Not really. There are examples from the Carboniferous of trees penetrating several mud layers when the depositional environment consisted of migrating river meanders and muddy banks, which means that tree trunks could be innunated several times while still upright.
But not from the cooling of lava, as you seem to believe.
Granite only forms deep under the surface, where magma can cool slowly enough and under enough pressure for the crystalline structure of granite to form.
On the surface of the Earth, lava cools into basalt, a very different kind of rock, which will not turn into granite no matter how long you leave it lying around on the surface.
What is going to happen to the ash and lava flows of M.S.H. in a few hundred years?
They're going to remain ash and basalt in timespans as short as "a few hundred years".
How about the trees that are in Spirit Lake?
They'll still be trees, albeit considerably more rotted.
There are upright petrified trees all over the world that cut straight through the sacred geological column.
No, there aren't. And the geologic column is not "sacred" -- you've got geologists confused with someone else.
There are, however, fossil trees which extend through one or more stratigraphic layers which were rapidly deposited onto the trees, burying them.
For the lurkers: For far longer than they should (since at least 1975), creationists have been beating a dead horse that they call "polystrate trees". These are trees (or more often, stumps of trees) found standing fossilized vertically. Aha!, cry the creationists, if the stump is 30 feet tall, then clearly the 30 feet (measured vertically) of rock around the tree couldn't have been deposited over millions of years, therefor geology is bunk!
The problem with this, as has been pointed out to them countless times, is that although the *entire* geologic column has taken hundreds of millions of years to accumulate, this hardly means that any particular foot of it had to have been "grown" with glacierlike slowness. On the contrary, ordinary river floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, etc. can at times deposit dozens or hundreds of feet within days. "Polystrate" trees can result when the location the tree had been growing gets inundated several times in a few years (or once, if a big one), burying a significant portion of the tree trunk (the fossilized trees often look "cut off" above a certain point, where deposition had stopped long enough for the top of the tree to be rotted or eroded away before the next cycle of deposition).
What's funny is that this process was recognized by geologists as early as *1868* (Dawson, J.W., 1868. Acadian Geology. The Geological Structure, Organic Remains, and Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, 2nd edition. MacMillan and Co.: London, 694pp).
But the creationists seem to be slow catching up sometimes.
If that column formed over millions and millions of years, the tree would have rotted and turned to dust.
Right. So it didn't. Not the 10-20 foot portion immediately around the tree, anyway. But that doesn't mean that the *mile* or more of column above and below the tree happened all overnight, does it?
These trees are perfectly preserved.
Hardly, but they are recognizeable.
Mt. St. Helens shows how this likely happened.
No, it doesn't. Your link provided very shoddy argument which boils down to, "some debarked, limbless stumps with a few root stubs clinging to them landed root-down in the lake bottom, therefor scientists wouldn't be able to distinguish them from trees which had fossilized where they grew". Not only is that an insult to the profession, it's untrue. Take, for example, the following description of "in place" trees, and how many different ways it was possible to determine that they were where they had grown, and not blown there by a volcanic explosion: Fossil trees trunks
Your link makes another fallacious claim as well. It says that because some of the sunken trees have landed a few feet higher/lower than others, that this might "explain" layered forests in the geologic column. Um, no. Layered forests in the geologic column are hardly separated by "a few feet". For example, in the Joggins section of the Bay of Fundy, along a 50 kilometer section of sea cliff, is visible a 2750 meter-thick cross-section of the geologic column, with *multiple* layers of in-place forests, separated by up to *hundreds* of feet of strata. The forests are mature, layered atop each other (with large separation), upright trunks, and *in-place roots* resting in layers of well-developed soil.
This is the kind of evidence ICR tries to lamely explain away by saying, "well, some of the trees blasted by Mount Saint Helens ended up a few feet higher or lower in the lake bed..." Sheesh.