Toutle Lake studies Mount St. Helens ecosystem changes since 1980 blast
Ninth grade students from Toutle Lake Jr/Sr High School are scheduled to visit the Mount St. Helens Institute Volcano Outdoor School Monday to mark the 46th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption.
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The trip is part of science teacher Sierra Luchmun's effort to revive a yearly event put on hold by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, she also hopes to open students up to new career possibilities and help them connect with local history.
"Living in Washington, we have such a monumental event in history that happened right here," she said about the May 18, 1980, eruption that killed 57 people and forever altered the landscape.
Bringing back a tradition
Toutle Lake started sending field trips to the institute in 2013, said Rae Hutchinson, the institute's youth education and rental programs manager. They visited yearly until 2018.
Luchmun picked the program up again last year after the previous science teacher retired.
She said the opportunity is especially important for Toutle students because of their proximity to Mount St. Helens. The school is located about 45 minutes away from the Science and Learning Center at Coldwater, where the outdoor school program is based.
Toutle Lake students
Toutle Lake Jr/Sr High School students pose at the Mount St. Helens Institute Volcano Outdoor School during a 2025 field trip. Science teacher Sierra Luchmun hopes to return to offering yearly trips to the site.
Despite being so close by, a lot of students have never had the opportunity to visit Mount St. Helens, Luchmun said. She said many are excited to change that.
"There's a lot of buy-in from students," she said.
Along with planning the trip, Luchmun said she encourages students to interview older relatives or staff members who remember the eruption to hear firsthand accounts about how it impacted the community.
Outdoor learning
The students will have the opportunity to participate in an activity modeling how ecologists collect field data to study the ways the ecosystem is responding after the eruption, Hutchinson said.
The activity has been part of the Volcano Outdoor School since around 2012, and students collect samples from the same sites each year, allowing them to see how the area has changed over time.
"It gets students outside, and it's something different that they wouldn't be able to do if they were just coming up to recreate or hike," Hutchinson said.
Last year, the students participated in a GPS scavenger hunt where they used coordinates to locate boxes hidden around the area.
Past trips
Students from Battle Ground High School's Center for Agriculture, Science and Environmental Education participate in a field ecology study activity during a 2024 trip to the Mount St. Helens Institute Volcano Outdoor School. The institute hosts school trips from around Washington.
State funding
The state Legislature voted in 2025 to cut a grant that funded outdoor learning opportunities like trips to the Volcano Outdoor School or Cispus Learning Center, a popular field-trip destination in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
The Mount St. Helens Institute has seen less impact because it's a smaller program, but some schools are still struggling to get the funding to visit, Hutchinson said.
"It definitely has been felt," they said.
Because the institute is a nonprofit, it has been able to use donations to offer subsidized trips for some schools, Hutchinson said.
Luchmun said she was not certain whether Toutle Lake received the state outdoor learning grant in the past, but it does receive an institute scholarship based on the school's percentage of low-income students. Students also pay a $15 student fee to help fund the trip.
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