eyed. We told them about the volcanologist David Johnston, who stood at this very ridge the morning of the eruption. His final transmission, “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” felt like a haunting incantation now engraved in metal plaques.
Between Ash and Bloom
The juxtaposition is stunning—bare plains of pumice meet fields wild with lupine and avalanche lilies. It’s a botanical defiance: life insisting on returning, no matter how scorched the canvas. Tiny creatures skitter through underbrush, and in the distance, elk graze lazily on new grass unfurling from ash.
We hiked the Boundary Trail, winding through skeletal trunks and riotous bloom, inhaling the perfume of rebirth. Each footstep stirred dust and memory, like walking through chapters of a book half-burned, half-rewritten.
The trail climbed gradually, opening to ever-widening views—Mount Adams in the distance, Spirit Lake glinting like a lost coin, and the enormous yawning crater just ahead. The children climbed boulders, found salamanders, and made walking sticks from fallen limbs. They didn't ask for screens, didn’t crave distraction. Here, imagination roamed unbridled.
Lunchtime Overlooking Cataclysm
We found a perch overlooking a valley, both raw and restored. There, beneath a battered snag of pine, we unfurled our modest picnic—cheese, fruit, sun-warmed bread, and cold water. There’s something delicious about eating on the edge of ruin, where every crumb and swallow feels amplified.
The kids balanced crackers on their knees while marmots peeked from behind rocks, hopeful and unafraid. Below us, a ribbon of wildflowers unspooled down a ravine, their colors defying the monochrome ash. Above, raptors circled in thermal spirals, their wings carving through the sky unbothered by borders.
The Silence That Speaks
One of the most startling sensations at Mount Saint Helens is the quiet. Even with other visitors nearby, the atmosphere feels reverent. Sound is absorbed by the immense openness—the crater swallowing echoes, the forest muffling steps.
That silence spoke more eloquently than any narration. It urged reflection, invited awe, and reminded us of the fragility of permanence. Even the children sensed it, walking slower, speaking softer, their usual whirl subdued by wonder.
Lessons Carved in Stone and Sky
This wasn’t just a weekend trip—it was an education etched in basalt and bloom. The mountain taught us that devastation does not end the story. It punctuates. It breaks. But then it opens space for renewal. Beneath ash, roots stretch. Above rubble, birds build anew. The entire ecosystem is a masterclass in metamorphosis.
And we—rushed, distracted, digitized—needed that lesson.
We needed to be reminded that grandeur does not require grandeur. That connection thrives in stillness. That our children don’t remember the malls we took them to, but the marmots they saw while eating pears on a cliffside in Washington.
Return, Transformed
Driving back toward the forest where our tent still waited, the car fell into a lull of silence. The road curved softly, shadowed by firs and ferns, and we passed a lone elk standing motionless at the treeline, like a sentinel bidding farewell.
Back at camp, the fire crackled again, this time with a deeper glow. We roasted marshmallows more slowly, spoke less, and stared longer into the flames. The kids drew the mountain from memory with sticks in the dirt—jagged lines, swirls of ash, and improbable flowers.
Even days later, long after the sleeping bags were rolled and the forest road had disappeared in our rearview mirror, the feeling lingered. Mount Saint Helens was no longer just a point on a map. It had entered us—raw, regal, and real.
The Pulse of Wild Resilience
To explore Mount Saint Helens is to confront contradiction: destruction and growth, sorrow and sublimity, silence and symphony. It’s an invitation to witness the alchemy of time, nature’s quiet refusal to remain broken.
What began as a spontaneous weekend escape became a pilgrimage—a rediscovery of what it means to be awed, to wander without agenda, and to let the wilderness rearrange our inner scaffolding.
The mountain does not shout; it hums. And once you’ve heard it, that hum becomes part of your marrow. The cadence of wind through lupine, the crunch of ash underfoot, the haunting grandeur of a world unfiltered—they stay with you.
Toward the Next Trailhead
This journey was only the first chapter in our deeper exploration of Washington’s wild heart. There are more peaks to ascend, more silences to hold, more stories whispered by stone and sky. But Mount Saint Helens was our threshold—the fissure where awe spilled in.
In the end, what we found wasn’t just a volcano or even a vacation. It was a return to what truly matters: presence, reverence, and the extraordinary solace of wild places.
A Humble Beginning Among Marsh and Murmur
Our adventure ignited with quiet grace at a modest visitor’s center tucked across from a rugged campground, partially veiled by the shadows of pine. Though the structure itself stood dormant—its doors shuttered by enduring limitations—the exterior offered an invitation no wanderer could deny. A winding marshland trail beckoned, its edges stitched in golden cattails and lilypad-slicked pools.
As we stepped onto the boardwalk, the world shifted. Birdsong pulsed through the air like a hidden language, and dragonflies traced incandescent sigils in sunlight. The two-mile loop didn’t simply guide us through nature; it ushered us into a tempo unfamiliar to modern lives—slow, symphonic, sacred.
Shoes damp with dew and hearts unburdened, we followed the path through glistening wetlands. Swathes of meadow foxtail whispered against our legs while frogs leapt from mossy shadows. We found ourselves pausing often, not out of exhaustion, but reverence. Each ripple, chirrup, and rustle seemed part of an ancient conversation that had never needed translation.
The Ribbon Unfurls—Highway to the Heart
Once the trail receded behind us like a curtain drawn closed, we returned to the road. The highway curved ahead like a silver ribbon unraveling through the hills. We followed it with quiet awe, each mile an unveiling. Rising terrain revealed new textures: wind-bitten cliffs, forests charred and regrown, and distant peaks shimmering with residual snow.
Then the landscape commanded our attention with a feat of human determination—the Hoffstadt Bridge. There it stretched, an elegant arc suspended high above a chasm carved by time and tectonics. From its edge, the valley below yawned vast and primeval. This was no ordinary stop; it was a tableau of survival.
We parked and walked to the observation point, where information panels whispered stories of the eruption, of devastation rewritten into rebirth. Gazing both east and west, the panorama was astonishing in its juxtaposition: scorched ridges reborn in green, skeletal trees beside burgeoning saplings. It became immediately clear that nature does not merely recover—it reimagines.
Where the Mountains Speak—Approach to the Learning Center
Our ascent deepened. The road climbed with deliberate persistence, a winding testament to resilience and exploration. Around each bend, views shifted, widened, and stunned. Glacial rivers hissed below while granite cliffs guarded the horizon. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Mount St. Helens Forest Learning Center emerged, perched atop a bluff like a sentinel.
This was no mere building. It was a vessel of memory, a place where the earth’s violent breath had been cataloged with care. From its balcony, the volcano dominated the skyline. Its form, both fractured and majestic, told of fury and peace in equal measure. The ridges surrounding it seemed stitched together by an invisible hand, while ribbons of white water traced scars into the rock.
Before delving inside, we replenished ourselves. The gift shop, charmingly rustic, offered hand-labeled honey, cedar soap, and local trail mixes packed in waxed paper. With provisions in hand, we followed a narrow path behind the center, ascending to a lookout where silence reigned like a sovereign.
No elk stirred in the meadows that afternoon. Still, the stillness itself was intoxicating—thick with pine resin, wind, and a sense of being watched by something older than history.
Witness to Wound and Wonder
Standing at that overlook, the truth of the mountain became inescapable. It did not shrink from what it had become. The crater gaped, smoke no longer rising, but the earth was undeniably altered, riven by time and transformation. And yet, there was beauty in that. A new ecology had taken root in pumice and ash: wildflowers like fireweed and lupine stretched from unlikely soil, butterflies flitted across slopes that once roared with fire.
Something was healing in the way the land bore its history, not with shame, but with poise. Here, rebirth wasn’t soft. It was serrated, hard-won, and radiant.
We lingered, breath misting, notebooks open. We wrote in fits and starts, trying to trap language that might do justice to the view. But words stumbled, clumsy beside such grandeur. Still, the effort felt necessary. Even scribbled thoughts became a ritual—an offering to a place that had survived so much and asked for so little.
A Wilderness Unscripted
The descent offered time for reflection. The winding drive back unfurled with the grace of a remembered melody. Each overlook we passed on the return seemed more vivid, more alive—perhaps because we now understood what had sculpted them. The volcano’s presence was no longer mythic, but intimate.
We pulled over one last time, near a glade flushed with alder. Dusk was beginning to lace its lavender fingers through the canopy. Insects sang a soft anthem, and somewhere nearby, the crackle of hoof against leaf hinted at life just beyond sight. We sat on the hood of the car and listened. To the wind, to the distant river, to our thoughts recalibrating against the scope of it all.
Souvenirs of the Soul
Not every memento fits in a backpack. While we did leave with pockets lined with pinecones and crumpled brochures, the real treasures were sensory. The scent of scorched bark and sun-warmed stone, the echo of wind through chasms, the reverberation of silence deep enough to reorder breath. These were the true souvenirs.
Even days later, back in a city wrapped in streetlights and schedules, something lingered. The marshland birdsong played a phantom in our ears. The bridge's span stretched in our dreams. And that mountain—half absent, half eternal—watched over our recollections like a myth reborn.
Returning Changed, Not Just Traveled
To journey through such a realm is not to simply mark locations off a map. It is to be altered. To watch the earth rebuild itself is to question how we, too, might reconstruct parts of our lives. Perhaps less frenetically. Perhaps with more reverence. The wilderness teaches not only patience but also adaptability. It shows that nothing truly vanishes—it merely reshapes.
In this unhurried odyssey through remnants and regrowth, we discovered more than views. We encountered resolve, witnessed wild resurrection, and tasted the holiness of hush. Each stop—a whisper. Each overlook—a sermon.
When we speak of this trip, we won't begin with coordinates or mileage. We'll begin with stillness, with marsh reeds bowing under morning mist, with a bridge that seems to float on memory, and with a mountain that reminds us ruin isn’t the end—it’s the rewrite.
A Summit of Memory at Johnston Ridge
The pinnacle of our expedition manifested at the windswept ledge of Johnston Ridge, a place suspended between solemn remembrance and unflinching natural splendor. The ascent, though paved and navigable, carried the intangible weight of reverence. One does not merely arrive at Johnston Ridge—one is summoned. As the car engine quieted and the doors thudded closed behind us, the silence that followed was not emptiness, but presence.
Mount Saint Helens stood sentinel in the distance, her truncated crown veiled lightly by cirrus wisps. Time itself seemed to hush in her shadow. Even Ethan, normally vivacious and full of questions, fell uncharacteristically quiet, as though he, too, understood that we were about to commune with something sacred and sublime.
Walking a Timeline Carved by Cataclysm
The path from the parking lot to the observatory unraveled like a living museum. With each step, the earth whispered chronicles of upheaval and resilience. Beneath our feet, ash-flecked soil bore the burden of decades, dormant yet thrumming with latent stories.
Interpretive signs lined the trail, their weathered surfaces inscribed with fragments of history. Some bore black-and-white photos of the mountain before May 18, 1980—serene, whole, unblemished. Others displayed spectral satellite imagery of the aftermath, a monochrome apocalypse rendered in chilling detail. Each sign offered a vignette into the past, but none could compete with the visceral eloquence of the landscape itself.
We paused often. Not from fatigue, but to absorb. To behold. Riverbeds, dry in places and glistening in others, threaded across the terrain like silver sinews. Skeletal remains of trees—grey and petrified—reached upward as if still pleading with the heavens. But there was vitality, too. Wildflowers pulsed in the breeze, flickers of lavender, gold, and crimson woven defiantly into the monochrome palette. They danced on stems that had, against all odds, survived fire and ash and time.
Monumental Stillness Beneath an Infinite Sky
We arrived at the main overlook, where a long wooden bench curled around the edge of a viewing platform. Ethan climbed up beside me, legs swinging, face turned to the panorama like an open book waiting for ink.
From this perch, the caldera of Mount Saint Helens resembled an amphitheater of the gods. The crater’s yawning mouth, part gaping wound, part living sculpture, was cloaked in shadows that shifted with the passing clouds. To its left, the jagged spine of a ravine knifed toward the valley floor. Below, a fan of sediment reached outward like a volcanic fingerprint. You could see where pyroclastic flows had once scorched through life like a mythic beast—now subdued but never tamed.
Ethan munched on dried apricots and almonds, sipping from his thermos. “It looks like it belongs on another planet,” he murmured, more to the mountain than to me.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. There are moments when awe overtakes articulation—when language, with all its syllabic wealth, feels like a pauper in the face of nature’s grandeur. This was such a moment.
An Elegy Etched in Stone and Soil
Despite its visual splendor, Johnston Ridge is not merely a scenic vista. It is a hallowed scar. Named for David A. Johnston, the USGS volcanologist who perished in the 1980 eruption, the ridge is as much a memorial as it is a monument.
A bronze plaque affixed to the observatory wall bore Johnston’s final words: “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”—a declaration that was both a scientific observation and an unintentional epitaph. Reading it aloud to Ethan, I felt my throat tighten. Here was a man who had faced nature not with hubris but with curiosity, who died bearing witness to the very force he had dedicated his life to understanding.
The observatory itself, with its glass windows and contemplative exhibits, invites not only exploration but introspection. Inside, a miniature model of the mountain showed the before-and-after topography in disquieting contrast. One side depicted the pre-eruption symmetry; the other, the jagged crater that now defined the mountain’s silhouette. Geological samples, archival footage, and whispered audio narrations filled the space with voices from another time—some triumphant, others tragic.
Where Ruin Met Regrowth
The trail continued beyond the observatory, tapering into a narrow path that hugged the ridgeline. We followed it for some time, descending into a terrain where meadow met memory. Lupine bloomed in symmetrical clusters, and butterflies flitted past as though brushing against another reality.
One might think that a landscape born of such destruction would remain inert, suspended in trauma. Yet, this was not the case. The land had healed—not completely, not uniformly, but irrevocably. Nature had returned not despite the calamity, but because of it. The cataclysm had made space for reinvention.
There was poetry in that. There was hope.
Ethan picked up a charred piece of wood from the trail's edge and turned it over in his hands. “It’s like the mountain’s telling a story,” he said.
“It is,” I replied. “And we’re lucky to be here for this chapter.”
The Wind as Archivist
It was the wind that seemed to carry the most meaning. It swept across the ridge with a voice of its own—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar. It moved through the grasses and around our bodies, curling into the crevices of our clothing like invisible parchment. It held the memory of ash, the trace of those who had stood here before us, and the resilience of all that had returned.
I closed my eyes and listened.
There were no car horns. No city hum. Only the wind, the mountain, and the rhythm of breathing. It was in this quiet that the experience reached its zenith. Not in spectacle, but in presence. To be there was to understand something wordless—something elemental. A communion between humanity and the earth’s rawest edges.
A Lesson Not in Books, but in Sky and Stone
As the sun began its slow arc toward the horizon, the shadows deepened across the crater, casting Mount Saint Helens in a chiaroscuro of majesty and melancholy. We walked slowly back to the car, our shadows stretched long behind us.
Ethan was unusually silent. When I asked if he was tired, he shook his head. “I’m just thinking,” he said.
That was enough. This journey had not just been a scenic stop or a place to stretch our legs. It had become a parable. A way of teaching him—and reminding myself—that destruction is not the end of a story, but the reshaping of one. That silence can hold more than speech. To witness the sublime, one does not need to conquer it, only to stand in its presence.
The Last Glance Back
Before pulling away, I looked in the rearview mirror. The mountain still loomed, now bathed in the gold of late afternoon. It had not changed. But I had. We had. Ethan hummed quietly beside me, a tune with no name but deep roots.
I thought of all the others who had stood on that same ridge—some to mourn, some to marvel. I thought of David Johnston and the moment he became part of the mountain’s narrative. And I thought of my son, who now carried that story forward, not through recitation, but through reverence.
The wheels turned. Gravel crunched. The ridge grew smaller behind us. But it did not vanish. It had carved itself into us, indelibly.
The Journey Back – A Soul Marked by Ash and Wonder
A Descent Laced with Reverence
As we began our serpentine descent from Johnston Ridge, a reverent hush seemed to settle over the vehicle, like velvet drawn across glass. The grandeur of Mount Saint Helens clung to our minds, not as a spectacle, but as a presence—a sovereign force felt deep in the marrow. The road was ribboned with gold where sunlight fractured through fir limbs, gilding the forest in hues too rich for simple daylight.
Each pull-off we passed begged for stillness, not out of obligation, but out of sheer magnetism. The land didn’t whisper so much as breathe—heavy with stories, thick with memory. We stopped not because we had to, but because we were compelled. The wind carried silence like a hymn.
Land Shaped by Fury, Reclaimed by Grace
From the shattered core of the eruption had sprung an orchestra of tenacity. Lupine, Indian paintbrush, and beargrass bloomed defiantly amid pumice and ash. Their colors were almost jarring—like stained glass against charcoal. It was nature’s paradox: violence birthing vulnerability, annihilation giving way to elegance.
No plaque or ranger’s monologue could articulate this metamorphosis. You had to witness it—to stand where the mountain’s breath once scalded and feel the cool hush of recovery. There, where trees once stood incinerated mid-growth, now grew saplings like litanies, rising despite memory.
A Quietude That Restructures the Soul
By the time we reached the valley floor, the day had mellowed into ochre and rust. Shadows stretched like cathedral arches across the road. Our children, uncharacteristically quiet, stared out the windows as if absorbing something ancient. Even they could sense it: that this wasn’t just a place—it was a reckoning.
No playlist could match the rhythm of this journey. We drove with the windows down, letting the mountain air drift through, sharp and resinous with pine and alder. Conversations drifted into fragments, replaced by long stretches of wordless communion. Grief and awe mingled in that silence, a mosaic of emotion beyond vocabulary.
Twilight Among Giants
Back at the campground nestled beneath towering Douglas firs, we lit a modest fire and huddled near the dancing flames. The hush of dusk was punctuated only by crackling embers and the occasional nocturnal rustle from beyond our lantern’s glow. The children, stirred by lingering mountain magic, crafted elaborate tales of lava-beasts that guarded slumbering peaks, of ancient forests whispering to those who listened.
We didn’t interrupt. We simply watched the flicker in their eyes match the glow of the fire. My partner leaned in, hand resting on mine, and we exchanged that knowing look—the kind reserved for moments suspended outside time. The kind that says: This will live in us, always.
Reflections Etched in Volcanic Dust
Later, I walked alone beneath a canopy of stars, the fire’s warmth still on my back. The Milky Way smeared itself across the ink-dark sky like a divine signature. No city light dared infringe here. I thought about the mountain—the wound it still carried, the memory it would never relinquish. I thought of how it bore its scars with dignity, never hiding, never explaining.
And I wondered about us—how often we try to bury what broke us. How often we fear our eruptions. But Saint Helens taught me something irrefutable: rupture is not ruin. From the crucible of collapse comes the slow, beautiful choreography of healing.
A Route Beyond Maps
When people ask for a good day trip near Portland, they expect waterfalls or coastal lighthouses. They want something digestible. Easy. But this pilgrimage is not designed for ease—it’s designed for magnitude. For reminding you just how small you are, and just how vast resilience can be.
This isn't a scenic detour. It is a call. A summons to confront what you carry, to measure it against earth’s upheaval and find grace in the aftermath. Let your compass swing north. Let your expectations dissolve. There is no itinerary for soul work.
The Alchemy of Return
The way back always feels different. You traverse the same bends, see the same terrain, yet you emerge altered. The children, now sleepy and nestled among blankets, were quieter than usual. Even the radio felt like an intrusion. There was nothing more to add. The day had spoken in a tongue older than language, and we had listened with more than our ears.
I looked back one last time before the trees swallowed the view of the crater. The twilight had turned the mountain lavender. It felt less like a geological formation and more like a sentinel—watchful, enigmatic, eternal.
Ash as a Sacred Script
There’s a sacredness to the ash that coats parts of this wilderness still. Not in the way relics are sacred, but in the way grief is sacred—because it testifies to what once was and insists that it mattered. It’s a script written not in ink, but in mineral and time. And if you let it, it rewrites you too.
Walking through those ashen stretches is like moving through the mind of the earth mid-reckoning. And yet, flowers crack the surface. Birds wheel overhead. Rivers, once clogged with pyroclastic flow, now sing again. It's not about forgetting the cataclysm—it’s about weaving it into the continuity of life.
Beneath the Stillness, a Roar
Even in repose, Mount Saint Helens hums with memory. It's quiet now, yes, but not inert. You sense it in the ground beneath your boots, in the way the wind hesitates near ridgelines, in how the animals move with quiet alertness.
You begin to understand: stillness isn’t always peace. Sometimes it’s vigilance. Sometimes it's a held breath. But there’s wisdom in that, too. In knowing that the earth does not forget, and neither should we.
Children of the Crater
As parents, we often chase curated moments—perfect photos, predictable memories. But none of that lingered here. What did stay was the rawness, the unfiltered collision of wonder and unease. The crater had become an unexpected tutor. The stories the children told were not polished; they were pulsing with myth, with echoes of something ancient.
And isn’t that what we hope for? That our children’s imaginations are sparked not just by screens or playgrounds, but by reverence? That their wonder is rooted not in fantasy, but in fractured landscapes that have clawed their way back to life?
The Mountain as Mirror
As the sun surrendered behind the western slope, I felt the mountain watching us—not in a fanciful way, but in the intimate way that trauma recognizes its kin. I had come here expecting a vista. I found a mirror.
We all carry our eruptions. We all know what it means to collapse. But not all of us know how to rise again—slowly, unglamorously, with roots inching through ash. Mount Saint Helens does not hide its disfigurement. It adorns it with wildflowers.
Conclusion
Long after we had driven back into cell service, back into humdrum notifications and dinner plans, I felt the pull of the crater. The way it carved space not only into the land, but into my work. It lingers—not as a memory, but as a shift. Something tectonic inside has moved.
So if you’re ever near Portland and craving more than a view—if you’re yearning for the kind of silence that reconstructs you—follow the fissures. Follow the ghost-forest trunks and the heat-etched canyons. Follow them north, to a place where the mountain exhales memory.
This isn’t just a day trip. It’s a rite of return. A chance to walk alongside ash and find, not desolation, but awe.