After it first was opened to climbing, I sat on the edge of that crater and had lunch. Two weeks later I went back, and that place I sat was gone. Sloughed off.

Scared me, in retrospect. Dumb.

And a friend of mine, the "renegade" nephew of a former Governor of Oregon, climbed it shortly after it blew and was still a "Red Zone". He took five days to get into place, started running up to the summit to catch the sunrise, took many, many pictures and ran down into the treeline to avoid the helicopter borne authorities.

The pictures are spectacular.

And it took him 4 days to get out. The guy's an animal when it comes to physical things, a poet when it comes to pictures, and got out of the family business which would have made him a multi-millionaire to become an EMT for a fire department.

Arf