Charlie Crisafulli Oral History Interview, September 15, 2015

SAMUEL SCHMIEDING: This is Dr. Samuel Schmeiding, Oregon State University College of Forestry. I am here in Chelatchie Prairie, Washington, with Charlie Crisafulli, Research Ecologist for the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station. He's the Research Ecologist for the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

CHARLIE CRISAFULLI: Yes.

SS: I think I got that wrong. But anyway, and we are basically-

CC: More or less.

SS: Off to the side of the headquarters and we are going to do an oral history interview here today, probably in two parts and this is a part of a greater history project on the science of Mount St. Helens and other related subjects. I want to thank you, Charlie, for taking the time to meet with us today. And how are you today?

CC: My pleasure, Sam. I'm pleased to be here. I'm doing wonderful, thanks.

SS: Alright, very good. Okay, well we usually like to start these-these are longer interviews. They are oral history, so they incorporate personal biography and things like that, so I will ask you the basic question: where were you born and raised?

CC: I was born in Albany, New York. I was raised there through the age of 20.

SS: Where is Albany?

CC: Albany is in the Hudson Valley about 120 miles north of New York City.

SS: I knew that, but-anyway, what was your childhood like, especially in relation to the natural world?

CC: Well, I grew up on about 150 acres in the Hudson Valley, which is nestled between Berkshire Mountains to the east, the Helderberg Escarpment to the west, the Catskill Mountains to the south, and the Adirondack Mountains to the north. So, it was a rural setting, but only perhaps 10 miles south of Albany, and on this 150 acres, which was pastoral farmland mixed with hedge rows, rock walls, and the typical rock walls that you find anywhere you went in New York, and deciduous forest: oak, maple, hickory primarily. On the 150 acres we had two ponds. We had a couple of streams and so it afforded me great opportunities to the outdoors and I spent many of my waking hours out romping around throughout the seasons, everything from riding bicycles and fishing in the streams and ponds to collecting frogs and salamanders and snakes and turtles to ice building lean-tos and having bonfires and ice skating throughout the winter and playing pond hockey.

SS: So, would you say that it was more just a kid having fun in the outdoors or was there a scientific bent to what you were doing, even at that early age?

CC: Yeah, I think there was something to it. I had a natural curiosity that seemed insatiable from the earliest of days. Fortunately, because of where my parents settled, and my dad built the house and we lived in this countryside setting that it afforded me the opportunity to engage with it. In addition to that may family had property up in the Adirondack Mountains where my father and my brothers and I cleared the land and built a cabin and so right on a lake, at Schroon Lake, in the heart of the Adirondacks. Spent a lot of time up there and then my best buddies in middle school and high school had a place out east on Long Island and so we had access to the ocean. Much of my life would be characterized by the outdoor world where I was able to pursue my interests, although they were untrained then and I had no anticipation of where it might lead me. One thing for sure is I had great zeal and took advantage of the opportunities I had by spending so much time outdoors. I had the fondest of memories of just being out one spring when the frogs arrived and ice out to the ponds and just listening to the chorus and going out at night and just sitting down and listening to the frogs for 10s of minutes at a time. I remember going back when the tadpoles, the eggs would hatch and tadpoles were there and seeing this enormous bird flying right out from the pond, feet from me, startled me. It was the size of me and come to find out it was a Great Blue Herron, first one I had ever seen. To this day I have vivid memories. Also, a little bit older, going frigid cold temperatures into the heart of the Adirondacks white cedar bogs, 20 below zero with my old rawhide and hickory snowshoes and walking through those marshes bitter cold. With every inhalation your nostrils sticking together and just remember the calm and the stillness of that environment and to this day it stirs my curiosity and brings me peace.

SS: Where you considered an odd bird by your high school mates?

CC: I think so. In some regard. I didn't do sports and so I wasn't interested in that. Although, what some of that youthful curiosity turned to is a more consumptive sort of an engagement with nature. What I mean by that is lots and lots of hunting and fishing trips. My buddies engaged in that. Through high school it seemed like almost every weekend that would be within some season, which meant most of the year, we were off fishing for brook trout, or for pike, or for walleye, or for bass, brook trout. Or we were off hunting white tails or grouse. That became a huge part of my high school trips and of course we did it you know as youth would with lots of, I would say some reckless engagement and carrying on and shenanigans, but it was a blast. All of those steps I think in my formative years led me to where I was today, although I had no idea I was on that path, but it was clear in retrospect.

SS: Wow. I take it that your parents were very encouraging to your interest in nature, or was that just beyond their influence, your hanging out with your friends? Or did they encourage that part of your life?

CC: This is how that goes: my parents I came from a blue collar, Catholic, Italian family, and my parents knew how to work, and they worked hard, and they thought that was the thing to do, was to work. Family business, construction business, and so my grandfather started it. My uncles and my dad worked there. Some of my siblings worked there. Some are there still today running the business. They didn't really know the whole nature thing. We weren't a family that grew up camping, although we did have our camp and we went on a few camping trips. My grandfather hunted and my father and his brothers and my cousins and my brothers. That was part of it. But they saw my interests and they certainly encouraged it. There was no discouragement of that whatsoever. There was nothing that said why are you doing this? Instead, they saw all of the interests I had and they certainly you know condoned that.

SS: How would you describe the aesthetic of upstate New York? I'm talking about the natural aesthetic: mountains, plains, farms. If you were going to describe that conglomerate wise or individually, how would you describe that?

CC: Well, my view of that has changed. When I left there, because I had a taste of the west, in particular all of Canada, every providence from Quebec to British Columbia once I had graduated from high school. Then I had made some other trips out west. I didn't think too much of New York and New England. With time, as I've gone back, which I do every year by the way, I realized just how great that part of the country is for its natural values. I was just back in August and I took my two nephews up on to a hike to Pharaoh Mountain and looking out over the lakes and ridge after ridge after ridge [SS interrupts].

SS: The Finger Lakes?

CC: No, this is the Adirondacks, the High Lakes region.

SS: Oh, it's the High Lakes, right.

CC: Yeah and just looking out over the ridges into the high peaks area up by Lake Placid and [SS interrupts].

SS: Mount Marcy, isn't Mount Marcy [CC talks over SS].

CC: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, in any case it's beautiful and I think the Helderbergs, the Berkshires, the Catskills, and what's great is the history's so rich there. There's stories-this is a place that Teddy Roosevelt spent a lot of time, Gifford Pinchot spent a lot of time. It's a place that the Eisenhowers and the Rockefellers, even our political world is tied up in there and these were people who really enjoyed the environment and it's great reading about that now, their level of engagement. In any case, New York cared, the politicians cared, and they made a 6-million-acre park, the Adirondack Park.

SS: Preserve, yeah.

CC: Exactly.

SS: Which was really a predecessor and a model for what would happen later in various areas, and an exception in the east too.

CC: Exactly. It was to be forever wild.

SS: Yeah.

CC: That was the motto. In any case, it's a wonderful place. The mountains are old. The forest trees are relatively small. They're just trying to, you know, eek out an existence on this granitic rock, when the growing season is short, and the temperatures are cold and so the soils are thin. In any case, it's a place that's very dear to me. I'd never like to live there again, but it enchants me just the same and it's captured in my heart and in my soul.

SS: Now, when you were a child, what was the first image or memory you have of anything volcanic, either in a movie, art, a book, a volcano-do you remember?

CC: Yeah, there had to be two, there's two that stand out in my mind. I'm trying to think of the order of them. Clearly, the eruption of Vesuvius and seeing the victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Those were poignant images in my mind, and I said, "Wow, wow. This looked like it had to be hell." It was more from the perspective of the victims and what a torturous event this was without really recognizing the volcanic forces that led to that.

SS: It was deep history. It was something everybody was taught in even grade school.

CC: Exactly. But then what happened was you know the antithesis of that, a contemporary eruption that did not have victims involved would be the eruption of Kilauea. So, seeing these lava fountains, these lava flows heading down off these shield volcanoes into the Pacific Ocean and flashing with steam and fiery, fiery flows of incandescent aa and pahoehoe lava and what it looked like after the fact, you know these surfaces and so those images are the ones that stick out in my mind and they're very different, of course. One is a shield volcano and effusive and the other is highly explosive, but the Pompeii example, the Vesuvius example, there weren't images of that to see. I'm sure that there were paintings of it and things like this, portrayals, but in any case, it was the effusive eruptions of Hawaii that really captured in my mind a dynamism of this very much would appear to be living phenomena, contemporary processes that were underway.

SS: I would say that not just Hawaii, but other representations in the arts and otherwise have given a lot of people a misrepresentation about what most volcanic activities actually is. It's not runny lava.

CC: It's true.

SS: That was my impression too was Hawaii in a Tarzan movie I saw with Johnny Weissmuller with this fake, black runny lava. Well, it was black and white. I remember seeing that going down and somebody got thrown into the lava and they died and that was my first memory. I was like 7 or 8 years old, but also the Hawaii volcanoes. But the kind of thing we see at Mount St. Helens and some of these more violent eruptions that have relatively little or no "lava" in the stereotypical sense, that's something that most people, including you, weren't exposed to. Right? Before you experienced this place?

CC: Right and the world was such that it would be on, maybe it would get you know a 10 second sound bite on the evening news if there was some big volcano that erupted in Kamchatka or down in Chile or in Indonesia or some other part of the world. You would hear a sound bite and there weren't necessarily even images to go along with that. The images are so compelling about explosive volcanism, right? Nowadays with everyone at their cellphones and all their kinds of devices and the monitoring that happens, when big eruptions happen in many cases the world sees them in sometimes nearly real time.

SS: Exactly. I don't know if there's any photography of Krakatoa, the big eruption? I don't think there is. There's a lot of artistic representations but is there any photography of Krakatoa?

CC: None that I'm aware of or not during the big [SS interrupts].

SS: I mean it's 1887.

CC: 1883.

SS: '83, and so you have photography, but-

CC: Yeah but I haven't seen any imagery of the main eruption that occurred in August of 1883. Subsequent eruptions, particularly on Anak Krakatoa in the '20s, late '20s, early '30s [SS talks over CC].

SS: The new islands that came up.

CC: There's black and white, yeah, there's photos of that, black and white photos.

SS: Okay. Anyway, going back to your perspective as a New Yorker and you took some trips when you were in high school or afterwards across Canada, correct?

CC: Yes. Exactly.

SS: But still you weren't into the Cascades, at least into the volcanic part of the Cascades, right?

CC: Well, what we did was we left New York. It was in the summer of '78 and we had worked for months on modifying my friend's Ford Econoline van and totally had it equipped for taking off on this long, multi-month camping trip across Canada. We drove up through New York into Quebec and zig-zagged our way across the country, Canada, hitting every providence just north and south, fishing our way across all of Canada, BC. Then we dropped down into the Cascades. I saw Garibaldi. I saw Rainier. I saw Mount St. Helens.

SS: Before eruption?

CC: Before this eruption. But all [SS interrupts].

SS: This was, how long was this before, Charlie?

CC: This was in 1978.

SS: So, you're close to the-okay.

CC: Yeah. In any case, these mountains, I was like they were stunningly beautiful, as you know. These ice and snow-clad volcanic peaks were punctuating this continuous green ribbon of the Cascades and they caught my attention. But I didn't spend any time near them. We ended up heading down into Southern Oregon and did camp out on all of this gravely material down there. Didn't know what it was. It was only years later I realized we were camping on the Mazama surface of the roughly 7,000-year-old Mazama eruption.

SS: Everything had blown up all over the place, including over much of southern Oregon, right?

CC: Exactly. So that was my first exposure down there, but I didn't get close to any of the volcanoes. It was all I-5 corridor looking out at these majestic peaks. Truly being curious about them, having no idea that 2 years later one would erupt and change my life forever.

SS: Now, you were already in school, correct, by this time?

CC: So, I took this big trip in summer of '78 and then in '79 had moved to Logan, Utah, and attended Utah State University.

SS: Now, is that when you started your undergraduate work or did you already-?

CC: No I had-but at state university in New York for a couple years and then transferred out to Utah State University and was working for a professor there at the time, you know, took course work and this person went on to become my mentor, Jim MacMahon, my number one mentor in my career who is just a phenomenal ecologist and a character, so colorful and huge is his personality. We became buddies between taking herpetology and community ecology from him among other things and then began working with him.

SS: Anyway, let's go to Utah State. Tell me about what you came there expecting to study, to do, and how what you studied and particular relationship with MacMahon, ho that changed. Maybe give me some examples, some classes, some moments.

CC: Yeah. Sure.

SS: Some things that he taught you that set an a-ha moment, for instance.

CC: So, when I arrived in August of '79 to Logan, Utah, had never been there before. I had never even stepped foot in Utah. Utah seemed really barren, really dry, and really rocky. It was foreign to me because of all of these other things. I had lived in the Hudson Valley of New York and hung out in the mountains of New York and England. Very green. Strong cities and this. This was in stark contrast to that. Of course, I hadn't lived through the seasons yet, because I'm just arriving in late summer where it's arguably at its driest point and brownest point, but liked it. It intrigued me. But pulling into Logan-and I moved out with a good high school buddy named Val Pelitern. Val was going to school down in Lynchburg, Virginia, to a small school, did not like what he referred to as the south in Virginia. The story's interesting because I had applied to Colorado State University and Utah State University and I had got accepted into both. Val applied, unbeknownst to me, to both of those schools while he was down in Virginia. He comes up and said, I'm going to go out west to school. I'm all, where? He's all, well, at Utah State. I said, well geez. So, we hopped in his Blazer, packed it up, and drove across the country out to Utah and landed there and got settled in, found a place to live, and started taking coursework and took herpetology and Jim taught herpetology (the studies of reptiles and amphibians). This person was like no one I had ever taken a course from before. He was dynamic. His knowledge was so expansive, so vast. He had so many interesting stories about the ecology of reptiles and amphibians. I had already had this strong fondness that had developed in my youth because I grew up in the Hudson Valley which has so many amphibians and I had collected them. I knew where to go find and collect every single species by the time I was 12 years old in the area around where I grew up in the Hudson Valley. This just built upon that untrained experience in fascinating ways.

Then we hit field trips. We took field trips to southern Utah, which just blew my mind to see these desert amphibians. How could it be that there's these little pockets of moisture and they come alive with amphibians in an otherwise isolated place. It turns out that has relevance to some Mount St. Helens stories down the road, as these oases develop. In any case, and then all the reptiles. You know, New York has some reptiles, not like Southern Utah. It certainly doesn't have things like chuckwallas and Gila monsters and all the rattlesnakes and on and on, and so really, really fun. And it was great being in the field and learning from such a master with such zeal and enthusiasm to teach. I immediately became aligned with Jim and he liked me. I liked him. Then, I took ecology from him and the ecology class was just amazing, amazing. He, Jim, is responsible for really providing the foundation of my ecological knowledge. He did it in such a fun way, just because Jim, again, his knowledge of organism, natural history, zoogeography, biogeography more broadly was just so amazing I couldn't wait to get to class. I just couldn't wait to get in there and just scribble down notes as fast as he was firing the information out. Then I took animal community ecology from him and again we went to Southern Utah and did different activities, but most importantly we went to Fort Bragg in Mendocino, California and studied the rocky intertidal and the redwoods on this field trip. That also opened up tremendous opportunities for me. I'd never really spend times in the rocky intertidal in the redwoods and we had an exercise just to sit down and stare, circumscribe a 1-meter square area on the floor of the redwoods and then look up. Project that square up through the air column, through the canopy, and sit there for a couple of hours and record everything that entered that space from ground level through the canopy. It forced me to just look and study and record. In many respects it's not unlike what I was doing back as a kid at those ponds that iced out looking at the frogs.

SS: It was just a more systematic way of funneling your fascination.

CC: Yeah, exactly. I was primed things to look for and connections. In any case, that was remarkable and then we went, Jim really liked me and so he would grab me, and a couple of other students and we'd go off to the Russian River and we'd go to the wineries and buy a whole bunch of cases of wine. We'd come back and we would cook up crab and abalone and we were at a drinking age and drinking wine and just having so much fun. This provided such an enriching experience. Jim was very important to me in so many ways and he became my buddy, my pal. It was at the end of the school year, so it was spring and- [SS interrupts].

SS: So, you were just like a junior then?

CC: Yeah, that's right.

SS: Because you transferred 2 years in?

CC: Exactly. So, then there was Green Canyon. I lived at the base of Green Canyon. It was a beautiful canyon up into the Wasatch Mountains and so my friend Mel, who's from Cleveland, had decided to have an end of the year pig roast and keg party. So, we went out to a local pig farmer in Cache Valley and we bought a little 100-pound swine and got a keg of beer, which is not easy to do in Utah, by the way.

SS: I know. I do a lot of research in Utah. I could tell you where the old historic brandy stills are, in Mormon country they used to use before the word of wisdom became the word of wisdom.

CC: Perfect. Yeah, so I think actually we went to Idaho to get our keg to drink in Utah, crossing state lines. In any case, I left a note on Jim's door, his office door, that said, it was in an envelope, but I said, Dr. MacMahon, you are cordially invited to the first annual Green River pig roast and keg party if and only if you offer me a job for this summer. So, I was a New Yorker, a little brash.

SS: I was going to say, you had some big ones, Charlie.

CC: Yeah, big kahunas. In any case, we're at the party and we're getting tipsy and drinking and been cooking the hog for hours and hours wrapped in foil and poultry wire and stuffed with all kinds of goodies in its cavity and next thing I look down and there's like 25 of us in there, students, and up comes Jim and he looks at me and he says, hey boy, you got yourself a job for the summer. I said, then you have yourself a cold beer. So, I poured Jim a beer and he stayed up there and ate the big meal and we drank and then I went to work for Jim. Our primary work was up in Wyoming in a big strip mine at the Kemmerer Mine site. I worked there with Bob Parmenter and others and interesting projects, ecological projects. That's where Mike Allen worked. That's where Bob Parmenter worked. This was the cradle of this group that's carried forward 35 years later to work at Mount St. Helens.

SS: Part of the core science people here at St. Helens. [SS talks over CC]

CC: That set. Yeah, yeah.

SS: Some of the people that were at the Pulse recently.

CC: Yeah, yeah. So, in any case, I was really interested in birds. I started doing the birds surveys on the Kemmerer Project. Working for Jim, the good thing is he had such a diverse portfolio of research interests and students that were tasked with different projects, graduate students and post docs, that we'd be heading down to all the hot deserts: the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan desert to the Great Basin down to Baja, Big Bend National Park. We would go all the places doing these studies, carnivory studies, desert, desert, doing the same study, shifting two weeks at a time from one desert to the other. This wonderful opportunity to see the west. So here I am [SS interrupts].

SS: Like a series of pulses, if you will.

CC: Here I am in my 20s and I'm just getting to see the west and I'm just lapping it up and then winter comes and I'm like wow, this snow on these slopes are a little remarkably more intriguing than those in New England and New York. I started skiing. I got to ski the Wasatch. I really learned how to ski in the Wasatch Powder, which was remarkable. Back country, a whole bunch of friends. We'd just go up and we'd skin up and get up on those big ridges and ski down the bowls, and just phenomenal.

SS: Did you have a favorite area?

CC: Yeah, I mean skiing up Logan Canyon with all the side canyons coming in for sure. Did primarily back country and not so much resort skiing. Then what happened, it was-I continued working for Jim throughout the school year. He kept me on doing data processing of all the pitfall samples and such: Mount St. Helens erupts.

SS: This is when you are still a junior? Entering your junior year?

CC: No, at this point I'm entering my senior year.

SS: Okay. CC: Jim gets a call from Jerry Franklin, who he had worked with through the International Biological Program, and is invited to come up. Jim comes up in June with Doug Anderson and they scout out the scene and, obviously, it was very limited in terms of access back then, largely helicopters. Then in September Jim brought a larger group up.

SS: That was your first visit to the post-eruption landscape.

CC: Exactly. Then that winter the idea-we got up here because Jerry provided seed funding for us to come up, probably through Forest Service and National Science Foundation, a combo. That winter we went back based on the data that we'd gathered on small mammals that June and September and wrote a proposal to NSF, which was successfully funded. Once we heard word that it was funded, which probably went in for the January panel, we heard in May or June, Jim said how would you like to be the Mount St. Helens kid?

SS: You mean, he basically said how would you like to be the guy there?

CC: Yeah, but he said how would you like to be the Mount St. Helens kid?

SS: The kid, huh?

CC: Yeah, the Mount St. Helens kid. That's what he said. Yeah. I said I would love that, Jim. He said, well, get ready we're starting a new project we were just successfully funded by NSF for 3 years. At that point, I had no idea what that would lead to, but it led to the single largest life-changing event that I've had. Up we went in these old beater, university Suburbans. They had names like the Desert Fox, because we worked a lot in the deserts and up, we came and worked out of the Cispus Center south of Randle, Washington, and north of the volcano and established a whole network of plots.

SS: Now, tell me about your first view of the landscape. You were in a helicopter, I take it, correct?

CC: Mm-hmm.

SS: Tell me about that. What was your expectations? What was your first reaction? What do you remember about that moment and what you thought and said?

CC: Right, well, what I remember is that we were at the Cispus Center and there were a number of helicopters staged there. They were punching out: that is, flying in different groups and dropping them off and taking them out to gather samples and begin early monitoring work, plot establishment, and I remember getting in the helicopter and it was the first time I had ever been in a helicopter, by the way, which was thrilling in and of itself.

SS: These were like Vietnam pilots, weren't they? Ex-Vietnam guys?

CC: Yeah. Exactly. That era, that's who you're flying with.

SS: Right.

CC: I think I was in a Bell Jet Ranger and took off and up we went out of the athletic field at Cispus where they were staging and over this forest. As far as I could see was this fabric of green and looking, I was like, wow. Then, you know, flying south towards the volcano and seeing it off in a distance, but it was ashy and muted in the distance. But then all of a sudden seeing what appeared to be very discrete, abrupt, shockingly abrupt, transformation from verdant forest to just gray and levelled to first-standing dead, scorched, and then leveled trees and it was-and then kept going into where the trees weren't present and over the pumice plain and it was oh, my God. This is like how do you even fathom what had happened here? How can this be? It's so vast. It was so intense that it was chilling. It was awe-inspiring, and chilling, and I knew then that this was going to be a very extraordinary summer and presumably few years ahead of me.

SS: But you had no clue that it would be 35 years.

CC: Yeah, there was no way to anticipate that.

SS: Right. Now, tell me a little about the research design. You talked about basically you setting up plots was one of your first things. Tell me about the research design and how you went about setting up your first plots and what you were plotting and in what areas.

CC: Sure. So, our focus was first the role of small mammals in ecosystem responses to the 1980 eruption. That's what got us here. That was the hook to NSF. We said we would do work with other taxa beyond small mammals, but that was our ticket here. Specially focusing on the role of the northern pocket gopher, because in June and September of '80 we had realized that small mammals had survived in certain locations, much to our surprise and, two, that the gopher had survived in many places and likely would have an important role in the ecological response. In addition to that, I'd already been working with birds from Kemmerer, Wyoming, in the deserts, as well as lots of mammal trapping and doing pitfall trapping for arthropods. What we'd looked at is the feature that turned out to be incredibly important at St. Helens and that's that recognition of the pattern that the disturbance was not uniform across the landscape, but instead, because of different volcanic types and intensities-which, I didn't even know what these things were. I'm talking about these now. I had no idea what the hell happened there.

SS: Now, you didn't have much of a background in geology at that time, right?

CC: No. None whatsoever. Minimal. A couple of college classes in geology and I don't know if they included anything much in volcanism. I'm sure they had a section. Of course, they did. In any case, it was evident, okay, it was obvious that the influences of the geological forces were not uniform and collectively created this disturbance gradient. We said why don't we establish our plots along this gradient and try to tease out what factors in terms of what was removed from the old-growth forest ecosystem-first of all, what was the patterns of survivorship. We saw a gradient that was really based on floristics, on vegetation. We saw it went from being very green out far, where the overstory trees survived but the understory was missing, two areas where [SS interrupts].

SS: Because of the tephra buried it?

CC: Burial, yeah. We saw places closer in where the trees were present, but they were standing dead. Closer in towards the volcano, the trees were present, but they were knocked on their can. They were levelled, toppled. Then closer yet the trees were removed, but fragments of trees here and there, and then right out in front of the crater, now we refer to as the Pumice Plain, just appeared sterile and steaming. And so, this, one, that, obviously, if the vegetation had differential survivorship, the small mammals must have as well. We took advantage of that and, number one: first area of interest was what is the patterns to survivorship and how is that related to disturbance density? Second, is how will the types, amounts, and distribution of this residual component of the eruption ecosystem influence post-eruption ecosystem processes? We set up bird transacts, mammal sampling webs and grids, arthropod pitfall stations along this gradient, going from reference out and ran to where it was uninfluenced by the eruption to deep tephra, shallow tephra/deep tephra, blowdown [SS interrupts].

SS: Or scorch, blowdown.

CC: Scorch, not for everything. Scorch we skipped initially. It was pyroclastic flow, blowdown, deep tephra, shallow tephra, reference. I circled back years later and folded in the scorch into the network. There we started immediately sampling birds every morning between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., starting the survey, sampling until 10:00 or 11:00 along this gradient, sampling small mammals. Then, on the pumice plain, in areas of the tree removal zone, which I didn't mention that's kind of intermediate between blowdown and-well, I did mention it, it's where there were just a few fragments left of forest.

SS: In other words, where the blast or the pyroclastic was so powerful it just uprooted and shattered and just dispersed. \ CC: Yeah, these are non-pyroclastic flow sites. They were hit by the so-called pyroclastic density current, or what we call a lateral blast. But that's right, it was as you said: it was so close that the forces overwhelmed the ecosystem components and even trees were just abraded, shattered, carried away, incinerated and all that was left was maybe stumps that were all these sand-blasted away on the volcano side of the wave of the flow phenomenon. This was a gaseous flow.

SS: How do you remember the "brain trust" of how this, the plan formed. You had Jim MacMahon. Jerry Franklin was also part of this wasn't he?

CC: No, we were-

SS: No, he wasn't yet? Okay.

CC: No, because at this point [SS interrupts].

SS: Just you and Jim and that team, right?

CC: Yeah, we had our Utah State team.

SS: Okay, gotcha.

CC: Okay, so we had our Utah State team and we were the animal team. Except for people like Evy Merrill and her major professor, Tabor and Radke who were working on elk and they did it on the Weyerhaeuser side, the west side.

SS: They're still doing that, right?

CC: Yes, the northwest sector of the blast area. We were largely-Steve West was doing a tiny bit from the University of Washington, but we pretty much, that was our focus. We had a lot of people and we were funded to do it and we dove in and got dirty. We established this network of plots that represented the gradient and began sampling them every year. Then, what would happen, I would just come up in May and we'd rent trailers at Cispus and stay May to September and some crews would be here, members would be with me the whole time. Others would be cycling back and forth between Jim's big project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, Jim and Bob's big project.

SS: So, you were already given a supervisory role even at this early stage?

CC: Oh, absolutely.

SS: Even though you weren't even an undergraduate yet?

CC: That's right.

SS: That's pretty amazing if you think about it.

CC: Yeah, it is.

SS: That's rare.

CC: Yeah, exactly. So, Jim provided me with that opportunity, and I think I took it seriously. It was like this is a golden opportunity and I loved it. I mean, going out there each and every day you know first of all I was challenged by needing to learn an entire new flora and fauna. It required so much effort of finding reference materials, talking to people, keying out plants, keying out insects, keying out mammals, listening to bird call after bird call on recording and, yes, okay that is the orange crown warbler or whatever it happens to be. I took that as a challenge but didn't recognize that, but was just so intrigued by it, enthralled by it. I was inquisitive and I was driven, and I was compelled to learn the system. At the end of the day I'm an organism guy and, although I focus on organisms and most of my interests are in communities, that doesn't mean by any stretch that I'm not interested in the broader scale landscape patterns. That kind of evolved with the maturing in my career and also linking the geophysical forces to the ecology and vice versa. But that came with time. That was like a slow fermentation. In some ways it's when I think back and having this conversation of how naïve I was back then and how little I knew, because I had to learn so much.

SS: Your exuberance carried you through your naïveté for a while.

CC: I think so and I had great mentors, so, I mean, Doug Anderson, who was a post doc of Jim's and Bob, very knowledgeable. Then having the likes of people that work with Jerry Franklin: Charlie Halpern and Joe Antos who worked with Don Zobel around to help out with some of the plants just learning them. My girlfriend at the time was a botanist and, so she knew a lot of the plants, had been working in botany for years and so we spent a lot of time just botanizing on our free time.

SS: Do you remember what was the process like of getting the permission to go in and do work and how did you have to get cleared: oh, this is a good day, this is a bad day, the lava dome is angry? All that kind of stuff. It was still erupting that first year.

CC: Oh, it was erupting through '86.

SS: Well, but I mean the first year especially there was a couple more big eruptions.

CC: In July, July 25th. But that happened before I got here.

SS: Yeah, okay, but I mean-so, you were after the bigger ones. But still what do you remember about that process and what you had to do.

CC: Well, I mean, two different points to make. One is that there was a process and the process meant you had to carry a Forest Service radio. You had to check in. You had to check out. You had to keep the radio on all the time. You needed to have a key to get in and out of the red zone. In the early days if you were up close and you were in there with helicopter, the rotors had to be kept running. They couldn't power down and you could only go within maybe 10 minutes or so distance time to travel back to the chopper and so it was very limited. It was really grab-bag samples. I remember in 1981, I believe it was '81, setting up a bird transect on the Pumice Plain and then never having a chance to sample. Just said okay we'll just get it set up. Then in '82 we were going to start sampling it, but in in think it was March of '82 there was a big lahar that came out of the crater and when we got back there to sample it, it had been wiped out. It was a number of false starts just because the geophysical world was still in control and had the biota under its thumb, which I refer to as there was biological inertia and lots of it because the physical system still reigned supreme. Other places like in the tephra fall zone that we could drive to and as they begin opening up the 99 road we got better and better access and could visit our sites with greater frequency and longer duration which made it just more amenable to doing our work. In any case, there was this process. I can remember once it was Memorial Day weekend I think and it must have been circa mid '80s, early '80s, and in any case being up on Coldwater Ridge, long before there was [Highway] 504 built up the fancy new road all the way to Johnston Ridge Observatory and Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center we came in through Weyerhaeuser's roads, which was like a plate of spaghetti roads everywhere through that northwest sector of blast area.

SS: Those were salvage logging roads or were those ones that were already there before the blast?

CC: I think it was a combination of roads that were there for active logging pre-eruption and then for post-eruption salvaging. I can't distinguish which ones were there before. Looking at an old Weyerhaeuser map would provide insight. In any case, we camped behind the ridge at Fawn Lake and then would come back over the ridge facing the volcano to work, you know, core. Volcano's framed right there. You're looking into the muscle from our sites. I was with my crew and I'm like man, the volcano just seems active. There's just rock fall after rock fall going on and then ash plumes would be going up and my crew would be nervous and like should we be here? I'm like I haven't heard otherwise. I haven't heard otherwise and every time I'd call in and you know would not necessarily hear back but I'm checking in I don't know what's going on with this batch. Finally, a helicopter flies in and saying Utah State we've been trying to get a hold of you for days. The volcano's active-the energy is on the rise. An eruption is certainly possible. We were seeing all this rock fall and ash plumes going up. They're like you need to get out of here right now. Then we scrambled, dropped all our equipment, high tailed it over the ridge, got to Fawn Lake, packed up and got out.

SS: Why did you not get the notice earlier? The radios were down?

CC: So, they were hearing me, but I was not hearing them is the problem. In any other examples I can remember being on the Pumice Plain working and the mountain putting up a big ash plume and just literally dropping everything and running as fast as we can out of there. Those days were scary. You were always looking over your shoulder at the volcano. Always looking at it.

SS: It's kind of like-I don't know if your parents in the east said the same thing, but one of the lessons when I was small there was said, never turn your back on the ocean.

CC: Exactly.

SS: That kind of thing.

CC: That's right. So, those were the early days and of course as the volcano settled down post 1986, that required less, and less check-in and roads were opened up, so we had better access and were able to do our work with less process in terms of bureaucratic check in. Just made life easier, in short.

SS: Now, going back to what you thought ecological processes were like and how you were trained, and I'll reference something that Jerry Franklin probably told you and you've heard him talk about. He said that in our oral history interview where a lot of the ideas that he was taught about ecology were certainly challenged, if not overturned, by what he saw at Mount St. Helens. Would you agree with that?

CC: I don't think that that happened right away. I think that took some time to develop. I mean, I think there were things at St. Helens-we didn't have examples because so much of the work on succession, as you're well aware, came from old field succession in the east and Midwest where it was harvested forest, it was an Ag land story. That's apples and oranges. A lot of it wasn't that those were wrong. They just weren't universally right and so I think it's important to recognize that the people before us didn't have bunk ideas and theories. They were just incomplete, and they didn't have application universally. This was a different setting, a different system, a different type of disturbance, different intensity disturbance, and the responses were quite different. Those theories didn't hold up. They were incomplete. They weren't wrong. That's a big distinction. Because I think a lot of people play the card that they were just wrong. But they weren't wrong. They were incomplete.

SS: No, I mean.

CC: There's a difference.

SS: You look at the history of science and it's sprinkled with that. Even the early geologic taxonomy that developed based on central and eastern Europe. Silurian and Ordovician; all these different names that came out of those worlds and what they saw and those examples. Well, they didn't always fit in these other places, like the Colorado Plateau where did you work when you were at Utah State. That challenged a lot of geologic predispositions by John Wesley Powell you know all the different people that came out there where they said okay this is different. This is a different world.

CC: Exactly. So, I think the first thing I focused on was the disturbance gradient. But then in a lot of ways I think our group may have played the most important role in terms of recognizing the importance of residuals, which had been popularized by Jerry and others as biological legacies. Jim McMahon was part of an effort of a paper that Jerry led, and Jim was coauthor. In any case, we said that if we're interested in looking where animals survive, we ought to look where plants survived. Our very design included a rigid component that said by God we're looking at matrix that is average conditions of a particular disturbance type along the gradient: Pyroclastic flow, blowdown, tree removal, but also, we need to sample small patches out of the matrix that represent heterogeneity. In other words, little islands of survivorship that are different from the matrix. So, what we would do is I'd scramble up these tephra slopes with a backpack full of traps and I'd slap those traps down on these little nodes of surviving plants and say what do we see in terms of a broader ecosystem pattern of survival? What emerged from our work is recognition that there were all these isolated patches of refugia, and they included many different groups of arthropods and different families of insects as well as arachnids and others but also different small mammals that represented different positions in the food web, in the trophic structure. I spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting the average conditions of a disturbance type to these nuances that occurred because of either chance or because of certain pre or post eruption conditions that made them different from the surrounding area, but one thing for sure early on there was much more internal homogeneity within a disturbance zone so they were readily recognizable from one another disturbance zones, but with time they become such that the internal heterogeneity of any given disturbances often exceeds that among disturbance zones. My whole focus has really been when looking at the types, distribution and abundance of residuals and what happens to those through time, the coalescence, the assembly of communities and the coalescence of habitat types and looking primarily first and foremost at the patterns of survivorship. How do communities, biological communities, reassemble after explosive volcanism that involves different types and intensity of disturbance that occur during the same disturbance event?

SS: Going back to the materials you had at your disposal going in-what do you remember about the richness, or lack thereof, of literature and stories pre-eruption of Mount St. Helens in botany, zoology, what have you? What did you have at your disposal?

CC: There wasn't much. For small mammals, I remember looking to see what was out there. Berks, I think he may have been in Ohio; he had some publications on Parícutin in Mexico. He had made anecdotal observations about small mammal species that he encountered here with this much tephra fall. Lizards and amphibians that he saw with this much level of disturbance type and intensity of disturbance. But it was anecdotal. It was a sentence or two about each. It wasn't a study. He documented the plants quite well and this was just bits and pieces. You saw the same thing from Katmai, from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta up in [SS interrupts].

SS: The land of 10,000 [Smokes] [CC talks over SS]?

CC: Exactly. Up there. Griggs had some notes and other people about fish responses, sockeye, to some of the presumably enrichment from the tephra, but there was very little, there was the work of Dammerman from Krakatoa. But Krakatoa [SS interrupts].

SS: Who was the Dutch scientist, right?

CC: Yeah, but Krakatoa is an equatorial island and so [SS interrupts].

SS: Kind of a poor analog for St. Helens at least on a certain level, huh?

CC: Yeah, and because study in earnest started for at least 20 to possibly 30 years post eruption there, there was still a big question about what survived and what didn't survive and it's still to this day called "the Krakatoa Program" and is hotly debated in scientific conferences. It's been a long time since 1883.

SS: Good to know they're still arguing about it.

CC: Yeah, so at any case there was a dearth of information with respect to [SS interrupts].

SS: Volcano ecology post eruption, right?

CC: Animals.

SS: Oh, okay.

CC: There was far more on plants. There were lessons from many, from Japanese volcanos, there were a number of examples sprinkled around the world in new world, tropics, and other locations. But still overall very little to draw from.

SS: Any studies on the 1944 Vesuvius eruption?

CC: They're vegetation studies.

SS: I mean of course it was also in the middle of World War II, so you had issues in the area.

CC: Right, so there wasn't a lot to draw from. People often drew from examples of other types of disturbances, fire for example.

SS: Okay, right. Well, I mean what other example-you don't have any other example in the northwest in historic times.

CC: That's right. Because there's been little-that's right, and those eruptions that have occurred, say in the last couple of hundred years, have really gone unstudied. So, activity that may have happened at Glacier Peak or Hood or Shasta certainly were not well-studied. At Rainier it's been 1,000 years, really.

SS: Right. So, it was all, hold on a sec-so, I want to clarify a little bit what went on before was what was available for you to study on what the plants or the animals were in Mount St. Helens, Spirit Lake, in any of the areas around here, whether it was anecdotal, non-scientific or scientific?

CC: Presumption data from Mount St. Helens, the region was really well-known for its flora and fauna. It was not hard to get, for example, hypothetical species list for all the different taxonomic groups: for birds, for small mammals, for fishes, for reptiles, for amphibians. It was a well-studied group, well-studied location Cascadia in general. At any specific location, the chances of somebody having studied right there, not so much. But generally speaking, the region's biota were very, very well studied and described. That provided a great opportunity, because you could say okay who is the potential cast of characters that were influenced by this eruption. Once I went and started doing museum searches. For example, I searched all the major museums: the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, California Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Vertebrae Zoology. I found out that people had actually gone and sampled from amphibians at Spirit Lake and they sampled Maratta Creek before the eruption. I was able to assemble a group of species that were known from very specific locations at Mount St. Helens pre-eruption but that's not the case for most taxonomic groups. We knew it more broadly what the biota were and for some examples we knew specific information at least at some time pre-eruption. In some cases, it may have been a few decades. In other cases, it may have been just a year or two.

SS: Of course, a lot of the forest science information would have been couched in the utilitarian world of where Weyerhaeuser and the other area around that would have wanted to know versus something that would be more interesting to you, right?

CC: Right, but for the plant ecologist they had a great pre-eruption data set available to them. Interesting enough, none of them have really rose to the occasion and tried to capitalize on that opportunity. The U.S. Forest Service National Forest System had an Area Ecology Program and the area ecologist for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest had established pre-eruption, well, before the eruption, they had no idea the volcano was going to erupt, they had installed a number of plots to characterize the vegetation in areas that went on to be hit by pyroclastic flows, by blowdown, by tephra fall and it is quite remarkable that to this day they are the only sites with actual pre-eruption data that you can get back to that those have not been capitalized by the botanical scientists, plant ecologists.

SS: So, nobody's gone back and retested those?

CC: There was a little bit of work in the early '80s, but it never saw the light of day in terms of publication and nobody's followed up on it. With each and every passing year, you know, those opportunities are slipping away just because it was pre-GPS, so being able to get back to those sites is already in question.

SS: Interesting.

CC: Because people have retired, and people have passed away.

SS: Where are these data sets? Where's the materials?

CC: They're right in that cabinet.

SS: Oh, you actually have them here?

CC: I have them right there in that beige cabinet.

SS: Is it just a matter of you just waiting for funding and a new group of interested people that want to go do something like that, right?

CC: You could say that, but they haven't been adequately marketed in a long time. They could be, but you know, my research interests are broad, and I do everything with quite a bit of intensity and I just, I don't have the time to take on anything else. I generally I view it as my job to be a steward of these plots and to find new people to work on them, to adopt them, or to continue on when someone retires. I haven't gotten to those that might be something I can get to before I'm [SS interrupts].

SS: How would you compare the location of those? Of course, some of them didn't survive or you could even find them to the gradient work that you guys did starting in '81?

CC: Well, they were distributed across that gradient.

SS: It's just, okay.

CC: There's representative plots in each of the disturbance zones.

SS: Just incidentally because that's where they happened to be?

CC: Absolutely.

SS: '60s and '70s, probably?

CC: Those were all done '70s, sometimes just a couple of years, even a year before. There's a plot that was done, that was installed and measured in the summer of '79 right out in front of the crater. Somehow [SS interrupts].

SS: Let's go back a bit.

CC: Well, I'm going to take a leak.

SS: Oh, you wanted to take a break?

CC: Just a restroom break.

SS: Okay, sure. So, when do you think that you stopped being more of a cataloguer and becoming more of an interpreter? In other words, you're there in '81 and it's just overwhelming and you're going out and doing all this work and probably more in the cataloguing, learning mode. When do you think it started transforming where you started becoming a mature interpreter and analyzer of what you were doing and seeing?

CC: I think that started in the most incipient stages of that probably happened early 1990s. So, 11, 12 years afterwards. But, in a lot of ways the maturation of my understanding, my truly being able to wrap my head around what all of this means at least with more clarity than I'd ever had before, so it was a quantum leap and still is far from comprehensive, probably began about a quarter century post-eruption. Probably the 25th anniversary. Something in that that really was able to start thinking about this more systematically, more holistically and recognizing really what the value of this whole experience has been. Since then, I think that has been a large part of my charge in terms of what stirs my intellect, what motivates my interests, and also recognizes a shift in the roles that I play at St. Helens, not in any way giving up what I had done but branching out and expanding into new terrain.

SS: Now, when you first got here you were on 3-year contract or the contract was funding you was-how did your position evolve? I mean, you came from basically as an undergraduate student and MacMahon said you're the guy. You're going to coordinate this for me right here. You had some funding from NSF but tell me how that went from to what you became at least in the first decade or so.

CC: That happened through '88 I was just spending my time, so from '88 to '89, okay, from 1980 to 1989 I worked for Utah State University as a Research Assistant and was for the first couple of years a student that worked summer position in the field, winter position processing samples while taking classes. I graduated with my undergraduate degree and started working full time for Jim as a Research Assistant. I would take non-matriculated graduate courses from 1982 to 1989. Every winter I'd take a couple of courses. I would take any classes that interested me: vegetation analysis, micrometeorology, whatever it happened to be, advanced entomology or systematics entomology, advanced plant taxonomy, any number of things. Take those classes for free, because I was an employee. Personal interest that helped develop I think my at least academic training for sure.

SS: But you still were kind of bi-locational? You were here and there.

CC: May to September living in Washington and then you know sometime in late September, late October through late April, early May back in Utah. That's how that worked. Then in 1989 the Forest Service advertised the position as the Mount St. Helens Ecologist out of Amboy, Washington, working for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument. Funding for that position was coming from the PNW Research Station to the Gifford Pinchot. I applied for the position. I interviewed. I was offered. I accepted. On April 24, 1989.

SS: Not that anybody remembers, right? [Laughs]

CC: April 24, 1989, was my first day working for the Forest Service. I'd left the university, which was really an agonizing decision for me, but it was the right decision because I loved working for Jim and I became so, so much part of that family, the MacMahon family, that it was a teary event, really pulling myself away from there.

SS: Because his family was probably like your other family out west, right?

CC: Yeah and so I knew I wanted to be in the far west, here on the west coast. I landed here working for the Monument and continued. That was a big transitional point. Because when I arrived here, that's when I started building the plot empire. Because I was here just all the time. That's when I said, okay, we have this many mammal webs, but I think we need to have 4 replicates of each. I just started randomly selecting new sites along the disturbance gradient in each of the zones, started pumping up the efforts. So, 1989 right through to a couple of years ago I have just been building and building and building the plot network. Honestly, I mean I have thousands of plots out across the Monument. They're in streams. They're in ponds. They're in lakes. They're in riparian areas. They're in uplands. They're in meadows. For example, we had 7 bird transacts that we sampled during the MacMahon era. Now I think we're up to well over 30. Mammal sites we had 7. We're up in the high 40s. Amphibians we had a couple of sites. We're over, well over 150 sites that we study for amphibians. Both bolstering and, in some cases, dramatically the sample effort, the number of sample sites and then adding through collaborations soils and nutrient cycling and different taxonomic groups, different system types, really have expanded that dramatically. I worked for the Monument-they let me do this. But I didn't last long with the Monument for a host of reasons. I was growing less than happy with my situation here in the National Forest System side. People knew that at the Station. What they did is through, may he rest in peace, Jim Sedell, who was a funded position said. "Crisafulli, we're yanking you and we're yanking our money and we're putting it into Pete Bisson's team up in Olympia." Pete Bisson and Jim worked together for Weyerhaeuser years ago and Pete was now working for the Station in Olympia, fish ecologist, great salmon ecologist. Next thing you know, I'm leaving here, not physically, going over to the research branch. This happens probably '93. It was maybe '92 even. It was just a couple of-'89, it may have even been earlier. In any case, a couple years here, I'm over at the Station '92, '93, and life gets great.

SS: Let me ask you this-what was the problem with the Monument? I was going to ask you, not with the Monument, but in terms of management or rules or regulations or constraining effects on the science the plots that you wanted to do? Was that an issue, or no?

CC: In any case, shifting over to the research branch was a better match for me. This was a research group. I was focused on research. I was better to express my interest and to do the things that I really liked to do under the Station instead of under the Monument. I was a positive move for me. Pete Bisson went on my time there to be, you know, the best boss that I ever had, I'd say, short of MacMahon. Pete wasn't the mentor that Jim was, but Pete has so much humility and such a wonderful man and so supportive and such a good scientist that he was phenomenal to work under. I got to stay here where my family is and where I had my home and all that so that worked out great. It didn't require a move.

SS: You were already pretty well-rooted even by '89 when you got offered the job?

CC: No, but by '90 [SS interrupts].

SS: I mean you knew enough people here that you were rooted in the sense that you were connected to the community and the place.

CC: That's right. By '92 I owned a home. I had an orchard. I had a berry patch. I had a chicken coop. I had 1800 ft2 greenhouse. I was here. The Station and my program and team fully supported the St. Helens research program and I continued to expand the work and particularly expand collaborations and had a very active program. Each year hire undergraduates, hourlies, undergraduate interns and then would implement our work throughout the field. We had a lot of fun out there. I was spending in the heydays that lasted quite some time, I was spending 100 days a year up on the mountain and we were just living out of tents and running fast and hard both by day and night and just gathering all the data we could and processing it in the winter and built some of the best friendships that I've had out there with these people. I still maintain these friendships to this very day as well as those that extend way back from Utah State, such as Mike Allen and Bob Parmenter and Jim and Chuck Hawkins. During this time, I started becoming much more involved with steams and Chuck Hawkins, also from Utah State but who hailed from OSU and close colleagues with Jim Sedell, he and I joined forces about 1990 and started doing a whole lot of work in the streams, which we continue to this day. It was this really building of the program and the social science and the science and social aspect of ecological science network that really happened in a transforming way, I would say, in the early '90s and has continued to this very day. So, now we have this expansive network of plots. We have lots of collaborators and I think we've developed a fairly respectable research program out on a volcano, and we've done it with literally with pennies. This has never been a well-funded program, but we've leveraged a lot through partnerships and just working all the time without getting paid for it.

SS: Also, the fact that it's such an interesting subject to a lot of people, especially the people that got in on the ground floor. The people that are involved with the Pulse, for instance, still bring their influence to bear on keeping or at least staying interested in what's going on here, in general, correct?

CC: Oh, absolutely. People, there's you know generations of scientists that have worked at Mount St. Helens that have become committed to the place and to the program and they come back and now they're bringing their students back and some of those students are bringing their students back. There's this hereditary aspect of the work that's happened at Mount St. Helens and that's been great. We're in a crossroads right now where a lot of the original people, obviously, are approaching or beyond retirement age but are still working. Others are retiring. Others are passing away. So, one of the most important thrusts over the last 5 and even 10 years has been to recruit the next generation of scientists to continue the work that was initiated in the early post-eruption days.

SS: Of course, do you fear that the interest might wane because the dramatic post-eruption landscape is more ameliorated by ecological change over 35 years? Do you think there's still going to be just as much interest, scientifically, if it's nurtured correctly?

CC: I think that the interest has not waned. It's only increased. I think we're at a renaissance, quite honestly, right now. Thirty years out I think there's more interest today than there has been since the earliest post-eruption days. I think there was a lull because people didn't recognize the value. They thought it was an anomaly. They thought it wasn't typical situation, therefore why study it. But I think now people have universally recognized, holy smokes, does this place have a lot to offer ecological science. What we're seeing is a lot more people coming and a lot more interest and expansion of which is really great young faculty and other researchers coming with a different bent. They're coming and using the plot data or other remote sensing data, say, but they're asking new questions with it. They're carrying on the plot measurements. We're not out of the woods yet on that one. That's not necessarily appealing I think to this younger generation of scientists just to track change through time. It's hard to get funding for. I think that's where the Station plays a huge role.

SS: Because they're keeping at least a baseline bit of funding so you can keep doing the continual monitoring, correct?

CC: Well, the Station is.

SS: That's what I meant, yeah.

CC: Yeah, the Station is. But a lot of the new faculty coming in they're asking new and different questions, which is phenomenal, which is really, really good. On the other hand, by maintaining some plot measurements for sure, but if there's one concern I have it's being able to figure out who are the people and how do you fund the continuation of funding this core set of plots. What's really promising right now is the Station more so than ever at least in the time that I've been working at the Station, so since the early '90s, has been so tuned into and so supportive of ecological scientists at Mount St. Helens. I think this is a really, really positive time for science at the Monument. One, because of the peaked interest and heightened interest on part of the Station. Two, because we have all this young blood coming in that has a lot of vitality and interest and enthusiasm.

SS: If you were going to draw a thumbnail sketch of funding over the 35 years, how would you characterize that in general? The NSF, the PNW, University-how would you put that together in kind of a thumbnail sketch?

CC: Well, it can be described by one, there's been continuous NSF funding at Mount St. Helens for 35 years. Some of the key players have come and gone and some have those grants. But there's been particularly through-so early on it was an ecosystem program. It was the division of environmental biology ecosystem science that funded some of the big projects. There was also a number of ecology programs funded through the ecology section. But in addition, and to this day LTREB has still played a role.

SS: What's LTREB?

CC: Long-Term Research in Environmental Biology.

SS: Okay.

CC: Today LTREB, there's been some people who've had continuous LTREB support for like 30 years. Others, including myself, going on a decade. That's been important and there's a number of people that the young folks that are planning right now to get preproposals submitted. There's reason to believe that NSF funding will likely continue. Of course, it all depends on how well those proposals fair in review, and so NSF has played an important role. The Station has played an important role, but much like NSF it has varied in the level of funding. I mean the Station has had early on it was Fred Swanson, Jerry Franklin, and Jim Sedell that worked at the volcano. None of them worked here full-time. Some of them got things going. All of them got things going. None of them really continued to have anything going. Of course, Jim's deceased. But they did stuff early on and then they more or less left the scene in terms of doing work and then they come back now and then for visits.

SS: Most of that original group, from what I can see in the records that I've read, they came back the first 5 years and then some of them a little bit 'till about '89, '88. Would that be correct?

CC: Exactly. Since then, not really. I mean if you really look at on the groundwork it was in the first decade of the first post-eruption decade of the first 5 years, first half of the post-eruption decade. Fred has stayed on in a way more just being a supporter of the program with some writing activities, but not field work per se. So, the Station had a big hiatus, say, from the mid to late '80s until they were funding the partly-funded Monument scientist position, but in terms of them having people on the ground doing things it didn't really happen again until I arrived in '89. Then when I switched in the early '90s, and at that point they funded, they recognized that they're going to fund an ecologist that works at Mount St. Helens. But it was really the team. It's not like if you looked at the organizational chart back then you would have seen Mount St. Helens ecology position. It would have been Bisson's team, Crisafulli, focus Mount St. Helens. Which is a big focus. The Station has never in the 35 years recognized at an organizational level that there's a Mount St. Helens scientist.

SS: How have you managed to stay here in an organization that at least traditionally used to like to move people around like you're in the military?

CC: I mean, that's less in the Station, first of all. That doesn't happen in a station.

SS: The research is different, I understand. But it's just a question to ask.

CC: I mean there has never been any discussion of me moving on. But what has happened is they provided my salary and usually a vehicle for the summer and then anything I wanted to do I had no operating budget. None. So, anything I wanted to do I had to go find, develop partnerships or find soft money grants. Write grants, get proposals funded to do the project work. That's how it's been right up until just a couple of years ago and before then I might have been able to get $5,000 here, $7,000 there from Jim Sedell or Dede Olson or someone I'm working with in my team, my team leaders, our program manager. But really something shifted about just recently, three or four years ago, where I received a very modest operating budget. Since then that's been like once the current station director came on, which was recently Rob Mangold, he said clearly, his words, you've been the orphan child. He's all: that's going to change. What Rob has done has been enormously supportive and it's right now the assistant directors have been enormously supportive. Here we are 34 years out, really, and a year ago, we saw change finally happen and it seems to have caught fire and has momentum now. I think we're in very good standings. I think the Station views St. Helens as important and so they're providing reasonable operating expenses and support right now.

SS: Even in the light of sequestration and congressional cutbacks?

CC: Yeah, they've been fully supportive. I think the idea is that what I've learned is that if you can go out and be a mover and shaker and make things happen and make your bosses look good, that they'll get behind you. I think I've been just disjunct from any lab. I'm assigned to the OLY Lab [Olympia], but I'm not there. I have never been there.

SS: Your laboratory is the field and you only occasionally visit the lab?

CC: Yeah when I need to use specific equipment, I'll go up but right now I have microscopes here. I have analytical balances here. I have many things here. If I need other items, equipment, I'll go to one of the labs, typically the Olympia lab or down at Corvallis. That's the role that the Station has played in terms of you asked the funding question. I talked about NSF. Then some of the really, they're the two primary, and a whole lot of work is being done piggy-backed off other projects that are better funded. People come up and rob Peter and feed Paul.

SS: How do you think that constant synergy and attempt to find collaborators, funding and otherwise, how do you think that affected positively the whole dynamic here at St. Helens, because I mean it seems to me like because you were here and you've done that and this has become your mission, a lot of the team and the continual interplay back and forth had a lot to do with those efforts out of necessity.

CC: I think we built out of necessity or out of desire, really. Out of desire. We built a complex nexus of collaborations and it's the general notion in ecology that richness begets richness. I think in terms of collaborations, the more collaborators you have and if you have people that can play nicely together that that builds synergy and you end up with something where the sum is a whole lot greater than the parts. That's what we have here today and it's really exciting, but St. Helens has never been terribly well-funded. If you look at the productivity of St. Helens, St. Helens has an amazing publication record and I think if you were to stack it up to places like the Starkey Experimental Forest or the H.J. Andrews publications per dollars spent you'd have to break the Y-Axis in order to plot them.

SS: Do you think it's because this place and the dynamic, ecological and otherwise, are inspirational?

CC: I think so. I mean, in some ways you could argue [SS interrupts].

SS: I mean, scientifically inspirational as well as on a personal level, too.

CC: Right, I think in some ways you could argue it's apples and oranges to compare the Starkey, the Andrews, and St. Helens, but in other ways it's not at all. If we're a science organization and part of the way in which we need to measure success is by publications, then that ought to be a common currency. If you're spending whatever it is, that tens of thousands of dollars per publication at those other sites and a fraction of that here, you might look to say, you might consider evaluating how you're distributing and allocating funds. But the reason is clearly-I mean, I've never even been to the H.J. Andrews, believe it or not, or the Starkey.

SS: You've never been to the Andrews?

CC: I've never been to either one of them. But my understanding of them is that you know, and I may be wrong, but the Andrews represents kind of your run-of-the-mill, west-side Douglas-fir, true fir, mountain hemlock forest along the elevational gradient. I don't think there's necessarily anything necessarily spectacular in talking to Fred and others about the forest of the Andrews versus the next basin north, the next basin south: Opal Creek, for example, you know certainly does it hold anything over Mount Rainier or Mount Jeff? You know. There's nothing necessarily special. It's kind of like a working man's west side forest, is my understanding.

SS: But what makes it special, I would say, is what has happened there.

CC: Right. But that's the point.

SS: And what emanated from that place.

CC: But what I'm trying to draw a comparison to [SS interrupts].

SS: I understand.

CC: ...is Mount St. Helens there's nothing ordinary about it.

SS: No.

CC: So, I'm trying to compare the working man's Douglas-fir forest in the Cascades to a huge, you know, not huge. It wasn't a huge-to a large contemporary explosive eruption influencing forests that were probably similar to the Andrews. You have everything the Andrews had and now add an explosive eruption on top of it. Okay? Compelling.

SS: Let's say at the South Sister, which is the newest of the cones in the Sisters. Let's say it was 30 miles more this way and boom.

CC: So, in any case, Mount St. Helens obviously because of what unfolded on May 18, 1980, you know created this exemplary place to conduct ecological studies that you can't go do in any other places in the Cascades, right? It's one. It's like a stamp collection. You've got one right here. Just erupted. There's not another one that just erupted. It's not like Hood erupted 6 years ago and you can go do study that one or Glacier Peak. You got this one contemporary eruption site. People flocked here. You could probably go do the studies that are happening at the Andrews in 100 different basins in the Cascades. There's nothing special about that. It's special because it's been a focus of work there and that's important but in and of itself, I'm speculating and probably spending too much time on it, that there's nothing that's inherently special about that place.

SS: Which is one of the reasons that H.J. Andrews himself actually chose that basin or made that one of the priority sites when he signed the Blue River Experimental Forest, which was the original name for it.

CC: Yeah, okay.

SS: Then it became the H.J. Andrews when he was killed in a car accident in 1951. They were grooming him to be the director [Chief] and he was killed out looking for a house in Washington, DC.

CC: Jesus, okay. So, in any case, St. Helens stands apart. It was dramatic. It captured the world's attention. It captured the attention of scientists from around the world and around the nation and certainly regionally and people recognized so many things that can be learned here that really, I mean, ultimately you know our forests in the northwest have been shaped by volcanism and so the study of 1980 eruption of St. Helens informs our understanding more broadly of forest processes in Cascadia.

SS: Now, the most, shall we say, pre-historic times would be an analog in the Cascades would be Mazama, right? Although it was a different kind of eruption, but...

CC: No, I mean there would be some eruptions. I mean, there's been big tephra eruptions from St. Helens before. Glacier Peak has had some major eruptions that included lahars and tephra falls. Hood the same can be said. Shasta the same. So, there's better examples than Mazama. Mazama's off the charts in terms of its eruptive index.

SS: But for those historic ones you're talking about are still much less catastrophic than the St. Helens explosion.

CC: Right, but they're probably closer than to what Mazama was.

SS: Because that was just massive.

CC: Massive, yeah.

SS: Okay. So, what about Lassen Peak? I talked to Fred about that and I understand at the time that it happened in the early 20th century. Ecological science was literally still stuck in the Midwest back then.

CC: Yeah, so I mean Lassen, I [SS interrupts].

SS: Well, I mean I'm just asking opportunities for comparative studies even 100 years after the fact.

CC: Yeah, and I don't know enough about Lassen to speak to it. I don't know. I was hoping to make a trip down there in early October. But I know for whatever reason people haven't seized the opportunities and studied that much.

SS: Yeah, it seems like when I was there it was most of the interpretive and that literature was traditional geologic volcanism, but I don't remember reading anything about ecological processes.

CC: Yeah, if you look across the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest what you'll find is that ecologists haven't focused their studies on those, even doing taking advantage of retrospective studies. They just haven't done it. Or if they've happened to work on these volcanoes, they have never couched their work in terms of a place that had been altered by volcanic disturbance, at least that I'm aware of. There's a few exceptions to this.

SS: For example?

CC: Well, Lawrence's work.

SS: Right.

CC: That's a great example. Lamarche, looking at the depressed disturbance induced tree line versus climactic tree line.

SS: That's of course St. Helens had a lower tree line, for instance, than a lot of other similar peaks in this same latitudinal gradient, right?

CC: Yeah. Flora was described as being in disharmony simply because of disturbances that would occur at a frequency that would preclude the flora to develop to a more typical composition structure as you would see in the absence of that disturbance.

SS: Soil formation, various factors.

CC: Plant community structures, so that the species that are there are in abundance.

SS: Okay. Now, going back to the earlier years you can talk about the '80s or even the early '90s as your present position was forming, but you were talking about some of the experiences. Relate some of the experiences and memories, people, instances, humorous, even tragic. Anything that's interesting that would be considered a story that you could tell on record.

CC: It's hard. I mean there's so many. I mean.

SS: Just pull out a few that are particularly memorable.

CC: Some of the greatest memories came from working out in the Pumice Plain in my career, sampling small mammals and so we just built tremendous comradery and always the presence of surprise, because you're looking at communities that, biological communities, that starting from scratch and so each year there's always the possibility, the potential for having new species to arrive and what order do they arrive in and how do their populations, so they persist? Do they wax and wane? Do they wink on, wink off? Do they build? Do they expand? That's been truly a remarkable experience to watch as community develop, and at this point all but 2 species, maybe 3 species that are potential within these source population within the Cascades have arrived to the Pumice Plain and almost all of them have established. We've watched development of a complete mammalian assemblage that you know includes 20 some species over the course of these years.

SS: Of course, you're making this reference because that is the prototypically harshest disturbed areas is the Pumice Plain right in front of the gaping crater, right? Even there all this is happening?

CC: Yeah, exactly. This is the area that was subjected to the most extreme forms of volcanic disturbance. There were no legacies. No carryover the pre-eruption forest communities. Everything started anew. You watched both the pattern and rate of life, mammalian life, re-insinuating itself on this landscape and including everything from large mammals, such as mountain goats and elk, too, that are highly mobile and can get in and out of a place. If resources aren't appropriate, they can just take off without a lot of ill effect or consequences, grave consequences. Whereas, also up to a half a dozen of small insectivores that have among the highest metabolic rate in the world of vertebrates and they're weighing but a few grams-4, 5, 6, 7, 8 grams-and are making out to this Pumice Plain. Our understanding of species-specific dispersal capacity and the relative unimportance of dispersal corridors and just the capacity of these organisms to disperse long distances over what appear to be inhospitable conditions is astonishing. Then watch how these communities develop, watch how they change. And the people along the way-I cannot even begin to tell you how important it is. I probably have trained 120 undergraduates in my career at Mount St. Helens, many of them going on to graduate school. But the time we've spent out there in the field together, sharing the exploration and the element of surprise, the sense of wonder, coming back to camp at night, making a nice meal, getting a fire going in either a wood-burning stove in the tent or outside under the stars, passing around a bottle of whiskey and just enjoying what we're jointly experiencing out there. It's rich. It's deep and the friendships have been amazing. The experience is watching the experiences for the young people and also fun. I'd say another place that has been really important is working in the Mount Margaret backcountry. We would go up there and establish a camp, sometimes for a month at a time. It's a show [SS interrupts].

SS: This is on the other side of Spirit Lake?

CC: Spirit Lake-the north of Spirit Lake, yeah.

SS: Mount Margaret, but you're talking about on the other side from Spirit Lake where you were camping, or you were on the Spirit Lake side?

CC: Well, in the heart of the Mount Margaret, so it's right over that front range looking you know from the south, north of the south part of the Mount Margaret. Working in all those lakes up there, characterizing the amphibian assemblages, but through time I've generally hired people that like to work hard and play hard. We would go up to the Mount Margaret for typically anywhere from a week to a month at a time, and it was a hike in. We could get helicopter support to fly our equipment in, because we had waders and dip nets and seine nets and all of our cook stoves and tents and all this. We would on some years be able to get helicopters to fly our sling load in, our gear. We'd hit the helipad at Meta Lake and load it all up and they would sling it in, and we would hike in with day packs, essentially. We're all beer drinkers, so we're like how are we going to get our beer in here? I'm like, okay, we've got to be creative. We don't want to have to have a bunch of containers that we have to carry out. Cans weren't popular back then. It was a lot of bottles, heavy glass. I said why don't we get a full keg of beer from Deschutes.

SS: And put it in the snow.

CC: From Deschutes Brewery. What we did was in the center of our sling load we took a full, 15.2 keg of beer and put it in a 32-gallon garbage can and put it in the center of the sling with the tap inside, covered it.

SS: Did they know this?

CC: And told the helitech foreman that it was liquid nitrogen and please don't open it. We packed everything around it and then they ended up slinging our keg of beer up and we would just place it in the lakes that were just thawing out. There was still ice floating in the lakes.

SS: So, your beer was cold.

CC: We had cold beer and so we did this a couple of occasions and no one ever knew we were flying kegs of beer in. Then that would get us through and then we'd just fly them out at the end.

SS: After they were empty of course.

CC: Empty, of course, yeah. Those were fun trips. The debris avalanche, all those ponds. A hundred and some newly created ponds. No one had studied them. No one had really looked anywhere in the world at how amphibian populations colonize brand newly created ponds, particularly after a disturbance and particularly after a volcanism.

SS: Of course, the chemical mix was pretty toxic at first but that would gradually ameliorate over time, right?

CC: Well, it just depended. We don't know much about the water chemistry, but, given that the amphibians were colonizing, would suggest that all of these ponds that we studied were within their tolerance limits, which suggests that they really didn't have inhospitable chemical environments. But, just looking at the way in which amphibian communities have assembled in these ponds through time and how that has changed, is mediated by mammal activity, such as beavers and their influence on hydrology and riparian and aquatic vegetation, and also how the forest succession itself has changed the suitability of these habitats for amphibians and leading to switches in different species dominance and compositions.

SS: Now has this changed the character of any of the species significantly, size-wise? Has there any noticeable mutations or genetic changes or shifts that are marked because of the dramatic ecological changes?

CC: In spite of the size and intensity of the 1980 eruption, when we look across many different taxa, when we look at the different taxa that have been studied for an evolutionary influence of the eruption, we don't see that at all. We've looked at this with a stream-dwelling amphibian, a couple of pond-dwelling amphibians among other species, and if there was you know, one would anticipate that there could be a bottle-neck effect. If most individuals were killed, except for some in some refugia, that those would represent a subset of the genes in the populations and that given the changes in the environment there could be different selective pressures leading to this bottleneck effect. On the other hand, if you have new colonizers coming in, and founding a population, particularly if it's a low-probably event, and some establish, they are going to represent only a small, some fraction rather, of the total potential gene pool and that under new, selective, post-eruption forces, that could lead to this founder effect. But if either of those happen, they were rescued shortly after the eruption, so they were transient or ephemeral in nature. Because when we look across these different groups that have been assayed for genetic population structure, we find that they're panmictic, simply meaning that there's gene flow across populations from reference sites, to tephra fall sites, to even pyroclastic sites, and that it's one big open breeding population. No evidence of genetic sorting or filtering leading to different [SS interrupts].

SS: Or slight alterations or...

CC: We haven't seen any of those kinds of manifestations.

SS: So, basically the species or the gene pool of plants and animals in the area, although there was all the death and destruction in certain areas the survivorship and then as the process has been working its way in or jumping in colonies and however that's happened you basically had the same species just adapting to the new environment without being significantly altered, though.

CC: Yeah, right. You have different community structures of all the organisms, but what we're saying (of all the communities), but what I'm saying is, of those organisms that have been studied, we hand-picked some that were like, if any organism is going to show a genetic signature it should be these, and there's been no evidence and support of that. In fact, it's been to the contrary.

SS: And what would be the species that you casted for [CC interrupts].

CC: Well, the coastal tailed frog, the red northern red-legged frog, and the rough-skin newt.

SS: Any more memories about those days, humorous, funny? I mean the kegger story is really fun. It's not exactly surprising, but very creative.

CC: So, I mean I think that there's so many stories. Sorry, I'm not pulling them out. Every summer has been rich with stories. I think I'll just leave it at that now. Maybe in the next half or something.

SS: Well, yeah, there's a whole lot. Has anybody ever been seriously injured out here in the monument doing research? Not necessarily with you but just kind of an aside question there?

CC: Well, let me just state that with my crew I've had about 120 employees. We've been out there as much as anybody from snow melt to snow fly and we've never, ever once had a serious injury which is quite remarkable given that we're at the basis of cliffs and tops of cliffs, we're at waterfalls. We're at fast-flowing streams. We're at down-timber strewn hillslopes. The one thing that happens every year is we always have lots of bee stings and only one ended up being problematic. This year probably more than ever, because it's the hottest, driest summer that we've experienced I think since the eruption, the white-faced hornets and yellow jacket stings were off the charts. But we were working at a fairly remote site, but still drive to, on logging roads, lakes in the Monument. At the beginning of every year I ask my crew, I'm all: does anybody have allergies that they're aware of to bee stings? Everybody said no, and so one of the employees starts walking counterclockwise around the lake, which is consistent with our protocol and we're sampling littoral zones on a riparian zone and he's in the riparian zone and he steps, indirectly, of course, on a ground nest of yellow jackets. Well, they boil up and he gets a whole bunch of stings on his neck and his face. And he's like, "Owe, dammit." But, then I'm all, "How you doing?" He's all, "Oh, I'm fine. No problem." Then, I'm in riparian zone in waders, excuse me in the littoral zone, and I'm walking around just immediately adjacent to him as we're walking in tandem, he on land and me in the water sampling as we go for amphibians. I look over and I'm all like, wow, your face looks really swollen. He's all, "Yeah, it feels really swollen." I'm, "You okay?" He's all, "I think I'm fine." I look over and I notice his eyes are swelling shut. I'm all, "I think we need to stop now." So, we stop. I sit him down and I say how you feeling right now? He's all, "Well, I'm kind of having hard time breathing." I'm all, "Uh-oh. Into the truck." We drive all the way down to the Yacolt to the EMTs. They hit him with an EpiPen and then just monitor him and he's-

SS: He didn't know he was allergic?

CC: This was the first time. He'd been stung many, many times. He built up a sensitivity and so, he was allergic. The other thing that had happened was we were working in the late very early 1990s in the debris avalanche deposits, all these ponds out there. Some of these have really, really mucky substrates in them. The same person, by the way, was walking around and he got out into the pond and was doing his work but then went to move and he couldn't move. Every time he moved, he sank more and more into the muck. At this point, he's up to his waist. He cannot move and it's getting dark. I'm on my way up to the mountain to camp that night and to work with the crew the following day. The next thing I know I have all these emergency vehicles flying by me with their lights on and their sirens and they're going up there. I'm like, wow, this is terrible. Somebody really got hurt up there. This is going to be a bummer. I get up there to find all of the emergency personnel in the parking lot and my employee's there and Josh is looking all sheepishly, and he had gotten stuck in the mud, but my crew was able to go up, they ran up to the visitor's center and said we've been trying, we can't get him out. They're like, okay, we're calling 9-1-1.

SS: They couldn't pull him out?

CC: Well, then they got a rope. By the time the EMTs came, they had pulled him out. But it was only after all this commotion had happened. EMTs were dispatched and came up there. In any case, but other than those two stories it's quite remarkable.

SS: No broken ankles or legs or anything?

CC: Nope. We've taken other people out with us. We've taken, you know it's amazing the people I hire I think I just either intentionally or inadvertently screen them and get people like I said that are people who work hard and play hard and they just, we haven't had problems, but oftentimes other individuals from other groups want to come out with us. We've destroyed some of those people. We've destroyed. I mean [SS interrupts].

SS: Running them into the ground.

CC: Twisted ankles. Cuts. Abrasions. You know it's like okay they're not one of us. Let's haul them out of here and so now it's gotten to the point where I've discouraged that just because people have gotten injured that aren't part of our group. Even though we tailgate safely, got to look out for this, got to look for that, these are people who aren't used to doing this.

SS: City people. They live in the lab or in the classroom, but they're not really used to, I won't say extreme field conditions, but rigorous field conditions, right?

CC: Exactly. With elements that aren't typical. People aren't used to being in slanted fast-flowing streams with lots of algae on the rocks or needing to hop over big, downed old-growth logs one after another, after another or going under some and then above or walking across gorges that are spanned by big, downed trees and you look down and a stream is blow you and it's a long ways down. All of these things.

SS: What was the research protocol like under the Monument and still today? How do you work in terms of the zones that are reserved for science, for different uses? Of course, I think that was negotiated pretty well the first couple, three years when they created the Monument. How does that affected research in terms of what you can and cannot do in certain areas?

CC: It's not been problematic whatsoever. Working at St. Helens we've had access to all of the sites that you would choose to work in, or have chosen to work in. Unrestricted following the rules and the rules have been very reasonable and have allowed us to implement our work without any problems. We haven't done a whole lot for manipulations. Most of it is just observational. In some cases, it has been applying chemicals on a very small scale on a very compressed timeline to control herbivores or removing plants, physically, to do at some response variable. But generally, our work is non-experimental and the observations that we make and the studies we've designed around these observational studies have been able to unfold without any problems. So, the biggest thing is that the Monument is very popular with visitors and so we try to really increase our level of awareness when we're in places that he public is so that we work in those sites when we're going to be least visible and if we encounter people we go out of our way to tell them this is why we're off the trail and this is what we're doing and we have a permit to do so.

SS: Hopefully they will respect the integrity of the sites.

CC: Yeah, but lately I mean we've seen quite a bit of violation. I'm not sure what's going on and why we're seeing so much more of that now. For example, bikers on trails that are clearly marked not for bikes.

SS: You're talking about mountain bikes, right?

CC: Mountain bikes, exactly. As use increases more off-trail travel in places where it's not permissible, more human feces here and there. But by no stretches have gotten bad, but it's just it was almost non-existent and now in some places it's noticeable.

SS: Once the visitation of the Monument has gone up approximately what gradient?

CC: I don't know where they're at right now. Depending on whether it's the north side, west side, east side, west side or collective-it varies. A few hundred thousand a year is my understanding.

SS: But it doesn't seem like the kind of Monument where a huge amount of people are doing off, you know, back country stuff.

CC: No. Most of the people who come of the visitors to the Monument, see the Monument via their cars, associated roadside pull-offs and visitor centers. Relatively few head out on trails and if they do, they tend to take short trials, or they go a short distance on longer trails.

SS: So, you're still pretty lucky in terms of that. I mean you're not, like the really high visitation parks.

CC: It's nothing like that. If you were go up to Paradise on Mount Rainier or even up to Mount Hood on a national forest, Mount St. Helens aside from the 504 corridor or up to the visitor centers, I would characterize as getting very light use.

SS: Which is good for science.

CC: Yeah, yeah. So, I don't see where there's been conflict or restrictions in terms of what scientists have requested to do and approached with anything other than support and approval of their work. It hasn't been onerous. If you go, try to do some work in a national park I mean you are going through hoop after hoop after hoop. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. We need to be protective of our parks. But at St. Helens because one of the mandates is research, it's been taken seriously by the managers of the Monument and they've been largely approving of all requested work.

SS: How many other monuments or parks or research priority? I'm trying to think through the system. Of course, this is a Forest Service management system versus some of the others which were mostly National Park Service and then some BLM.

CC: Right, I think it's quite remarkable that Mount St. Helens the enabling legislation spoke specifically as research being one of the primary objectives. I think that's uncommon. I think that it's part of the mandate for the National Park Services. It's certainly the case of Surtsey, off the coast of Iceland where that island is set aside specifically for research.

SS: Right.

CC: But others can speak better to this whole issue of other properties that have been managed for research.

SS: Now, you were a newbie when this was all happening back in the early '80s. What do you remember about the Monument creation process and just what you heard about and was MacMahon or Franklin or any of those people involved?

CC: Virginia was very involved, and Jerry was involved, Fred was involved some. There was a series of meetings and a number of alternatives and the scientific community got to voice their opinion on their view on what the Monument should be, both in terms of its geographic extent, in terms of its priorities, in terms of the way research could be conducted and the importance of the role that research would play in the Monument.

SS: Do you think they got it right?

CC: Oh, I think that the fact that we had the Monument created back the early '80s and with the language that, how it was written, is quite remarkable. I mean, in hindsight I think the Monument was way too small. I think the boundaries could have been better drawn. For example, I think it was a mistake to not have the Clearwater Valley and the Upper Green River Valley in the legislated monument. That provided, given that we knew over the west side that private landowners were going to salvage log and replant, because that's what they do. Of course, they're entitled to do so, and they've done it very well, by the way, in terms of they've been successful. But on the northeast sector of the blast area and in the east there was an opportunity, and the north, so that whole north, northeast, there was an opportunity in the Clearwater and upper Green not to salvage log and to replant but to let the entire signature of the geophysical forces that were unleashed that day persist in terms of how they influence the vegetation for the benefit of millions of domestic and international visitors and it was really short sighted or a missed opportunity to draw the lines where they did and to salvage log, most of the Clearwater basin and the northernmost extent of the Green River. Because we would have had areas of standing dead timber, timber grading from leveled trees to standing dead trees to tephra fall forest in both cases and now they just kind of end abruptly and you're like oh, so what happened here? That was a lost opportunity. It would have given two more basins for areas of ecological inquiry study.

I'd say that I applaud the monument and the act for creating these different research areas, to have a research admin closure areas, one like the Spirit Lake basin, the debris avalanche deposit, and places along the volcano itself that the primary management objective is research and either people aren't allowed in there at all or they're other non-researchers, or they're allowed on trail-only use. I think that was good. I think it's been challenged. I think it's been difficult for the Forest Service sometimes to convey that message in a positive way that the public, well-

SS: Respects?

CC: Understands and respects. But I'd like to almost retract that to say that there's always been this small, vocal minority of locals that have been disgruntled and they're never happy, never been happy with the way the Monument has been managed. I think more broadly that the public visiting thinks it's a pretty amazing case study of what could happen in terms of managing a post-natural disturbance environment.

SS: I'll talk to you more about the local thing because you've been here so long and when we're in the second half I'm going to poke more into your knowledge of the people and that kind of a thing, but, no, I think it's really amazing that it happened during the first Reagan Administration. Even though James Watt was Interior, and this was Forest Service, James Watt was the Secretary of the Interior, that the reactionary spirit of natural resource management was not exactly progressive, pro-science. To me, historically that's very interesting anomaly or actually a surprise.

CC: It is. But I think that today, if it were to happen, it would have been a lot of easier I think to create the Monument and it would have been a lot easier to create a much larger monument and there would have been additional importance attached to preserving not only the research opportunity, expanding research opportunity, but also preserving the visual aspects that I described about the gradient for the benefit of the broader public. Because it's not like I mean we planted the Clearwater Valley. At least to date, it's matrix land in the Northwest Forest Plan. It's up for active management. We really haven't done anything down there. Talking to the silviculturists and timber planters, there's nothing on the planning books to really do anything with it and so maybe that is a lost opportunity. If you look at these and we'll go into this more later, but if you compare the active versus passive-managed Monument from an ecological perspective they're very different places. Should we break, you think?

SS: We're going to take a short break here and then we're going to proceed with a short tour around Charlie's office. [Break in recording]

SS: Charlie's going to take us on just a little quick tour of his office, laboratory, whatever you want to call it, kind of a running commentary given us a little bit of color for the record here. I'll just let you take us on a trip wherever you want to go.

CC: Sure. We're on the back 40 of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument Headquarters in what was old employee housing. We have a ranch style house. It's comfortable. I have a beautiful fireplace right behind me that's covered with bookshelves right now, but they'll be cleared off for the winter months. We have a full kitchen. We have a lab set up. We have storage facilities both for equipment and supplies as well as for all of our data and specimens. Here's where we're at right now is my desk with my computer and all around us are bookshelves with all of my reference materials and in folder cabinets, file cabinets, full of all of our folders that includes all of our original data sheets, which are many, many, many tens of thousands as well as field notebooks that go back from 1980 to current that include all of the things that we jot down as our journals and other forms of information through the decades at Mount St. Helens. Each of these file cabinets has a variety of different projects. Each is full with maps and the data sheets and behind those are these are Cornell-style museum cabinets with trays.

If you open these up, you'll see we have the lepidopterans of Mount St. Helens in these trays where we collect the specimens and develop our collections. Another one of leps here and then beetles. We have all the beetles we've collected, some 350 species at Mount St. Helens. All catalogued and all labeled in terms of the species identification, where they were collected, when they were collected, etc. As well for the grasshoppers and their allies. Then over in this cabinet we have mammal skulls from the mammals at Mount St. Helens as well as, and this includes everything from shrews through some of the mustelas, the weasels, such as pine martins. Then study skins of each of these that are available to train my employees and students that come through.

SS: Also, for identification purposes, too, right?

CC: That's right. Then we have the large mammals behind us that includes everything from opossums and raccoons to the large rodents, the porcupines, the American beaver, carnivores that include the coyote, the bobcat, the puma or mountain lion, and the American black bear. So, then in a cabinet back here, we have liquid specimens of all of the amphibians from Mount St. Helens in each of their larval stages that are available as reference materials and then lots of literature that's filed in these banker boxes and, then, if we come around to this side, these are all our plant presses, which includes about a half a dozen of them with specimens from this summer and then over here's our microscope section where we have two stations set up to sort and identify all of the arthropods that we bring in.

SS: This is a Spirit Lake set that's right here I see you're looking at?

CC: Well, you see right here, this is 62 envelopes that represent the scales of fish from Spirit Lake that we sampled on the 10th of September 2015.

SS: So, it's not arthropods. That's fish scales, okay.

CC: This is fish scales, and these are micromet. These are temperature sensors that were taken from Spirit Lake last week on the 10th and replaced. These are for recording the temperature of the water a meter above and a meter below the surface every half hour throughout the year. These had been out for a year, and we've replaced them with new ones.

SS: Are these ones connected to the log mat?

CC: These are not. There are others that are.

SS: Okay.

CC: In any case, that's this work area. Then if we go back through here, this is the kitchen, but we use the sink we sort and clean our specimens and these are all fish stomachs from Spirit Lake that were collected on the 9th and 10th of September, then a fridge where we have our frozen specimens. These are all the bags of small mammal mortalities, genetic samples from amphibians. There's genetics from the debris avalanche deposit. Genetic specimens from Spirit Lake fish and then if we come back in here this is an office for employees to work to pin insects, such as these beautiful lepidopterans from Mount St. Helens.

SS: That's gorgeous.

CC: Just gorgeously preserved, just brilliant, as well as dragonflies as the case here. Then juvenile fish from the Spirit Lake basin, which we're looking at their age structure as well as their dietary analyses. Then these are files which are not terribly organized right now, but it's the originals from the debris avalanche ponds, for willow stem-boring project, for mammals, for streams, elk exposures, the lupine plots, and here's our reference seed collection. From as many plants as we could found out on the Mount St. Helens landscape we'd go out in the fall and we collect the seeds so then we have a reference collection to identify seeds. If we're trapping seeds, we have a way to identify them because we've taken them off of a known plant. Then all of these back boxes are from all of my work down in southern Chile working on volcanoes to compare that work with Mount St. Helens. Here's more fish specimens. But if we go out this way through here, we'll come to our herbarium, this is our herbarium cabinet filled with [SS interrupts].

SS: Pressed.

CC: All of the pressed and mounted plant specimens from Mount St. Helens, including lichens down below and these are all organized by family and within the family by genus and then species. These are then available to train the crews and up here these are all of the lichens specimens up in this box that are all again identified to species with the scientific name, the county, the area they were collected specifically the location, the habitat, other species growing in their presence, substrate and then UTM, you know, information on the special information, the collector, and who determined the identification.

SS: So, this is a complete set of pretty much everything is here.

CC: Except electronic, what happened is the electronic copies are moved down to OSU Forestry Sciences databanks, so we have just looked at the original copies. The original data sheets. Then every one of these data sheets has been photocopied and been stored off-premises at the warehouse.

SS: So, you do have backup copies to all these.

CC: Of everything, yeah.

SS: I was going to ask you about fireproof safes and so, yeah, I see.

CC: In addition to that, all of these data are backed up on the electronic files are backed up, well, they're on our hard drives. They're backed up on external hard drives and stored off-premise, and then once we get them all cleaned up, they go down to the OSU Forestry Sciences databank and are archived along with the H.J. Andrews LTER [Long-Term Ecological Research] site data under the Mount St. Helens folder, so we have all of this.

SS: So, Don Henshaw, his crew does all that.

CC: And Susanne Remillard down in.... [Corvallis]

SS: Yeah, Susanne.

CC: Yeah, so in any case that's what's down there and then we have various things that we're working on up on the wall to aid the employees that are identifying spiders in this case. This is looking at the dorsal and ventral view of spiders and all the anatomical features and above up here's some glomalin images of glomalin extracts from the Pumice Plain soils under different plant communities. Here's a map of the debris avalanche ponds out on the Hummocks area between Coldwater and Castle Lake and each of these are study sites some 100 ponds up there.

SS: Is that one of the areas where the guy got stuck?

CC: Exactly, yeah.

SS: One of those little sinkhole, quicksand things?

CC: Exactly. Then in the basement we have [trails off].

SS: So, you do have a basement?

CC: Yeah. And down here as you can see there's tens of thousands of specimens being stored. All of these samples right here are identified by taxonomic group. These are all from Chaitén and Cordón Caulle in Southern Chile, all of these samples that you see here that are ready for identification and then ultimately for archiving in museums and over here are all of our tephras from Chaitén and Cordón Caulle. These are all from Mount St. Helens below. Right now, we are the single biggest repository. All of these boxes that you see that are carefully marked and stacked here represent the largest collection of soils and tephra from Mount St. Helens that there is in the world.

SS: Wow.

CC: This is the repository right now. Off on our left is all of our camping equipment and supplies, a wood burning stove, water jugs, coolers, aquaria, terraria, cots, tents, funnel traps, and then everything you see in these boxes and all on this far wall represents Mount St. Helens 1981-2015 arthropods specimens. Tens of thousands of specimens.

SS: Wow.

CC: These are all being worked on by my employees and my collaborators around the world. These are our large wall tents up on the right and then we have two other supplies. This is all our chestwaders and wading boots are down here and then if we go also a chest freezer, we keep additional specimens in. Then upstairs...

SS: One more room?

CC: Yeah, we'll just go out here.

SS: We're going outside. Continuing the tour.

CC: Out in our carport, this is where we store all of our traps. We have perhaps about 3,000 Sherman live traps for trapping small mammals and then each of these cabinets outside the carport we store additional equipment and all of our ethanol for processing, for preserving specimens. In this case, it's more Sherman traps. In any case, that's pretty much what we have in terms of our infrastructure here in Chelatchie.

SS: Well, fantastic. That's what I wanted to know. I wanted to just put a little face, or, shall we say put a verbal face on what I can see here. Thank you, Charlie.

CC: Sure, of course.

SS: We are recording, yes, it's recording, because this thing always records. I don't think I need to test it because it looks like it's going like usual. Anyway, this is Sam Schmeiding, Oregon State University, again with Charlie Crisafulli, Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. I got it right that time. Ecologist. We're going to continue the interview that we started at his office over in-

CC: Chelatchie Prairie.

SS: Chelatchie Prairie. I always call it sasquatch land, because there's a sasquatch icon on the general store. Anyway, very subjective, but what are your favorite places at Mount St. Helens and why? Or a place, however you would want to characterize that.

CC: I have several favorite places at Mount St. Helens, and for a host of different reasons, but the Mount Margaret back country I think may very well be my favorite place. One, because it has a level of seclusion that many of the other parts of the monument does not have. It's very rugged and mountainous which I like being up high and I like being up high because there's a lot of sky when you're up high to take in and lots of views and so it offers wonderful views of the Spirit Lake basin, of Mount St. Helens looking in many places directly into the muzzle, into the crater. It also affords spectacular views of other volcanoes in the region, such as Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount Hood. It's a place that was dotted, or is dotted, by beautiful sub-alpine mountain lakes that were created during the Pleistocene, so it's full of these cirques. They're just gems and in this area there's often krummholz-type vegetation, sub-alpine fir, mountain hemlock, Pacific silver fir that are diminutive and interspersed with beautiful meadows. It's a place I like for all of those reasons and I've had such fond memories working back in those lake systems with probably the best crews I've ever had in my entire career. It's both because of the natural beauty and natural history of the area as well as the social dimension of comradery and friendship building and bonding that happened there.

SS: Excellent, excellent. How would you define Mount St. Helens as a place?

CC: Can I say something else about a favorite place?

SS: Oh, no, go ahead. Sorry. No keep going we're going to-

CC: Another really favorite place is in the crater itself because to actually hike up into the crater of Mount St. Helens, one, it's not a terribly grueling hike, but it's a bit arduous and no one really gets to go there. It's a not a place that has access to the public, public access, although people who are climbing to the rim on the south side can look down into it. It's a very different perspective being in the crater. When you're in the crater, particularly the contemporary crater, one it's really full. It's this large amphitheater, horseshoe shape crater, but it's filled with the '80-'86 dome, the dome that was created through dome built eruptions through 1986, but also the megadomes that were built during the 2004-2008 eruption and also the glacier that had developed between 1986 and 2004 that ended up being bulldozed and pinched and moving, flowing forward to the north in two gigantic arms that in the front of the crater they've coalesced so they were pushed around the domes and then were united again in the front.

SS: The glacier?

CC: The glacier.

SS: Kind of squeezed out and then compacted again together by gravity as well as the rocks, right?

CC: That's right. Now, they're beginning to tip into the two, out the two drainages that come out of the crater, Loowit and Step Creek. So, when you're in the crater you have 2,000 foot sheer walls, the crater walls, that are constantly caving off material: big boulders coming down. You have this enormous, perhaps 1,000-foot dome that is caving material off of it and then you have a glacier that's flowing. If there's a place of dynamism, it's inside the crater of Mount St. Helens. Plus, when you get to see stratovolcanoes are just eruptive material on top of eruptive material on top of eruptive material. So, there's all these different layers. Some of them are lava. Others are pyroclastic flow and tuft that resulted from that. Others are different types of domes: andesite, dacite domes, as well as just regular, just volcanic products. When you walk into the crater, you get to see a longitudinal section of the eruptive history of Mount St. Helens, at least going back as far as the current edifice began construction. You get to see all of these layers cut away beautifully for you and the angles at which they're pitched, the materials they're constituted of, and so on and so forth. It's a really, really interesting place. I was just there two weekends ago. It's just a fabulous place.

SS: You go up there just for personal reasons or actually is there a certain spot you got up there?

CC: Typically, I don't have plots in the crater-it's one of the few places I don't have plots. I went up there to lead a trip. I was basically a scientific interpreter to discuss aspects of the ecology of the area and with me I was accompanied by a co-leader who was a geologist.

SS: That leads me to a question because of where you were talking about is you didn't know much of anything about geology when you came out here. When and how did you become comfortable, conversant, and even an expert to some degree on the geology? Just over time?

CC: Well, first of all, I'm hardly an expert in geology, even on Mount St. Helens. First of all, my geological expertise is very, very narrow. I know the more contemporary eruptive history of Mount St. Helens going back a few thousand years. I can talk fluently about the 1980 eruption. It's because I've just spent so much time conversing with my colleagues at the US Geological Survey, Cascades Volcano Observatory and they've been very patient and through redundancy, repetitiveness I've heard the story over and over again. I've read on it. I know it well. But whenever I'm in the presence of one of those folks and if we're co-leading a group and one of the participants asks me a question about geology, I quickly, quickly refer them to the geologist.

SS: Like Jon Major.

CC: Precisely.

SS: People like that.

CC: Yeah. In any case, I'm absolutely comfortable talking about the 1980 eruption, but if there's a geologist around then my lips get zipped.

SS: You know enough to be dangerous, in other words.

CC: I don't know about that.

SS: That was a joke.

CC: You know I've spent my career working on the ecology of Mount St. Helens and I don't necessarily need a geologist to talk about the ecology, if I'm there, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying this volcano, and I give deference to those people and their particular fields.

SS: Out of respect, if nothing else.

CC: Yeah. At all times.

SS: What about a few other places, not necessarily favorites, but tell me about Spirit Lake. Obviously, it's the central feature that most people know about because of the history and what happened there.

CC: Spirit Lake is a feature of the Monument, a place that I'm particularly fond of and I've spent a tremendous amount of time on the lake, in the lake, and working on the lake, thinking about the lake, writing about the lake and so you know Spirit Lake was created the pre-1980 eruption, most recent incarnation of the lake was created roughly 2,400 years ago by a blockage that came off the mountain and created the impoundment and there's many previous forms of Spirit Lake that were impounded and subsequently breached catastrophically and released the water downstream. There's evidence of that in the geological record. But the pre-1980 eruption was interesting. One, because it provided connectivity between the Pacific Ocean and this beautiful lake, the northern flank of St. Helens and so it co-host salmon and chinook, salmon as well as steelhead trout and sea-run cutthroat trout among other species freely swam between the Pacific Ocean and the lake. To me there's just something cool about that. Of course, you could say there's all kinds of lakes that are connected via river systems to the ocean, and it's true. In this case, this is one I'm very close with. What's interesting is that suddenly changed. In 1980 when the debris avalanche came down and blocked it, so no longer were there fish freely moving between these two bodies of water.

SS: Spirit Lake was for a while that, well, for all practical purposes, right?

CC: The lake was nutrient impoverished before the eruption. It was a classic oligotrophic lake, meaning it had high oxygen levels, low nutrient levels, a high light-transmission into the water column, so cold, nutrient poor, oxygen rich and good light transmission. The adjacent landscape was the opposite. It was highly productive in terms of nutrient status. Well, those switched roles. So much of this shattered forest, pyrolyzed forest, the lake basin was the repository. The lake became grossly enriched and all air requiring life was snuffed out. A giant chunk of the mountain, the so-called debris avalanche deposit, came sliding down into it, displacing all the water. When the water, which sloshed up onto the adjacent valley walls of the lake came back down they carried with it the ancient forest, the herbs and the shrubs and the soil and all of the wildlife and all the animals from earthworms to elk and bear down into the basin. It became this, and because of the thermal properties of the eruption, it went from being about 50 degrees Fahrenheit to body temperature. Now you have what was a cold body of water that was nutrient poor now is tepid and instead of having high light transmission, like what I mean down 40 feet deep you could see a pie tin if you were to drop it into the water on a string, on a thing called a Secchi Disk, roughly the size of a pie tin, it's alternating in black and white. After the eruption if you were to put your hand in up to your wrist and wiggle your fingers, you wouldn't be able to see your fingers. Dramatic change and then grossly enriched because all this material had entered the lake. It created this grossly transformed in terms of its morphometrics, it's basin shape. It was a couple of hundred feet higher. In fact, the bottom of the current Spirit Lake is still above the elevation of the former surface. It's twice the surface area and it's half the depth, max depth. It was raised up, spread out, and made shallower and it was shoaled. So, all this material that came in, came down created these shoals, these shallow areas. That turned out to be the single most important factor in the post-eruption ecosystem response, I think.

At least in the longer term was the shoaling phenomenon. Before the eruption it was a steep side of the lake, which meant there was little opportunity for, although light transmission was good, there was little opportunity for productivity to develop because it was deep immediately offshore. So, that's changed. With all this enrichment, the lake became a bacteria buffet and bacteria colonized into the billions of cells per cm3 and just began working on all of this material. I'm not going to go into all the details, but there was this rapid, biogeochemical transformation that occurred. What's remarkable is that within about 3 years' time much of those inputs of the former forest had been processed, the water began clearing, light transmission thus increased. The water obviously cooled off because of the cooling of the deposits and incoming rain and snowmelt and oxygen began churning into the water because of wind action and wave action, incoming stream flow and so all of this ushered in the development of a more typical ecological community that had the base of the food web was driven by phytoplankton primary productivity. Then zooplankton colonized. 135 species of phytoplankton colonized between '83 and '86 and following suit were zooplankton, aquatic insects, amphibians and then eventually although the lake basin was fishless, in the early 1990s, it appears that there was a clandestine stocking operation that happened and so fish were entered back into the scene. Just a single species: the rainbow trout. We've been studying the system responses and just embraced the trout as a new apex predator in that system. We continue monitoring the lake. Our focus has changed through time. Right now, we're really keenly-my collaborators at UW and I are keenly interested in the log mat. We're doing a number of experiments trying to understand what role the log mat is playing in the ecology of Spirit Lake.

SS: The log mat is about how big a percentage of the original size of it is it now?

CC: The log mat was created when the big slosh from the lake came back down carrying the trees. This downed forest has been floating on the surface of Spirit Lake for 35 years.

SS: It's smaller, though, than it used to be.

CC: Yeah, it was about 40% of the lake, 35% or 40% was covered immediately post eruption and now it's down to 20% or 25%, but still a chunk of the lake's surface is covered, which means light that's coming down from the sky isn't getting into the water column, but instead is being intercepted by the log mat, so the question is what role does that play in ecology, because sunlight drives the aquatic food webs through chemical transformation, through photosynthesis by the phytoplankton.

SS: It also blows around the lake, too.

CC: And so, it alters the shoreline.

SS: Right.

CC: It agitates the water surface. It minimally retards if not prevents the lake from freezing because of this agitation. You need to have a completely calm surface and freezing temperatures in order for a lake to get the first skim of ice on it. There's many things about this-it's a thermal reservoir. It holds heat. Its' tremendous amount of substrate, if you consider it a surface area, for periphyton, tiny algal forms, to grow on which are a form of productivity, so one question we want to know is what is the net effect of having light intercepted and reducing net primary productivity from phytoplankton versus increased productivity by all this surface area and substrate for periphyton. We're working on these types of questions right now through observational work on the log mat itself and also creating artificial log mats by tethering together, booming together, two log mats that we made and anchor and have tethered and instrumenting them.

SS: What other places at St. Helens have you not described in detail that you would like to? Something maybe you haven't mentioned about a place, since we're on that theme.

CC: I think there's two places. One is the Pumice Plain. The Pumice Plain is just inherently unique because it's a place where all life was obliterated. It's a place that the substrates were highly susceptible to erosion. It's undergone tremendous secondary disturbance, some chronic, some episodic, but the net result is a reshaped landform. This is a new landform. With all of this carving up through wind and water action, erosion, it's revealed different substrates that have been buried. It creates different topographies which lead to different moisture availability. Different topographies lead to differences in trapability of seeds and shading and moisture resulting in biological hotspots and biological cold spots out in the landscape and so it begs for questions regarding patch dynamics. How do different patches in the landscape move forward with community biological assembly, assembly of biological communities and, two, how do all these different types of patches lead to different beta or gamma diversity that is when you consider the whole of all of these? It's a place that's inherently interesting. It's nestled just north of the crater, the volcano itself. Amazing views of the crater. You look down slope into the glistening Spirit Lake basin with the shimmering log mat. It's a great place, both in terms of the aesthetic beauty and hands down in terms of ecological research opportunities. That opportunity has been seized. There's not a place in the Monument that's been more studied by ecologists than the Pumice Plain and, so, I like it there a lot and I've spent a tremendous amount of time, you know, who knows how many days out there. A thousand days. Then the debris avalanche deposit because it has this uniquely hummocky landscape that where the hell do you go find that around the globe? Well, around some stratovolcanoes that had edifice collapse and they spewed their guts down the valley. We didn't even know where those were before 1980. They're down at Shasta and the geologists know how to interpret those. It was only seeing it in real time before and after the formation of these new landforms that geologists were like, a-ha, that's how this happened! For me, as an ecologist all of this microtopography, because some of these hummocks are 100 meters tall and then between them are depressions. These filled with water so now 100 and some ponds created that differ in their morphology: their size, their depth, their shoreline complexity, the retention of moisture going from spring dry to perennial and everything in between and then to be able to study the way in which both amphibians and aquatic insects colonize and assemble communities in these ponds and then how the marching and progression of vegetation through plant succession influences the factors that happen to be so important in driving amphibian and insect community assembly.

SS: How do you view the cultural place of Mount St. Helens? How would you describe that? The cultural place of Mount St. Helens?

CC: Well, Mount St. Helens is many things to many different people. The Cowlitz people and other native peoples have used the volcano for a long time. They revere it as a place of spiritual value, a place of securing sustenance, food resources, berries, fish, game. Then there's the cultural aspect of the dimension of the scientific community. Mount St. Helens was a watershed event that shaped both the geological and ecological science, at least disturbance ecology, in ways that we never could have anticipated and so it's been a hot bed of research activity. It's been a training ground for the young and the old scientists and it continues to provide lessons on a regular basis. If you look at its publication record, it eclipses that of all other volcanoes, all other natural disturbances and so it's become the granddaddy that others turn to when they're faced with volcano disturbance, even other forms of disturbance to provide insights.

Not only what lessons were learned here but how might scientists or managers go about taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves at other sites. From a non-native people, non-science perspective just the boarder public cultural aspect, it's a place that people come for spiritual renewal. They come to hike and just to be. They come to look out and gaze out over the landscape. They come to ponder the powers of nature, the geological, raw geological energy and also the equally compelling renewal power of life and so, obviously, it instills a tremendous amount of thought and curiosity, but, also, it's very compelling in the way it presents the notion of hope. From the cold dark ashes spring forth life and renewal. That's a wonderful metaphor for all of us, because we all lose loved ones eventually, sometimes prematurely. We go through divorce. We have illness. All of these things that inflict us: drug addiction, alcohol addiction that bring us to the lulls, to places of despair. If we're scrapping and have some tenacity, we bounce back. Mount St. Helens shows us how hard a knock you can take and still get up, dust yourself off and find your way.

SS: All those times that you were out with teams, camping out and you were talking about the good times, specifically in the Pumice Plain or right in the front, do you sense that the discussions had more cosmological reflective elements to it because of where you were?

CC: Sometimes there's that magical element, for sure. It is a wonderful place to learn and to always be caught off guard when something presents itself in a way that you weren't expecting and also for young scientists and older alike, for that matter, it provides a great place to have friendly debate and discussions about what might be the underlying factors, the driving forces that lead to some observation, some patterns you've seen. Then you often have the luxury of being around to see well how did that really play out. That's the beauty of this long-term research. You outlast the vagaries of any one wet spell or dry spell or insect outbreak and you start looking at these more, you're able to look at these more emerging properties. The average NSF proposal cycle is probably 3 years. The average graduate is a year or two for a masters, maybe 3 or 4 field seasons for a Ph.D. I just finished-my crew is still out there today, we'll be wrapping up next week, we've been out there since the first week of May. We'll be out there until October 1st. Every single week a small army out there gathering data, well, you know thirty-five years, okay? That's a lot of 3-year grant cycles, 2-year master students, or 4 or 5-year field seasons for a Ph.D. It's been a wonderful opportunity to, this may be getting towards a capstone, so I don't know I better be careful.

SS: Well, we're not done yet, but if you want to do a capstone [CC talks over SS] go ahead.

CC: No, I don't but there's this wonderful opportunity to get to know a place. For Mount St. Helens for me it's one of the bright spots about this whole ride, this whole long, strange trip has been getting to know a cast of characters and getting to know a place really thoroughly. How often, you know, even at, I don't know, the LTER sites, or other places are long-term ecological research I just wonder if we went around to all the LTER sites how often do you have someone who's been in the trenches for 35 years and learned all the taxa and knows all the sites. These are special places, like the LTER and Mount St. Helens. It happens at those places, I'm sure, and it's happened at Mount St. Helens, but probably not a lot of places. Those individuals that get that deeply in tune with the place, it provides just tremendously rich experiences.

SS: When did you know you were going to stay? Like for the whole duration?

CC: When they told me, I wasn't going to go. I mean, in other words, when I got my permanent position.

SS: So, '89 or '90?

CC: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I knew then. Well, it probably was '92 when my position finally went permanent. So at that point, I'm like here I am, I'm young, I'm in this arena that provides some of the most interesting ecological research opportunities I could probably ever hope for dealing with all levels of biological organizations: from molecular, I don't do much with cells, from molecular, to individuals, populations, communities, ecosystems across a variety of taxonomic groups from microbes to mammals, different system types, including lakes and streams and seeps, riparian areas, meadows, uplands and along a gradient of all these different community types, like forest to early seral communities. It was a wonderful opportunity and I never grew tired of it. Never. Never.

SS: Even today?

CC: Not tired of it a bit. There's only one thing that right now I would say is different. I've been feeling it for the last couple of years. That's that I no longer, I mean, I think my career has been unusual, I think. In talking to many, many, many collaborators and others I think it's probably true: I had a long, long run of being a field ecologist. In the trenches gathering data every single day with my crew. Scuffing small mammals out of the trap, swinging dip nets through the ponds, setting strains in the streams, calibrating around quadrats for vegetation, digging soil pits. I mean, I've been living that. This was my 36th field season this year. Like I was out training my crew a week ago Tuesday, so it'll be a week tomorrow, and on the willow sampling, sampling willows for both volume, attack rate by the willow stem-boring beetle, and other features, and it's like I did it for the afternoon and I'm like, yeah, I'm glad I'm going onto something-I don't want to just sit with my head in willows all day long anymore. I want to go out. I want to train my crews. I want to sample it for a day or two, each of the things, but I no longer want to trap every single night of the 6-night trapping session. It's changed and now my interests are far more in pulling in, it's like this giant octopus with all these arms out there, and I'm much more interested in coalescing and bringing information into some central point and to make sense of it and to secure it for future use and to tell stories. To that end, I put in a proposal two years ago to get funding to start dealing with the backlog of tens of thousands of specimens: spiders, insects, plankton, mammals, amphibians, fish and work to create collaborations with the Smithsonian, the California Academy of Sciences, Museum of Southwestern Biology, the Burke Museum and the National Museum in Sydney, Australia and now archiving specimens: sorting them, getting them identified by the leading experts, when necessary. If not, I'm doing it or a collaborator's doing it and assessing all of these specimens into these reputable repositories so they're available in perpetuity for future generations complete with electronic databases that go along with all of the specimen records, and so that's all there. I've been doing a lot of that.

On the cyber side, taking all of our physical data sheets and making sure that all of those data go through proper QAQC, that summaries are made to disseminate information and that those original forms of those data get archived in a databank and safeguarded from loss. That has been a huge mission. I mentioned just two years, but it's been going on more like for 10 years. I've just had funding for it now. Before I was just doing it. That's been gratifying. I put over 700 small mammals into the Burke Museum alone. Another 350 down in the Museum of Southwestern Biology in Albuquerque, University of New Mexico. The Burke Museum's at UW [University of Washington]. Lots of that kind of activity, but also trying to distill the lessons from St. Helens and provide that information to a number of different avenues to different audiences, from scientific conference participants that are coming to the Portland, Seattle area to take them out on St. Helens fieldtrips as part of the conferences in one of those cities, for example. Creating, organizing or co-organizing symposium at these conferences about Mount St. Helens so that we're sharing our research results, the Mount St. Helens community with this broader ecological community, national and region, getting our information out onto various websites and into different interpretive groups and scientific educators, so curriculum can be developed for largely middle and high school age students so they can learn from the lessons of Mount St. Helens and do all kind of field trips and outings. Then, of course through publications, like the book we're working on right now the second Springer book, which I'm co-editor and also author [SS talks over CC].

SS: This will be the 35-year book, right?

CC: Yeah, the 35-year book that's probably going to come out in 36 to 37. Yeah, right. Right now, it's a misnomer to call it a 35. That was the target and we're woefully behind, but nonetheless we're making headway, and this fall I'm going to really put a concerted effort into the book. Then, finally, and what I consider to this point to perhaps be the highlight of my career is taking the lessons from Mount St. Helens and applying them to different volcanic settings around the globe and thinking about volcano ecology from a global perspective and testing the general lessons from Mount St. Helens that other volcanic settings to ask the question to what extent are the lessons from Mount St. Helens general and have universal applications and to what degree are they idiosyncratic and have something specific either to do with the biota or to do with the setting of St. Helens or the timing of the eruption or the characteristic of the eruption. That is really what I want to focus on for the remainder of my career.

SS: You would probably find, Charlie, that there would be a little of both. There would be some universality and some unique aspect, like the debris avalanche, the size of the landslide you've rarely seen that in recent volcanic history, for instance. But with some of the features.

CC: Right, but regardless of that if you even have a new formed lake or a lake where everything was snuffed out at a different volcano, is the pace and pattern of amphibian colonization similar?

SS: Well, that part, yeah.

CC: Yeah. I'm interested in more from the ecological perspective, but we do know that the geology story is a prerequisite. It's required to tell the ecological story and the reverse is true. These two fields of science really inform, strengthen our overall understanding by having a good understanding of each.

SS: One can't live without the other.

CC: Yeah. In any case, I'm not sure where we are in terms of where we started, but I'll stop.

SS: You spent a lot of time talking about Jim MacMahon. Talk about some other important mentors, or just people here, scientists who contributed greatly that you'd like to make note of.

CC: Sure. I'd say I have four, and I may add to it as this list goes on. I'd say hands down the single most important mentor in my life with respect to my career is James A. MacMahon, Utah State University. Jim has believed in me. He trusted in me. He took some risk putting me in the positions he did, and I think if we were to ask him, he'd say Crisafulli did an okay job with that.

SS: He's still around, isn't he?

CC: Oh yeah, he is. Yeah. And we still work together. He's a dear friend and I am forever in his debt. I'm loyal to a fault in that regard. But Jim's deserving of everything. Then Chuck Hawkins, aquatic ecologist from Utah State. Chuck has been very important in my understanding of the Mount St. Helens stream systems. Plus, a good friend, colleague and Chuck and I, I can just remember sampling all these streams in the Clearwater and other basins, the Green, the Bean, the Smith and we were interested in looking at the nocturnal behavior, excuse me, looking at the behavior of the coastal tail frog in response to predator cues, non-visual cues. We set up all these in-stream experiments and every half hour throughout the night we would walk down the stream with our headlamps and we would check to see how many tadpoles were out foraging where upstream in a cage from them that was attached at an experimental trough was either a cutthroat trout, a brook trout, a sculpin or any number of potential predators at control sites. Just really fond memories of staying up all night long and how rummy we would get. We'd just talk about all the stuff, all about the frogs. How esoteric. We would spend hours upon hours upon hours, night after night after night discussing the ecology of the tail frog in these streams. It was a blast. We would of course at some point we'd drink some beers and we had to stay up all night so those were not the drinking nights by any stretch. But the stories-I can remember just laying out on these big, blown-down logs in August when (I'll probably get to this) the Perseids meteorite showers-it's the meteorite showers, and just watching the entire Clearwater valley just light up with these streaming meteorites flashing through the basin. I mean that's burned indelibly in my mind, in my memory. Lots of cool work with Chuck. A good guy.

Then I would say you know Fred Swanson is a primary mentor and what Fred-and each of these people offered me something different. Fred's biggest gift to me has been I'd say the branching of the physical and life sciences and that crosswalk between the two, the importance of paying attention to both and broad thinking. I mean, my natural tendency is minutia. It's easy to get lost in the minutia. I never felt lost in it, but it's just so much facts. I'd say, "Fred why don't you take note of these things?" He said, "I can't possibly remember them. I don't know how you do it. It's not my thing. I couldn't do it even if I wanted to." So, Fred thinks in broad scales. He thinks in platitudes. To some extent he waves his arm and Fred is scholarly. Fred, I think, reads a lot, and this sounds so condescending (it's not meant that way): he reads a lot and does little. Fred is an idea guy. Fred is not a doer guy in terms of getting in and getting dirty and really focusing on something with razor, you know, or laser accuracy. Rather, he steps back and doesn't sweat the details and looks for these big, emerging patterns. That's what he does. It's been fun talking with Fred and it's been helpful and insightful. We're pals. We've spent at this point so much time down in Southern Chile together and exploring those two volcanoes together and that really has deepened our friendship and our understanding of each other and volcanoes. So, that's been enormous taking the show on the road down to Patagonia.

Then, I'd say Jerry Franklin has been the fourth mentor. Jerry probably because of his longstanding knowledge and interest in particularly old-growth forests, but now more broadly in just ecosystem sciences of the Northwest, including you know the importance of disturbances, the importance of early seral communities. His charismatic qualities to educate and to inform I have found to be just really remarkable and deserving of tremendous respect. So, those four people have been incredibly important to me and then to a lesser degree some geologists, such as Don Swanson (USGS), Richard Waitt, Jon Major, and Tom Pierson. The latter two I've also had the privilege of working down in Patagonia with those two. They're great. Today I've worked more closely with Jon than any of them and have a great working relationship with Jon today and he's truly a sharp, sharp scientist, astute scientist who is a wonderful geomorphologist and is so focused on getting it right.

SS: How would you compare what you've learned at St. Helens with your shorter study span of the Chilean volcanoes? You have samples up here, obviously, this is a serious subject. How would you give a thumbnail sketch of comparisons and analysis and conclusions that you could make at this point?

CC: First of all, because southern Chile is a long ways away from, say, the Portland International Airport, it really limits the amount of time I can spend down there and because the travel's expensive and the work is remote and I don't have a complete staff of employees to help, I've been limited in the scope of what I can undertake down in southern Chile. That's been a little frustrating, but there's been so much to do that that's a fleeting emotion. I think that you know so down there I've had a focus on three things. I've focused on plant community responses, essentially looking at the initial impacts of disturbances on plants and early patterns of plant succession. Second, I've been looking at ground-dwelling arthropods responses to a range of different disturbance types a la Mount St. Helens at Chaitén and at Caulle because we only looked at ashfall there, just he tephra piece. Then the third is looking at the physical and chemical characteristics of tephra, newly in place tephra and the buried former soil. That's the focus. That is a tiny, tiny sliver of what I do at Mount St. Helens. Honestly, I'm not one of the primary plant ecologists at St. Helens. It's like there's others that do that. I work on all these other things. Most of my plant work supports my animal studies via like habitat associations. I do have some pure botanical plots up here, but it's not the lion share of my work by any stretch.

Down there, you know we've seen at Chaitén some of the same disturbance types but at very different special scales and intensities. Some of the lessons were clearly the disparity between gymnosperms (conifers) at St. Helens and angiosperms down south and their ability to tolerate heat and abrasion where the trees down in these broad-leaf evergreen trees primarily in southern Chile resprout, even if they're knocked down by lateral blasts, pyroclastic density current, they resprout. You have late successional species growing via sprouts immediately on the site. So, that's different. Up here the conifers, they're really wimps, they do not resprout after being heated at least to the extent that the 1980 eruption heated them.

That's a difference. The role of the wood on the ground provides similar functions in terms of creating habitat for birds, for small mammals, for fungi, but what's different if the gymnosperms clearly have some anti or fungal-resistant characteristics. The wood decay process between a northern and southern hemisphere is night and day. Within two years of being down on the ground level at Chaitén fungi had begun colonizing-wood decomposers began colonizing. By year three, the mycelia had ramified through the boles and by year four or five they had consumed these massive diameter trees and they were already falling apart. At St. Helens it took the gymnosperms 25 years to get to the point of decomposition that the angiosperms were at in 3 or 4 years. Big differences. In terms of the early pioneers, almost ecological equivalence. There's this plant down there that's like Pearly Everlasting or fireweed [up here], so these wind-disbursed herbs are quick to come in and they can exploit the open areas that were formally forest overstory and shaded. Now they're sunlit and they can colonize those quickly.

The biggest-and then there's another parallel of similarity here and that's that here the acacia shrubs, huckleberries and their allies grew quickly and did in place of survivorship and preempted the site, occupied the light. Down there, their understory species included a fuchsia shrub, a large, large herbaceous plant called gunnera. It has leaves that are easily 2 meters across. Enormous plant. So, gunnera took off as well as this very, very invasive and native bamboo that grows vegetatively through rhizomes, just vigorous grower. Those species quickly spread and occluded the light at Chaitén. We didn't see that. I mentioned there was a parallel but these aracacia shrubs up here grow so slow. Plus, it's high elevation. Chaitén is sea level, 500 ft above sea level. So, at Chaitén these three species that I just mentioned that were there before the eruption and were survivors spread really quickly. There was a little bit of inertia, but then by even year 4 or 5 they had grown rapidly and altered the early pioneering community composition and abundance. At St. Helens it was a much more protracted process. Both the decay rates of wood and shifting of successional stage was much more rapid at Chaitén than at St. Helens. Sprouting was very different. Pioneering species: red alder up here, a species down there. But there were clear parallels between these early successional trees coming in. Insects quite similar. We see insect herbivory was pronounced at both sites, suggesting that herbivory is a common feature of these intensely disturbed sites and that really hasn't been well-documented in the literature. I think that we should basically consider that to be a rule now. When I've been up in a hardy ice field looking at retreating glaciers in Alaska, when I was at recent fires over in Idaho and in Wyoming, when I've been down to the volcanoes and Chile, at St. Helens there appears to be a unifying theme of herbivory being very important as these highly palatable forbs and shrubs gaining prominence in the post-disturbance environment.

SS: So, would you still say, though, that there's just not enough volcano ecology in the world to fill out the data set and provide even more comparative examples, because in the case of volcanoes, geology is still going to be the default discipline, which is first, and then ecology would be second, even with what St. Helens has taught us. Being the most studied volcano in the history of the world.

CC: Yeah, I think from an ecological perspective, but, from both geological and ecological, Mount St. Helens is the most well-studied. I think that, yes, I mean, so what I've been doing for the past two years with my employees, Fred has helped a little bit, but this has been pretty much my employees and I we have been developing a global database on volcano ecology. We have been trying to locate every single paper published on volcanoes in response to volcano disturbances. Not like some study of meadows of Mount Rainier that hasn't erupted in 1,000 years. This is post-eruption volcano ecology. We've gone through and we've classified every one of these papers by the disturbance types that occurred there, the taxas studied, the timeframe that they were studied, and other characteristics. Now we're able to look at things like, okay, and then we assign them to biomes of the world. We're able to say what is the distribution of volcanoes that have erupted since some period around the world. Okay, well, what percentage of them have been studied by ecologists? What percentage of those have been studied by, have had spider studies? Versus mammal studies? Versus marine studies? Versus bird studies? We can even ask the question how many have been disturbed by tephra? How many studies of birds have happened in response to tephra fall and published from 1970 to 1980? It's this incredibly powerful-we've been working on it for over two years. Some wonderful things have emerged from those patterns. One thing for sure is that right off the bat is that only about, well, about 15%, maybe 16 or 17% of volcanoes that have erupted since the big eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 have erupted have been studied by ecologists. Most of those have had cursory levels of inquiry. That is to say that they haven't had, it's been a short-term study or limited in terms of the disturbance type studied or the taxa studied, so duration, taxa, or system types have been limited. Only three have had long-term, committed study across many different taxonomic groups.

SS: Now, what are those three?

CC: Those three are the three iconic ones, initially the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, the 1964 emergence [from the north Atlantic] of Surtsey, and the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Those three alone account for roughly 70% of all published material in volcano ecology.

SS: And three completely different climate zones as well as-

CC: Exactly so-

SS: Typology so there's not the comparative analogies would be, well, you could make them but-

CC: With the caveat that growing seasons and many other things are incredibly different. Oceanic settings: two are in oceanic settings. One north Atlantic, the other equatorial. St. Helens: temperate, coastal continental. Right. There's differences. What emerged is that the west coast of the Americas, which is the only place with volcanoes in the Americas, are well-studied. This is relative, including out way to the Aleutians. The Aleutians and north, central, and south America have been well-studied and New Zealand is well-studied. Japan is well-studied.

SS: In other words, the developed countries more or less.

CC: Right. Places that are way understudied include Indonesia, Kamchatka, and in Kurils. Africa has amazing volcanoes. There's not a single paper we could find published on volcano ecology of the African continent. So, far eastern Pacific, Indonesia, and Africa are the places. This analysis we're doing can actually create an agenda for ecologists to start filling in the matrix of places that need study.

SS: You know, that's how academics work, too. They say, okay, where has not been studied. Hopefully people start, well, okay here's a spot on the map. Here's a place to make an original imprint, right?

CC: Or we make a pitch for it. Maybe we say if one of the African volcanoes pops off and it's not in a place of civil unrest, that we can now make the case and so, you know, obviously, Fred is I would say, not to diss him here, but he's well into his career. I don't think he's looking to go galavanting across the world starting volcano studies. Like he's hot to go down to Calbuco, Chile, and continue some work down there for sure, but we need young people. The same thing with me. I mean, I'm, Fred's ahead of me, but I'm also to the point that, yeah, in the next few years I'd be willing to do something along these lines, but we need the next cohort. In any case, this whole volcano ecology thing has been interesting.

There are some interesting parallels that could be made between the Chilean Patagonia volcanoes and Mount St. Helens because of two reasons. One, they're both temperate rain forests. They're coastal Pacific, each with big, expansive semi-arid environments to the east on the rain shadow side. The Patagonian steppe and the Columbia Plateau steppe. They're deeply dissected mountain environments with stratovolcanoes punctuating them. Both heavy precipitation and cool, moist air masses. There are great parallels between the two and we see lots of similarities with some differences. Most of the differences tend to be tied to nuances of the biota rather than to the disturbances themselves. Some of the underlying ecological processes seem to be quite similar. Differences we see tend to be tied to specific aspects of the biota.

SS: The overall dynamics have more similarities than not?

CC: Yeah. Like amphibians. Amphibians at both Chaitén and St. Helens came back gangbusters in the blast area. Not what you would anticipate, right? Amphibians are well-known for being highly sensitive to environmental perturbation, environmental change and that habitat destruction has been viewed as one of the primary, but certainly not the only drivers of their plight and leveling of temperature rainforests in either hemisphere could constitute by some radical habitat change, yet the amphibians have done quite well. I think most of the amphibian habitat alteration work that people have looked at things where people are bulldozing streams or altering wetlands, which are fundamentally a different beast than volcanic eruptions, but it's very interesting to see the similarities of very different, different families, different assemblages of amphibians, but they've behaved essentially identically.

SS: Going to local communities, I wanted to talk about that some. You've been a member of this community for a long time and you know the communities around the mountain.

CC: Uh-huh.

SS: What do you remember about your interactions with people in the local communities in the '80s, in the immediate aftermath about this and how they looked at the mountain and what happened?

CC: Well, it was mixed. Keep in mind in immediate aftermath and even extending for an entire, more than a decade, almost for 15 years, this region was embroiled over the old-growth logging versus forest preservation. If you were even associated and most of these communities, including the one I'm living in, were timber dependent communities. If you worked for the Forest Service, it didn't matter if you were a research biologist and had nothing to do with the timber sale plan, you were studying gophers out of the volcano, it didn't matter. You were targeted. You were targeted with hostility. You didn't go into the local taverns. A fight would ensue. You'd get knocked out. Those were really tense times as the communities were embroiled in this tension over how the National Forest should be managed.

SS: You would include Cougar, Toutle, all the-

CC: Surrounding communities. Particularly Amboy was bad.

SS: Oh, really?

CC: Yeah. And Randle, Randle was bad. In any case, that worked its way out. There were some terrible growing pains, but people realized they weren't going back to the days of cutting an umpteen board feet of timber off the National Forest. The Northwest Forest Plan was squarely in place and these were times of tremendous growing pains and the communities evolved. Some people went away and others came in, and new ways of earning income happened, and, so since that time, the dominant prevailing view is that Mount St. Helens is really cool, and we are really lucky that we have this national, international gem in our backyard.

SS: You think even the hardcore conservative redneck types?

CC: No, that's why I said the overwhelming view. This gets back to the vocal, the, sorry, the vocal minority. Then there's this vocal minority still to this day.

SS: Still, okay.

CC: Think that the Forest Service is doing a bum job of managing the Monument, that they want to go back, and they want to swim in Spirit Lake. They want to fish in Spirit Lake. They want to ride their ATVs wherever they want to. They want to ride their horses wherever they want to. They want to be able to shoot elk wherever they want to, and that uncle is keeping them out of their forest, their National Forest. They've never fully accepted the fact that things changed in 1980 and we're never going to go back to the same and they can't get over it. By God, their grandparents and parents took them swimming in Spirit Lake, finished in Spirit Lake and took them here and took them there and it's their God given right to continue that. They're having a hard time. But it's a vocal minority. It's a handful. People, many, most of the locals believe that the 1980 eruption was a fascinating phenomenon that happened and they feel privileged that it happened in their backyard during their lifetime and that they experienced that event. I think that, if you move more out of the local communities and go to the larger regional metropolitan areas, that only becomes more so.

SS: So, how has the timber economy recovered or re-found a newer, lower level in general? You could ask that question anywhere across the west, but in this particular area. I mean, you've got all the Weyerhaeuser land and then you've got National Forest Land.

CC: First of all, I can speak fluently on the ecology of Mount St. Helens. This is getting far afield for me, but my impression is that the forest we're not putting much timber up for sale and those timber sales that were going up for sale involved thinning of natural, regenerated natural fire-regenerated stands. So, they're 100-year-old stands that burns around on the Gifford Pinchot. The industry was either, because of the value of the timber at that time or because of this different view of not having regeneration harvest clear-cuts and because this was smaller material-the diameter of these trees. It wasn't old growth. These are 100-year-old trees or less, that there wasn't a real interest. I don't know how much of that was market forces or how much of that was just the system which had been doing something for a long time in a certain way not having the plasticity to react and change. I remember talking to many frustrated interdisciplinary team members.

These groups that the Forest Services convened to put forth a timber sale analysis, or to conduct a timber sale analysis and put forth a sale if it gets through the analysis okay and just say, oh my God, we just worked how many months on this and nobody's bidding it. There was this real lull. Now I'm seeing timber, you know, logging trucks roll off the National Forest in other lands on a regular basis and there are active timber sales in the Gifford Pinchot. There's two going on right now between here and Mount St. Helens. There's an uptick. But that's about all I can say to that topic. There are far more knowledgeable people.

SS: No, but still it's part of your knowledge base, since you've been a community member.

CC: One of the most important things for the ecology of the Mount St. Helens area is the fact that you know part of the blast area, or the blast area included areas that were in the Monument and areas that were outside of the Monument that were salvage logged and replanted. It happened on Forest Service land. Most notably Clearwater valley and the upper Green. It happened on DNR land [State of Washington Department of Natural Resources], most notably west of Studebaker Ridge and North Fork Toutle and South Fork Toutle basins and then Weyerhaeuser land, north of Toutle into the Green River and beyond. What's happened is that early on, you know, from an ecological point of view, the salvaging, logging the salvaged areas didn't seem all that different. Obviously, the wood was missing, but fireweed was the dominant herb and it covered the landscape. But what happened is, eventually, meaning about 6, 8 years after planting, these conifers really took off and then they achieved canopy cover. When that happened, that was a game changer. Right now, particularly for wide-ranging species like elk, the Monument has become, excuse me, the blast area has become a very different place in terms of the habitat suitability due to light occlusion from the closing of canopies in the plantations and a reduction of forage. What that means is not only does the overall carrying capacity decline, but so many of those hungry elk now shift out to the Monument where we're supposed to allow the ecological processes to proceed substantially unimpeded, yet we have high elk carrying capacity during the summer knocking the hell out of the vegetation.

SS: Which is why you have so many elk down in the debris avalanche area, the open area down by the Toutle, right?

CC: Well, and also because they feed them down there. To even complicate matters down there, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the Washington Department of Wildlife created, bought a bunch of land in the lower Toutle outside of the Monument and created winter ranges, seeded, on the mud flow deposit area. During the winter, they're bolstering the populations. Not only do they create the winter range, but on bad winters they've actually been feeding the elk. All of these things conspire to create challenges for managing wide-ranging species across multiple ownerships, each with different management objectives.

SS: Complex.

CC: Yeah.

SS: Along that lines [up questions about] multi-institutional and different agencies, what has been the biggest challenge from your perspective about keeping a collaborative dynamic of research at St. Helens going and being, what's the word I'm looking for? Being reciprocal or a positive relationship between them? Has there ever been a problem with too much stuff going on, not enough communication? Do you understand what I'm saying?

CC: Yeah, there hasn't been-as far as I'm concerned there's not been turf wars. That's one of the big, unfortunate aspects. I've talked to a number of people that said oh, we figured that everything was being studied at Mount St. Helens or that people had laid claim to certain areas or certain subject areas and that there wasn't any real estate left. That is so far from the truth. That was one piece, but in terms of the people working here I mean you're dealing with-the potential is large because you're' largely dealing with academics and many of whom have big egos overall.

But, let me say that, well, having said that we haven't had issues to speak of. I mean, I think generally, this group has gotten along very well. They've been respectful to one another and there's been some really meaningful and important collaborations that have been forged. On the other hand, there' are clearly people who are just the lone wolf and they prefer to be off marching to the beat of their own drummer, but they do it in a non-controversial way and they're super productive and they've been a huge asset to the community. This is not a place where wells have been poisoned. This is a place that I think largely is a goodwill and has been [a model] of sharing and openness and honest dialogue.

SS: How do you deal with talking about egos, PhDs, academics, which is true in some cases-now, you came in here as an undergraduate and in my opinion, you possess a PhD many times over in experience and knowledge of this place. How do you deal with people who have the card-carrying PhDs versus you who has serious credentials and publication history, but you don't have the PhD? I'm just curious-

CC: First of all, I would say that if I ever had any misgivings during my career, it was that I didn't take advantage of going to graduate school and earning a Ph.D. I had offers. I had offers with Chuck Hawkins, Jim MacMahon, Peter Kareiva. A number of people asked me if I would work with them on a Ph.D. and I didn't do it because I was earning a salary and I had a young child and was paying a mortgage and hunkered down with my wife and doing our thing and was like, "Wow. This is great. I get to do all these things." I didn't do it. I took 8 years of graduate coursework at Utah State, winters, free for non-matriculated. I felt like I was learning that stuff I wanted to learn the material. In any case, but I feel like to this day it was not the right decision. It did not serve me well not to do it. I should have done it. But it got to a point to where I wasn't going to do it. At some point, I got to a certain age and I'm like I'm not going to do that now. But throughout my career there's always been these uncomfortable times. Rarely are they from individuals. It's more an awkward situation when I'm introduced at a conference as Dr. Crisafulli.

SS: And you're not.

CC: And I'm not. Or, what did you did your Ph.D. on? And I didn't. Because everybody just expects it. Honestly if somebody introduces me at a conference or if they've come to Mount St. Helens with their class and they say class Charlie Crisafulli is leading us today. We're very privileged to have Charlie because of blah, blah, blah, he's familiar with Mount St. Helens, so my pleasure to introduce Dr. Crisafulli. I do not say, by the way so-and-so, I don't have-I just let it go.

SS: It's too awkward, yeah.

CC: And all the mail that shows up-Dr. Crisafulli. I don't write those people back, sorry, it's Mr. Crisafulli. Those have been the awkward things. Book chapters. Manuscripts. It's like list your highest level of education. And so, you know, I have to put what it is. It has been the single most uncomfortable part of my career is dealing with the ivory tower crowd. Fortunately, there's only been one person at Mount St. Helens that has been less than friendly about that and I would say at times really that was so unnecessary. I haven't gotten that. I have been dealt with in I think a very respectful way. If I were to do it all over again, I would go get a Ph.D.

SS: But you know what, Charlie, if you had done that you would have never been here all these years. You would have been at a university for a good part of your career.

CC: So, then the next point, you're right, is that is I say to myself, if, and excuse me if this is just ridiculous, but if a person is called a carpenter and everybody says, yeah, and you know he's trained as a carpenter. You go to carpentry school, you go to trade school, and you're trained as a master carpentry. Cabinet builder. Whatever. But every single day for 35 years instead of picking up a saw, a square and a hammer you pick up a trowel, all your masonry tools and instead of working with wood you work with rock and you work with bricks and you work with block, and you're mixing concrete cement and you're building fireplaces and rock walls and water features out of rock only a fool, only a fool after 35 years would call that person a carpenter. At what point, how many years do you have to work side-by-side with PhDs? How many times do you have to work at a level that people have said you know you work at or above a level with PhDs? You have published. You have bought in grants. At what point, well, is it just well I'm sorry, it's just academic? In any case, I haven't looked back. It's caused me pause on many occasions and because my world is in some ways kind of small, I do a lot at St. Helens. I went to trips in China. The Chinese Academy of Science has paid my entire trip. Dr. Crisafulli to come to China. I presented at symposia and fieldtrips and seminars and it was like that's what it is. In any case, it hasn't encumbered me, and I don't feel as though I'm doing my job under false pretenses, but it's created awkward situations and more often than not I just let it flow.

SS: I mean, Charlie, I listen to you and I hear brilliance and commitment.

CC: Well, commitment to a fault.

SS: No, I'm not trying to polish your apple. I'm given you an authentic compliment.

CC: Well, thank you.

SS: About what I hear and see and, like I said, if you've gotten in the ivory tower, you've never would been able to do what you've done here.

CC: Well, thank you. For me, this has been driven by passion, passion for knowledge, passion for ecology, passion for trying to satisfy or entertain my curiosity and that's what's been motivating me all along. In some ways, it's been a bit selfish. I mean a lot of this has been about me, about me wanting to understand this place that's so damn fascinating and there's so much to learn and I get to do that while I get to train scores of undergraduate co-advisements. At this point, I don't have a graduate degree, yet I've co-advised two Ph.D. students and two handfuls of masters students. That's been a huge highlight working with the graduate students and the undergraduates. It's been a great ride and not a single regret.

SS: In general, how would you characterize the science as having changed and in what way since 1980? I'm referencing the technology paradigm shifts in ecology, geology. How would you draw a sketch of that dynamic, that evolution over 35 years?

CC: I think the single most conspicuous change has been a reduction in the emphasis on studying organisms. I think generally I mean students used to come out of school with mammalogy, botany, zoology, ornithology, ichthyology, herpetology, etc. Training. That became somewhat, and there used to be those departments: the department of biological science, the department of zoology, of botany and obviously still exist. But I think the scope has changed from that organismal approach to the large and the small and so many, many of the applicants for the positions I advertise each year.

SS: For your seasonal group?

CC: For my seasonal have molecular techniques experience, so they know how to run gels. They know how to extract DNA and in other molecular techniques. They amplify DNA, for example, or they can run rapids or any number of molecular techniques, many of them, or they have GIS and perhaps remote sensing, and so what's really interesting is many of the students, and presumably because it's being emphasized in school or because it's a driving force in the job market have molecular techniques or have these huge special analyses techniques and these are equal, but opposite in terms of the scale. So, either the level of biological organization or just the spatial scale in which things are being viewed, and so I think there's been a dearth of people being trained as good, solid ecologists. Having said that, I've been able to-it's not like I haven't been able to find qualified candidates every single year, but, if I look at the whole pool of applicants, there does not seem to be as many as there once was. That's one thing that's changed.

SS: Do you think people are being over-trained in their specialty?

CC: To some extent. So, there's difference of the training: molecular and broad-scale versus organismal. The second is the emphasis on modeling. Empirical data, gathering empirical data, although it obviously still happens seems to be possibly slipping but more importantly the whole notion of modeling, if you're not modeling, something it just doesn't quite have the validity. There seems to be this real emphasis on genetics, a real emphasis on modeling and multi-variate statistics. I think a lot of the students, particularly graduate students, are being over-trained in analytical methods. A lot of people would buck and say oh my God, you're such an old-school natural historian. But there is such a thing as over-analyzing data.

SS: Well, they call it a paralysis through analysis.

CC: Yeah.

SS: You can talk about modeling?

CC: In any case, I think models are useful. I should say, all models poorly reflect the world, is probably true, and some models are useful. We need to be careful how to exercise those. Every graduate student, even undergrads now, they're all trained in R, right. They need to learn R code. They need to learn modeling techniques and many different modeling techniques and I don't think that's necessarily bad, but I'm concerned with the field of ecology becoming a little too abstract and not grounded in basic natural history and basic field ecology, because you can model until the cows come home, but, if you don't know the target organism, you're becoming less and less in tune with the very thing that you're studying. There's always going to be room for theoretical ecologists and biologists. God love them. They play an important role. I feel like almost a norm now is to have everybody spending a little bit too much time modeling and becoming maybe just a little too proficient in analyses. Another change that I've noticed between say 1980 and contemporary times from 2015 or even back five years or 2010 or perhaps earlier is that many of the investigators and certainly many of the graduate students are really sophisticated in their line of inquiry and they're looking beyond the narrow focus of any particular taxonomic group, but instead are really looking for relationships among different organisms, among organisms in an environment. I know that's just ecology, but in practice it wasn't always that way. Some people just studied amphibians or just studied fishes or just studied this or that. Now, at least the students and many of the investigators I'm working with at Mount St. Helens are really digging deep to look for underlying relationships and causal factors that would lend credence to explaining they patterns they see emerging across the changing landscape at Mount St. Helens.

SS: So, they're thinking holistically and ecologically outside of whatever their specific training has trained them to think about, right?

CC: Right. A student interested in the effects of willow herbivory by the willow stem-boring beetle, may be now looking at ecophysiology through photosynthetic efficiency or water use efficiency, leaf water potential. They may also be looking at nutrient cycling. They may be looking at attack rate infrequency and they may be looking at differences between water availability and those factors and gender of the plant, will it be male or female. All of these things at integrating these into one or several sub levels of inquiry that builds a much more comprehensive and much more holistic understanding. They're very sophisticated. It requires a great deal of training. I've been really impressed by some of the work that's been done that takes that more holistic and integrated approach.

SS: If you were going to forecast the next 35 years or 30 years, how would you, what would you think say that Mount St. Helens ecology would look like in 30, 35 years? What do you think will be the major changes or continuations of the same or how would you pre-masticate that?

CC: Of the research or the systems?

SS: Of the systems.

CC: The systems are going to change a lot. I think that there's going to be some very non-linear change. I think there are going to be cusp events that usher in or trigger major changes and that we will continue in much of landscape to accrual species, we'll continue to fill in and we'll continue to increase biodiversity, say richness values per unit areas, species richness. Then we're going to start hitting thresholds. Actually, even in the next 5 or 10 years, where we're going to see these areas that were quick out of the gate to change - to go into a condition of high canopy cover, dense vegetation, and they're going to be game changers. That's going to be the single most important factor that drives the ecological condition of the landscape is the presence of woody vegetation. Shrubs. It's already happening throughout much of the blast area right now and much less so in parts of the debris avalanche, essentially non-existent on the Pumice Plain to any degree relative to the other sites, except for down by Spirit Lake. In any case, the big change will be a shift in the plant life form, that is the physiognomy, and I expect that initially the shrubs are going to be game changers. They'll change things by changing the light regime. All the sun-loving plants that have been so dominant for so long are going to find relatively inhospitable or less-hospitable growing conditions and they're going to wane.

SS: As the canopy gets larger of various species.

CC: Darker, as it shifts. So, you're going to see changes in microclimate. It's going to be moister. It's going to have higher relative humidity, greater moisture retention, and sunlight. That's going to cause a reduction in the sun-loving vegetation and a slow (and it could be fairly rapid) and a slow increase in shade tolerance species. Because they have the problem of getting there, dispersal limitations. But I think that the, and the shrubs are going to usher in a whole new group of birds and small mammals and insects. It's already underway. That is a very important factor right now and it's only going to increase through time. Because the landscape that was disturbed was so large and it's so variable in terms of the initial conditions and subsequent processes of erosion and secondary disturbances of other forms and establishment conditions that there's a lot of heterogeneity.

It's still going to be a protracted place. Thirty-five years out there's going to be places on the Pumice Plain and debris avalanche that are probably going to be quite similar to places in the blast area now. This offers you know a multi-decadal opportunity for early seral species in this complex matrix of this slowly regenerating landscape. I think that the next game-changing event will be the dominance of trees. There are going to be places in the landscape that go into deciduous trees, namely red alder. Other places that are going to go into conifers, mixed conifers.

SS: Red alder's down in the debris avalanche and in certain riparian areas?

CC: Exactly. It'll be a big difference between trees versus shrubs and a huge difference between conifers versus deciduous trees. This is all going to unfold. Places like the Pumice Plain where conifers are getting established in fairly good numbers and mixed species it's going to be this very much a parkland type environment where you're going to have conifers emerging from a dense shrub understory and patches that are kept open by disturbance, primarily along the riparian areas because the streams are far from stable. In any case, I think that within the next 5 years we're going to see a local site basis, areas that are turning the corner and actually start declining in diversity. They've reached an apex and we're going to see other areas [SS interrupts CC].

SS: But biomass will increase but diversity will decrease, right?

CC: Yeah, you're going to have a net increase in standing crop in all likelihood but a change in community structure of everything from arthropods to mammals and you know we already see it. If you look at the places that have gone into shrub patches, even on the Pumice Plain. You look at the pitfall trap samples, they're dominated by detritivores and species like millipedes where immediately adjacent to that is still carabid beetles and orthopteras, grasshoppers. Even at a fine scale, that's why Mount St. Helens just really offers this opportunity for patch dynamics, but I think what we really need to be doing is not only looking at the patch dynamics, but looking at this broad landscape evolution and that's something that's gotten very little attention by ecologists and ought to be on a research agenda.

SS: But the landscape ecology has been a recognized field for 20, 25 years now.

CC: People just haven't tested those ideas or measured it at Mount St. Helens to speak of. Rick Lawrence did a little bit but that's about it.

SS: Right.

CC: In any case, I think that the landscape will continue to be dynamic and there are going to be places that start seeing a reduction and other places that continue to see an increase and that, in the absence of disturbance, the overall landscape is going to become more homogenous and so will the communities.

SS: I heard somebody at the Pulse say something about in 100 years this will look like it used to look, which I disagree with. How long would it take to look like it used to with the exception of the big hole in the mountain?

CC: Given that [SS interrupts].

SS: A hundred years or is that too short?

CC: No! Given that many of the trees were 300 and 400 years old [SS talks over CC].

SS: That's what I mean, yeah.

CC: It's going to be hundreds of years.

SS: Yeah.

CC: I mean you need to define just like before, I mean the species mix is probably going to be different. Over the whole area it will be tending towards a similar condition, but still centuries away.

SS: Right.

CC: In any specific area it may never resemble very closely the community structure because of just change events and history.

SS: Well, Spirit Lake will never look like it once did.

CC: Well, right, there are places in the landscape that are new landforms, so all bets are off. There's no sense in even trying to frame it in a recovery sense. It's a new place.

SS: No, I know. I mean, we use these words casually, like recovery and I remember Jerry Franklin talking to me about well, recovering from what? Because it's new in many ways. CC: You need to define what recovery is. If you want to say recovery of Spirit Lake, and we're going to define recovery based on having chemical and physical properties similar to the pre-eruption conditions, well if you define it that way, sure. You can do it. Then, it's okay. It's all about the devil's in the details in how you want to define what recovery is. Regardless, back to the main point is that and there may be some wild cards along the way. Mount St. Helens has been full of these boom-and-bust cycles, but I expect that these boom-and-bust cycles will also wane and they will be dampened and oscillated through time as species interaction strengths increase and these interactions become, species become more tightly coupled so they don't have the possibility to go through these wildly fluctuating boom-and-bust cycles. This gets back to what I call the three P's: predators, parasites, and pathogens. That if you have an area recent diminuted by a disturbance, such as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens or even greatly reduced in terms of the vegetation richness and volume abundance, that this affords opportunities for some species to flourish, because, if they get there there's a chance or some other force get there and they can exploit the resources, then their populations can really flourish and in the absence of predator, parasite, or pathogen they go unchecked to continue until they either exploit the resource their utilizing or one of the three P's finds them and then their population goes gangbusters because they have this unlimited resource. We've seen these boom-and-bust cycles play out through space and time as if it's a rule in these early successional systems. As more players, species, colonize and as the intervening spaces fill in, these interactions should become more rightly coupled, reducing the frequency and magnitude of the boom and bust cycles. So, it will be a dampening effect.

SS: What has been the biggest surprise for you at Mount St. Helens, either an individual result dynamic, general?

CC: I'll be very-it's not going to be long story. It'll be very short. One, is that life is incredibly tenacious and, no matter what natural insult happens, our expectation should be that there will be survivors. There will be survivors, the survivors will be present because a number of different potential reasons, some of them that will be incredibly surprising to us and not predicted or anticipated. Where life did survive and more importantly where life did not survive, that life is incredibly resilient and that life comes back. It's been at this for four billion years or so and it's damn good at it. The second point is that we don't need to tinker with things. We don't need to rush in and try to fix it. Restoration in places like Mount St. Helens, a moist maritime environment with unconsolidated volcanic debris deposited that we don't need to go through the effort or planning and the cost to restore anything because nature's quite good at it, thank you.

SS: In a perfect world, what would you like to see or continue to see grow at the science program at Mount St. Helens?

CC: I would like to see a non-profit Mount St. Helens ecology and natural history institute formed and that that non-profit would be a vehicle for training undergraduates, for training graduate students, providing RA-ships and be a fundraising arm of the research and also public face and outreach. It wouldn't be in competition with the Mount St. Helens Institute, which is largely a stewardship, natural resource stewardship and science education program. They would work closely with them and have no overlap whatsoever, but would complement one another in a seamless way. This would really be an organization that had ideally some endowment and an active board that worked with the research community, worked with the institutions in the region, particularly at the higher levels of administration at the University of Washington, OSU, U of O, etc., Evergreen State College, PSU, WSU, to name a few, and also with the PNW Station and US Geological Survey and build essentially a consortium around the Mount St. Helens research program.

SS: Now you talked about being very little turf war dynamics. Would you characterize the university active commissions along with the government sciences to be a very collegial, collaborative environment over time?

CC: Oh yeah. I see no reason why that would change whatsoever. For 35 years it's been very amiable and compatible, and I don't see what would fuel any change, but you know I don't have a crystal ball. I don't anticipate that being a problem.

SS: How would you best synopsize your history and role at St. Helens?

CC: Well, my role at Mount St. Helens has been because of my being place-based. I have centralized, been able to centralize a lot of the ecological research activities and I've done so by having my own independent research program where each year I hire a field staff and have one or two people stay throughout the year, winter, and we maintain a robust and multi-taxa plot network and make these data available, one, for our own purposes, but also to others, particularly graduate students. Then, engage with others in many collaborative research programs. Between the two, we maintain a large basic and applied research program between our own work and our collaborative work.

The other aspect is really being an ambassador to the Mount St. Helens volcano ecological sciences by networking with people, by providing information, by bringing people to St. Helens or, if they contact me, I willingly take them out, make time for them, take them to the sites, discuss research opportunities and possibilities, connecting people with people and people with place, and being a clearing house for information relevant to the ecology of Mount St. Helens. Also, it's relevance not only to other volcanic sites but to other forms of disturbances and help facilitate people. A very pragmatic part is I have a very large base camp. You and your crews are welcome to stay at our camp. We are here and happy to help you, to provide technician help, provide loaning of equipment.

That's the nuts and bolts of the program, plus then there's this whole outreach part, dealing a lot of with media and spending in some cases entire summers working on hour-long, it'll be an hour-long documentary in Europe. Literally working with thousands of media, international, domestic, regional, national throughout my career everything from Nat-Geo [National Geographic Society] to Smithsonian, to NOVA, to BioScience, to Science and then publishing our own work, maintaining a web presence, and, so, really, I guess being an ambassador for St. Helens and providing everything that I possibly can to help facilitate and encourage continued vitality of the Mount St. Helens research program.

SS: In your view what is the most important scientific lesson learned at St. Helens, either general one or a specific one?

CC: I mean, one is I'd have to say that community assembly and succession is very messy. It's very unpredictable in most cases and it's highly variable. We shouldn't expect a linear progression but that there's going to be things will go in fits and starts and that there will be unanticipated twists and turns along the way and that this created a great opportunity for us to understand how systems respond to a type of disturbance that has been so influential in shaping the forest, not only in the Pacific Northwest, but around the entire Pacific Rim.

SS: What is the spirit of the place? Mount St. Helens and the region, to you? How would you describe the spirit?

CC: The spirit of Mount St. Helens and of the region, it's a place that the spirit of the place is one of beauty, of grace, of full of intrigue and surprises. I think that it's a place of renewal. It's a place of hope. It's a place of satisfaction and comfort. It's a place that love can be lost, and love can be found. It's a place to engage with and you can really pursue any level of curiosity that you might have and never get all the answers, always get more questions and be entertained along the way and through the process of all of this you know be touched and touch the lives of so many different people, either here that you're working with or more broadly through the lessons that you distill from your work. It's a great place and it's a place that I hope and I'm certain it will continue to inspire and to motivate people for generations to come.

SS: Charlie, you couldn't figure a better way to finish the interview right there. Thank you.

CC: Uh-huh. Okay.